War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (11 page)

Most societies never recover from the self-inflicted wounds made to their own culture during wartime. War leaves behind
not memory but amnesia. Once wars end, people reach back to the time before the catastrophe. The books, plays, cinema take up the established cultural topics; authors and themes are often based on issues and ideas that predated the war. In post-war Germany it was as if Weimar had never ended, as if the war was just some bad, horrible dream from which everyone had just awoken and no one wanted to discuss.

This is why the wall of names that is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is so important. It was not a project funded or organized by the state but by those who survived and insisted we not forget. It was part of America's battle back to truth, part of our desire for forgiveness. It ultimately held out to us as a nation the opportunity for redemption, although the state has prodded us back towards the triumphalism that led us into Vietnam.

But just as the oppressors engage in selective memory and myth, so do the victims, building unassailable monuments to their own suffering. It becomes impossible to examine, to dispute, or to criticize the myths that have grown up around past suffering of nearly all in war. The oppressors are painted by the survivors as monsters, the victims paint themselves as holy innocents. The oppressors work hard to bury inconvenient facts and brand all in wartime with the pitch of atrocity. They strive to reduce victims to their moral level. Each side creates its own narrative. Neither is fully true.

Until there is a common vocabulary and a shared historical memory there is no peace in any society, only an absence of war. The fighting may have stopped in Bosnia or Cyprus but this does not mean the war is over. The search for a common narrative must, at times, be forced upon a society. Few societies seem able to do this willingly. The temptation, as with the Turks
and the Armenian genocide, is to forget or ignore, to wallow in the lie. But reconciliation, self-awareness, and finally the humility that makes peace possible come only when culture no longer serves a cause or a myth but the most precious and elusive of all human narratives—truth.

Let me have a war, say I: It exceeds peace as far as day
Does night; it's spritely, waking, audible, full of vent.
Peace is a very apoplexy, lethargy, mull'd, deaf, sleepy,
Insensible; a getter of more bastard children than war is a
Destroyer of men.

•
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Coriolanus
, Act IV,
SCENE V

T
HE MYTH OF WAR ENTICES US WITH THE ALLURE OF
heroism. But the images of war handed to us, even when they are graphic, leave out the one essential element of war—fear. There is, until the actual moment of confrontation, no cost to imagining glory. The visual and audio effects of films, the battlefield descriptions in books, make the experience appear real. In fact the experience is sterile. We are safe. We do not smell rotting flesh, hear the cries of agony, or see before us
blood and entrails seeping out of bodies. We view, from a distance, the rush, the excitement, but feel none of the awful gut-wrenching anxiety and humiliation that come with mortal danger. It takes the experience of fear and the chaos of battle, the deafening and disturbing noise, to wake us up, to make us realize that we are not who we imagined we were, that war as displayed by the entertainment industry might, in most cases, as well be ballet. But even with this I have seen soldiers in war try to recreate the fiction of war, especially when a television camera is around to record the attempted heroics. The result is usually pathetic.

The prospect of war is exciting. Many young men, schooled in the notion that war is the ultimate definition of manhood, that only in war will they be tested and proven, that they can discover their worth as human beings in battle, willingly join the great enterprise. The admiration of the crowd, the high-blown rhetoric, the chance to achieve the glory of the previous generation, the ideal of nobility beckon us forward. And people, ironically, enjoy righteous indignation and an object upon which to unleash their anger. War usually starts with collective euphoria.

It is all the more startling that such fantasy is believed, given the impersonal slaughter of modern industrial warfare. I saw high explosives fired from huge distances in the Gulf War reduce battalions of Iraqis to scattered corpses. Iraqi soldiers were nothing more on the screens of sophisticated artillery pieces than little dots scurrying around like ants—that is, until they were blasted away. Bombers dumped tons of iron fragmentation bombs on them. Our tanks, which could outdistance their Soviet-built counterparts, blew Iraqi armored units to a standstill. Helicopters hovered above units like angels of death in the sky. Here there was no pillage, no warlords, no collapse of unit discipline, but the cold and brutal efficiency of industrial
warfare waged by well-trained and highly organized professional soldiers. It was a potent reminder why most European states and America live in such opulence and determine the fate of so many others. We equip and train the most efficient killers on the planet.

I drove my Land Rover down the highway north of Kuwait City a day or two following the liberation. For seven miles there was a line of burned-out cars, trucks, and tanks, many with the charred remains of Iraqi soldiers inside. The retreating convoy had been strafed by F-16 fighter jets. Some of the 1,500 vehicles were turned in an apparent attempt to flee back towards the city. They had caused a massive traffic jam. The only escape was on foot. The air was pungent with the stench of rotting bodies. In the cab of one truck were the blackened remains of a soldier curled up over the steering wheel. Bits of legs and arms stuck out in strange positions from the burned metal. Cobra helicopters hovered noisily above me.

Millions of men watched mass death in World War I. They understood the power of modern weaponry. They struggled after the war to fit back into European society. But the world, from World War I onward, had changed. Writers such as Joseph Roth or Ernst Jünger understood that we had entered into a new era, one in which we would always flirt with death and self-destruction on a hitherto unknown scale. Redemption, since World War I, comes to us only through apocalypse. The old world order, captured in works such as the 1937 French film
Grand Illusion
, died with the end of the spontaneous 1914 Christmas truce. The accepted principles of humanity, the archaic code of the warrior, became quaint and obsolete. The technological and depersonalized levels of organized killing begun in World War I have defined warfare ever since.

