What If Soldiers Fought With Pillows? True Stories of Imagination and Courage

The title of this work is a truncated version of the question: What if soldiers fought with pillows instead of pistols? This is the first of 15 brief accounts of individuals or groups who decided that the status quo was unacceptable and imagined new ways of being and acting. The first subject is Desmond Doss, an American conscientious objector who served as a medic during the Second World War. He refused to carry a gun, but he did carry a Bible. Following a bloody battle in Okinawa, Japan, he stayed behind with wounded soldiers and rescued 75 of them during a 12-hour period. For his service, he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honour, the highest American military award and the first time a conscientious objector was so recognized. Muhammad Ali is another conscientious objector profiled in the volume. His refusal in 1967 to accept the draft to fight in the Vietnam War led to a criminal conviction that was overturned a few years later. More than three decades later, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In a similar vein, the creation of the Food Not Bombs movement began in 1980 as anti-nuclear protests.

Many stories illustrate the importance of music, visual art, performance and sport invoked to promote more just, peaceful and humane existence. Picasso painted Guernica to protest the barbarity of the Spanish Civil War. A Spanish clown paid by children to bring happiness to refugee children in Croatia led to the 1993 founding of Clowns Without Borders. A circus in Cambodia is helping to rebuild local and national arts in that land. In Senegal, a youth movement called Y’en a Marre used hip-hop music and more traditional outreach methods to engage youth in national politics that saw a new government elected in 2012. A young Palestinian man named Ahmad Joudeh grew up in a refugee camp in Syria. His love of dance, choreography and teaching dance to children continued despite the outbreak of civil war and threats from Islamic State militants. He is now based in the Netherlands where he continues to create new dances and raises funds to promote peace and raise awareness of the victims of war. In the Ivory Coast, it was the national men’s soccer team and its qualifying for the World Cup in October 2005 that helped to bring peace ending a civil war. Their star striker, Didier Drogba, pleaded with both sides in the three-year-old conflict to lay down their arms and to work to live and play together united in a common cause. A ceasefire was followed in 2007 by a peace agreement.

The biographical stories of courage and leadership in the face of war, displacement of civilians, persecution and injustice are diverse and engaging. However, the overall presentation of the book is rather unfortunate. The use of a “What if …?” question to introduce each subject is a conceit that brings some unity to the collection, but the rhetoric comes across as rather silly, sometimes forced, and the whimsical cartoonish illustrations by Bloch are chiefly decorative. Camlot states in the acknowledgments that this book was originally conceived as a picture book but morphed into a middle-grade work of nonfiction. At first glance, it still resembles a picture book with paired pages typically containing a full page illustration that depicts a What if? question opposite a page of text containing one additional illustration normally depicting the person named in the account. The text is longer and more complex than that in a typical picture book. The illustrations are all executed in comparable style and colours so they bring some unity to the work, but the aesthetic style adds little value. Some time spent on the internet reveals that Bloch’s depictions of the people in the text are usually quite authentic. The depiction of Picasso with five arms is an interesting salute to the fact that he is mainly remembered for his abstraction of the human form. It does seem odd to have an article describe images from a painting, such as Guernica, without including a photograph of the painting or a close up from the work itself.

Given the target readership, it is understandable that the historic details of events must be stripped of nuance for the sake of clarity. However, at times, Camlot’s statements seem too simplistic. In the story of Ping-Pong diplomacy that preceded Richard Nixon’s historic visit to the People’s Republic of China and the thawing of relations between two nations, it is rich to declare that the thaw was “All because of Ping-Pong.”

What If Soldiers Fought With Pillows? includes a glossary, endnotes to credit quotations used, and a bibliography of selected sources arranged by page sequence of the book. A table of contents would have added value to this work of nonfiction.