Main character energy. It’s a new term for an old urge: the need to feel that you’re a good person who matters. You’re at the centre of the action, the protagonist, a hero. You’re not a little person tossed around by a big bored universe. Instead, you have agency. (And 10,000 followers on TikTok.)^[1]

I began thinking about agency while reading a deeply thoughtful new book about veterans of World War II, Ghosts of Ortona by Ian Cosh. The book isn’t a military history, although it’s centred on a vicious battle that took place over Christmas, 1943, part of the Allied invasion of Italy that would ultimately drive Adolf Hitler’s Wehrmacht out of southern Europe. 

Canadian soldiers were ordered to take the Italian town of Ortona, which was occupied by crack German troops. Casualties were high in bloody house-to-house fighting—house clearing, it was called—with Canadians battling German snipers while dodging their way among boobytraps. The Canadians were ultimately victorious. After a week of carnage, the Nazis retreated. But a well-tended cemetery outside Ortona holds graves of 1,375 Canadian soldiers killed in 10 days’ fighting, a shocking number of them 18 and 19 years old. 

Other books have been written about military objectives and tactics in Ortona, which is pictured above today.^[2] Ghosts of Ortona is different: a close reading of stories that a group of veterans told themselves for years after the battle, and later recounted for Cosh. Because the book is centred on issues of trauma, memory and agency, the men could have fought in any battle in any war, or experienced a different kind of trauma we all might face. A disabling car accident. Rape. The murder of someone we know. 

Cosh’s book asks a series of questions. How do we edit our memories of violence into stories we can live with? Take charge of something awful we lived through by forming our experiences into a narrative, one that we feel comfortable telling other people—and more importantly, telling ourselves. Do we end up distorting what really happened, consciously or unconsciously? And what do we both gain and lose by doing so?

You may have read about the Battle of Ortona in Farley Mowat’s classic requiem, And No Birds Sang.^[3] The book, which was published in 1979 and revised in 2012, details Mowat’s growing trauma as he fought the Nazis across Sicily and, several months later, near the town of Ortona. He was a young officer in the Canadian army who watched too many of his buddies get killed. 

The book ends with Mowat breaking down in a cellar on a hill. A sergeant has just told him about an attack that his friend Al led on German troops in Ortona moments earlier, doing what Mowat calls “the unexpected and the inexplicable.”

“Seizing a Tommy gun, (Al) levered his great bulk to its full height, gave an inarticulate bellow, and charged straight at the enemy.

“He could have gone no more than three or four paces before he was riddled with scores of bullets. Crashing into the mud like a falling colossus, he lay there, his body jerking spasmodically until the dead flesh at last lay still. During that timeless interval, both his own men and the Germans were so stunned by his action that not a further shot was fired by either side.

“’It was the bravest goddamn thing I ever saw… and the craziest!’ The sergeant ground out his cigarette and looked into my face with puzzled eyes. ‘Crazy as hell! But Jesus, what a man!’”

“The blanket that screened the shattered cellar door was thrust aside and a party of stretcher-bearers pushed in among us. Al Park lay on one of the stretchers. He was alive, though barely so… unconscious, with a bullet in his head.

“Looking down at the his faded, empty face under its crown of bandages, I began to weep.”

Military historians have called Mowat’s account of the fighting in Italy factually inaccurate, although sympathetic readers point that he wrote the book 35 years after the war, when his memories had understandably grown dim. 

Or had they? That’s what interests Cosh. 

Ian Cosh is an anthropologist and ethnographic researcher who did lengthy interviews with 14 Canadian veterans of Ortona in 1999 and 2000. At the time, he was a doctoral student doing research for his PhD at York University in Toronto. During a memorial trip to Ortona in 1998, he also spoke with several former German combatants—some of them unrepentant Nazis—and a handful of Italian civilians who had lived through the battle.  

As he writes in the opening chapter of his book, Cosh was initially driven to find out everything he could about the veterans’ experience of battle, even though he wasn’t sure why, or knew what his research would lead to. 

“I felt intuitively that in the course of talking with the veterans, I was tracking something substantial. Something was beneath the surface details of the stories of Ortona. I couldn’t tell what it was, but I knew it when I encountered it. Its presence was felt in certain moments when the stories weren’t making sense—or when the stories were going on as usual but there was a mysterious alteration in the narrator’s voice… It was never brought into the open. I wouldn’t know how to begin to discuss it. But whatever this phenomenon was, I sensed there was a pattern to its occurrence. It had some kind of meaning and I was sure it was important somehow.

“I came home from fieldwork, transcribed all of the interviews, and examined all of my material. 

“Nothing came.”

Throughout the book, Cosh portrays himself not as an expert, but as a young man of 29 grappling with his own inadequacies. He fails to understand the subtext of the men’s stories. He finds himself doing a bad job of one interview because he’s desperate to pee. During another interview, he has to ask a veteran what the word “doggerel” means. 

Portraying himself with brutal honesty is a facet of anthropology in the tradition of Bronisław Malinowski, and more recently, Ruth Behar, who taught a workshop Cosh attended. Behar is a Cuban-American ethnographer, children’s writer and author of the influential book, The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart,^[4] which she published in 1996 and reissued in 2022. 

Recipient of the Macarthur “genius” grant, Behar is not an advocate of the classic school of objective anthropological research. She doesn’t believe it exists. Anthropologists inevitably bring baggage into their observations of the culture they’re studying, she writes, and the interviews they do. Better to admit to your experiences and biases, adding a soupçon of autobiography to your anthropological writings. 