“Having torn out of its midst millions upon millions of its
own people, inverted and perverted every value and belief, exploited to the limit humanity's willingness to sacrifice itself for a higher cause in order to perpetuate the most heinous crimes, the war has left us with a legacy of gaping absences of memory and identity, culture and biography,” wrote the Israeli historian Omer Bartov.
¹

But even in the new age of warfare we cling to the outdated notion of the single hero able to carry out daring feats of courage on the battlefield. Such heroism is about as relevant as mounting bayonet or cavalry charges. But peddling the myth of heroism is essential, maybe even more so now, to entice soldiers into war. Men in modern warfare are in service to technology. Many combat veterans never actually see the people they are firing at nor those firing at them, and this is true even in low-intensity insurgencies.

To be sure, soldiers who kill innocents pay a tremendous personal emotional and spiritual price. But within the universe of total war, equipped with weapons that can kill hundreds or thousands of people in seconds, soldiers only have time to reflect later. By then these soldiers often have been discarded, left as broken men in a civilian society that does not understand them and does not want to understand them. Once violence on this scale is unleashed it usually continues to plague societies. The civil war in El Salvador, as in many African states, has left the country beset by violent crime and dominated by armed militias and gangs. We are hostage to a vast and powerful military-industrial complex that exports more weapons than all other nations combined.

I knew a Muslim soldier, a father, who fought on the front lines around Sarajveo. His unit, in one of the rare attempts to take back a few streets controlled by the Serbs, pushed across
Serb lines. They did not get very far. The fighting was intense. As he moved down the street he heard a door swing open. He fired a burst from his AK-47 assault rifle. A twelve-year-old girl dropped dead. He saw in the body of the unknown girl lying prostrate in front of him the image of his own twelve-year-old daughter. He broke down. He had to be helped back to the city. He was lost for the rest of the war, shuttered inside his apartment, nervous, morose, and broken. This experience is far more typical of warfare than the Rambo heroics we are fed by the state and the entertainment industry. The cost of killing is all the more bitter because of the deep disillusionment that war usually brings.

It takes little in wartime to turn ordinary men into killers. Most give themselves willingly to the seduction of unlimited power to destroy and all feel the heavy weight of peer pressure. Few, once in battle, can find the strength to resist.

The German veteran of World War I Erich Maria Remarque, in
All Quiet on the Western Front
, wrote of the narcotic of war that quickly transformed men into beasts. He knew the ecstatic high of violence and the debilitating mental and physical destruction that comes with prolonged exposure to war's addiction.

“We run on,” he wrote, “overwhelmed by this wave that bears us along, that fills us with ferocity, turns us into thugs, into murderers, into God knows what devils; this wave that multiplies our strength with fear and madness and greed of life, seeking and fighting for nothing but our deliverance.”
²

The historian Christopher Browning noted the willingness to kill in
Ordinary Men
, his study of Reserve Police Battalion 101 in Poland during World War II. The battalion was ordered to shoot 1,800 Jews in the Polish village of Jozefow in a day-long action. The men in the unit had to round up the Jews, march
them into the forest, and one by one order them to lie down in a row. The victims, including women, infants, children, and the elderly, were shot dead at close range.

The battalion was ordered to do the killing on the morning of July 12, 1942. They were offered the option to refuse, an option only about a dozen men took, although more asked to be relieved once the killing began. Those who did not want to continue, Browning says, were disgusted rather than plagued by conscience. When the men returned to the barracks they “were depressed, angered, embittered and shaken.”
³
They drank heavily. They were told not to talk about the event, “but they needed no encouragement in that direction.”
⁴

In the massacres that followed, the killings by the battalion became less personal. The executioners drank now, as executioners did in Bosnia and Kosovo, before their work. Having killed once, Browning wrote, the men “did not experience such a traumatic shock the second time.”
⁵
It no longer became hard to find volunteers, and the killing escalated. In a massacre that became known as the “Harvest Festival” some 500 men killed 30,500 Jewish inhabitants of the work camps Trawniki, Poniatowa, and Majdanek in a matter of days.

The men in the battalion, aged thirty-seven to forty-two, were not elite troops. They were not highly trained nor had they been specially picked for the job. They were of middle- or lower-class origin. And their behavior, given the savagery of modern warfare, has been widely replicated. There are no shortages of former soldiers and militiamen in Algeria, Argentina, Rwanda, El Salvador, Iraq, or Bosnia who have done the same. There are always people willing to commit unspeakable human atrocity in exchange for a little power and privilege.

The task of carrying out violence, of killing, leads to perversion.
The seductiveness of violence, the fascination with the grotesque—the Bible calls it “the lust of the eye”—the god-like empowerment over other human lives and the drug of war combine, like the ecstasy of erotic love, to let our senses command our bodies. Killing unleashes within us dark undercurrents that see us desecrate and whip ourselves into greater orgies of destruction. The dead, treated with respect in peacetime, are abused in wartime. They become pieces of performance art. Corpses were impaled in Bosnia on the sides of barn doors, decapitated, or draped like discarded clothing over fences. They were dumped into rivers, burned alive in homes, herded into warehouses and shot and mutilated, or left on roadsides. Children could pass them on the street, gape at them and walk on.

There are few anti-war movies or novels that successfully portray war, for amidst the horror is also the seduction of the machine of war, all-powerful, all-absorbing. Most of the effective anti-war novels—such as Elsa Morante's
History: A Novel
—focus on the effects of war, on those who bear the brunt of war's brutality. Morante, who spent a year hiding among remote farming villages south of Rome at the end of World War II, set out to write a novel about those whom history ignores and forgets. Her world was that of victims. It is was a world not of heroics and glory but of rape, bombing raids, crime, cattle cars filled with human beings being taken to slaughter, soldiers dying of frostbite, and the fear of secret police and the military. In her world, no one had control.
⁶