Ryan Lucas Henderson’s “West from the Fallen Wall”: A Review

Peace, and the absence of war. These are two entirely different things. What we called peace in Europe during that period, which lay roughly between Kosovo and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, was not marked by feelings of tranquility, harmony, and security, but by the feeling of being watched by some unknown creature lurking in the brush. I had this feeling while hunting in the High Sierra backcountry, and over several days became increasingly convinced that I was being stalked by some malevolent cryptid. I never got a clear look at whatever it was, only flashes of movement out of the corner of my eye, the sound of a branch snapping, a whiff of strange odor that set the hair on the back of my neck to sticking up. It was much more nerve-wracking than facing a clear danger. I have come face to face with several grizzlies in the Rockies while unarmed, and none of those encounters gave me a dread like the thing I never actually encountered.

It is strange that such a terrible thing as war can feel like a relief once it is actually underway. The build-up to war is what is intolerable: a building, tormenting tension, and the constantly repeated and never answered question of what will actually happen, or if anything will happen at all. The tension finally reaches the breaking point. The rubber band snaps. The tank engines start. The planes head for their targets. Energy is now being directed into activity. The long-delayed but always expected conflict has finally arrived.

West from the Fallen Wall, a collection of short stories set in Europe by photojournalist and writer Ryan Lucas Henderson, deals with the before-time, before the coronavirus, before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. That strange time in modern Europe when it felt as if the end of history had actually been achieved. There were no longer any apparent threats from state actors as there had been in the Cold War days. By all accounts, the Russian and European economies were too interwoven and codependent for the relationship to ever fully sour again. The threats were confined to the shadows. NATO continued training for confrontation with an undefined enemy that, it was assumed, would take the form of a peer military power using conventional weapons and rules of warfare, but Europe’s actual security threat had evolved.

I remember returning with a group of friends to the base housing in Vicenza one foggy November night and being greeted at the gate by freaked-out MPs yelling and pointing their rifles at us. While we had been at the circus on the edge of town, watching bears ride bicycles around a ring, Islamist terrorists had launched a wave of mass shootings and suicide bombings in Paris. In such moments, the threat felt intense and defined. These moments were few and far between. Mostly, there was just an uncomfortable undercurrent of something. America’s security umbrella still hung over Europeans’ heads, even as the sun had been shining for years. But when bad weather did flare up, the umbrella was of no use. In fact, it usually functioned as a lightning rod. In those years, there were frequent reminders that America’s empire had worn out its welcome in some quarters. Reminders that were delivered with varying degrees of subtlety.

The stories in West from the Fallen Wall depict with piercing poignance this relationship between Americans and Europeans and the subtle complications and dramas that are an invisible feature of life in a peacetime military alliance. They touch on many aspects of the American experience in Europe: cultural frictions, the resentments, the inane foibles of military bureaucracy, and old sore spots, but there are also the moments of mutual affinity, respect, and affection. Europe is the place from which so many Americans derive their ancestry. Our forebears may have left to cross the ocean a long time ago, but there is something about the place that still resonates in the marrow, and something about the people that stirs faint memories. 

The closing story, “Forest of Dry Bones,” is a true pièce de résistance. I will not give any of the other stories because they are layered and arranged in such a way that you must allow them to breathe and draw you into experiencing them sequentially, as a series of vignettes that will form a complete painting only when you’ve read the last line. But the theme of “Forest of Dry Bones” recalls to mind a visit I once paid to the American military cemetery at Draguignan. I struck up a conversation with a groundskeeper after I stopped to compliment the immaculate landscaping. He told me that the people of the town consider it a great honor to look after the graves of the Americans who died in the liberation of France. The French conception of honor carries with it an active sense of ongoing purpose. Eight decades on from liberation and Le Souvenir Franco-Americain, an active society of local citizens, still carries on the special tradition of honoring the Americans each Memorial Day and on other military holidays throughout the year. The society also pays the way for two American relatives of the dead to visit the cemetery each year and be hosted and honored by the members of the society. There are fewer and fewer known, remaining relatives to invite. The members of the society are growing older as well, with less interest from younger generations now than in the past and fewer funds available to carry on the activities. But they carry on.

I recently visited my great-uncle, the last surviving veteran of World War II in my family. He will soon be 101 years old. He fought in the Battle of the Bulge and spent the end of the war in a POW camp. I grew up listening in rapt interest to him, my grandfather, and other veterans when they would talk about the war. A few years ago, in Baden-Württemberg, a German friend took me to visit his grandmother, and she talked about her memories as a little girl in Germany before and during the war, showing off a scar left by shrapnel from an American bomb and a picture of her American husband she met in the 60s. She passed away in the first winter of Coronavirus. There are precious few left who remember the war firsthand, and before much longer, there will be none at all. 

Much of the American-European relationship has been built on mutual connections to the war; as those connections fade away with time, either something will replace them, or the relationship will change. And when my generation grows old and passes away, the memories of Pax Americana in Europe will pass away too. But West from the Fallen Wall, and hopefully many others like it, will still be there.

Book reviewed: Ryan Lucas Henderson’s “West from the Fallen Wall” (Spade & Scroll, 2024)

Benjamin Braddock is an American writer and an Editor-at-Large at IM—1776. He can be followed @GraduatedBen.