True to Behar’s teachings, Cosh displays a very humane modesty throughout the book, just as he does in person. (More on that next time.) His bumbling and puzzlement is disarming on the page, although as a writer, I couldn’t help wondering if it was also a bit of a persona, an exaggeration, the sort of role one plays when trying to ingratiate oneself with research subjects—who are, of course, presenting a persona themselves. Later on, it’s also a way to make difficult material approachable for readers.

Or maybe not. Cosh’s puzzlement was deep enough to prove counter-productive. He writes that it took him 14 years and a course of psychotherapy to be able to craft his dissertation, eventually aided by the insights and vocabulary he’d gained from his therapist. Only after this long gap did he feel able to re-open his boxes of fieldnotes—which suddenly made sense. 

“Those moments in the interviews where I had vaguely sensed something beyond the words, now I was able to discern… Here was an instance of rumination or obsessional review. Here was a sudden topic shift, possibly motivated by a hidden association. Here was a recurring, unusual metaphor—some kind of personal symbol…

“I wrote the dissertation, passed the defense, got the degree…

“Then, having done it, I was desperate to get away.”

This despite the fact, as Cosh dryly notes, that “a deep aversion to your PhD material is not conducive to an academic career.” He became an independent scholar, at one point working as part of a team under The Royal Institute in Great Britain to study Covid 19 anti-vaxxers. Speaking of people asserting main character energy during a crisis.

Yet Cosh’s old guys wouldn’t leave him alone. Twenty-five years after doing his interviews, long after all his subjects were dead, Cosh once again opened his boxes of research and wrote this book, trying to finally lay the ghosts of Ortona to rest.

Ortona veteran Melville A. McPhee speaking with Ian Cosh:

“You know, whenever you’re in the line (in combat), you’re on two hours and off two hours, and my two hours off I was either heavin’ my guts or, I couldn’t sleep or, just like a, like an iron poker, a hot poker in your stomach, you know?”

“You were two hours on and two hours off?”

“Two hours on. Yeah… yeah, you’d go up the street and uh, go into the next house, you know, and uh, throw a hand grenade first and go in with your gun and, you know. So—”

Mel paused. He had just begun to answer my question (about house-to-house fighting). Something was putting him off-track.

“Yeah, these, these, these are things that I, that I say I was trying to erase from—and I did a fairly good job I guess but uh—but things that you try and erase from your memory because how much good does it do you to recall it.”

He paused again. Suddenly he seemed overcome by a thought that he urgently needed to share. 

“I—I don’t think—I don’t think any veteran wants—wants the schoolkids today to—to glamorize war or anything. It’s a terrible thing. Nobody should have to go through it.”

His stammer worsened. His face was pained.

“What—what—what—what fun is there, what—what is there to killing each other? You know? And really, the only thing we’ve learned over these wars is how better to kill each other, and how—how many more people we can kill at the one time, you know?”

I observed him in stunned silence. A wave of shame went through me. This was the answer to my question about house clearing. What a thing to want to know. What on earth was I doing, asking this kind old man to tell me how he had killed?

Mel concluded.

“That’s the only thing that we’ve learned over wars.”

To be continued…

Ghosts of Ortona: Reckoning with the Traumas of Canadian World War II Veterans by Ian Cosh is published by Sutherland House. You can order it here, or through your local indie bookstore.

Cosh will be speaking on Tuesday, June 30 in a free event at Caversham Booksellers in west-end Toronto. You can find more info and register here.

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^[1] Psychotherapist Duygu Balan explores main character energy in a fascinating precis published in Psychology Today. She dates the term’s explosion to 2020, calling it a Gen. Z coping strategy, although to me it sounds like a tech update of things people have done, oh, since the Middle Ages when they performed virtue for God, whom they thought was watching.

Writes Balan: “At its core, main character energy is a form of storytelling… It’s about making meaning of your own life. The term doesn’t just refer to confidence. It reflects autonomy and empowerment in a world that often feels unpredictable and chaotic.”               

^[2] Journalist and historian Mark Zuehkle is the author of Ortona: Canada’s Epic World War II Battle, published by Douglas & McIntyre in 2003. You can order it here or once again, through your local indie bookstore. (Support indie bookstores!)

^[3] And No Birds Sang by Farley Mowat, reprinted in 2012, is published by Douglas & McIntyre. It’s widely available in libraries and maybe on your parents’ bookshelves. It can also be ordered here.

^[4] Behar writes: “For me, anthropology is about embarking on… a voyage through a long tunnel. Always, as an anthropologist, you go elsewhere, but the voyage is never simply about making a trip to a Spanish village of thick-walled adobe houses in the Cantabrian Mountains, or a garden apartment in Detroit where the planes circle despondently overhead, or a port city of cracking pink columns and impossible hopes known as La Habana, where they tell me I was born. Loss, mourning, the longing for memory, the desire to enter into the world around you and having no idea how to do it, the fear of observing too coldly or too raggedly, the rage of cowardice, the insight that is always arriving late, as defiant hindsight, a sense of the utter uselessness of writing anything and yet the burning desire to write something, are the stopping places along the way. At the end of the voyage, if you are lucky, you catch a glimpse of a lighthouse, and you are grateful. Life, after all, is bountiful.”

You can order The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart by Ruth Behar here or at your local indie. (I might have mentioned indies before.) It’s published by Beacon Press.