"War Is Not A Noble Enterprise"

By Sarah Ruth van Gelder, YES! Magazine. Posted December 13, 2004.

“I have been in ambushes on desolate stretches of Central American roads, shot at in the marshes of southern Iraq, imprisoned in the Sudan, beaten by Saudi military police, deported from Libya and Iran, captured and held for a week by the Iraqi Republican Guard during the Shiite rebellion following the Gulf War, strafed by Russian Mig-21s in Bosnia, and fired upon by Serb snipers.... – “War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning,” by Chris Hedges

YES! editor Sarah Ruth van Gelder asked Chris Hedges to draw on his years spent in war zones to reflect on the experiences of young Americans now fighting in Iraq.

Chris Hedges: Iraq is a particularly bad situation for combat soldiers and Marines because it is classic insurgency warfare. It’s very similar to what soldiers and Marines experienced in Vietnam, what Israeli soldiers experience in Gaza and on the West Bank, and what the French experienced in Algeria.

You have an elusive enemy. You’re not fighting a set organized force, the way we were, for example, in the first Persian Gulf War. So you very rarely see your attacker, and this builds up a great deal of frustration. This frustration is compounded by the fact that you live in an environment where you are almost universally despised. Everyone becomes the enemy. And after your unit suffers — after, for instance, somebody in your unit is killed by a sniper who melts back into the slums where the shot was fired from — it becomes easy to carry out acts of revenge against people who are essentially innocent, but who you view as culpable in some way for the death of your comrades.

Robert J. Lifton, who did a lot of studies on the Vietnam War, called these “atrocity-producing situations.” It became very easy in Vietnam to shoot down a woman in a rice field as revenge for a comrade who may have stepped on a mine a few hours before.

War always creates trauma. But in counter-insurgency wars, you are constantly on edge. Going down to a corner store to buy a Coca-Cola creates tremendous amounts of anxiety because somebody could come up behind you and put a gun to the back of your head and kill you.

That’s what we’re seeing in Iraq. The psycho?logical cost — the emotional cost — that we’re inflicting on our soldiers and Marines is devastating.

One of the disturbing things about this war is that, because they are so short on numbers, they are treating people for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and then sending them back into combat situations.

So I’m worried about what we’re going to see over the long term as these young men and women are re-integrated into the society.

Sarah van Gelder: We tend to think of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder as a medical or psychological condition. But your book suggests that there are also issues of morality and identity involved.

Hedges: I think you raise a good point. Morality does play deeply into that sense of trauma, because when you’re in a combat situation (and I think you have to go there to understand), your reactions have to be instantaneous. If you hear a sound behind a door, you don’t have time to ask questions, so often you shoot first and ask questions later. And this we have seen in Iraq, where soldiers and Marines at road blocks have fired on cars filled with children and families that they initially feared were hostile.

When you are in a combat situation like that, you realize how easy it is to commit murder, how easy it is to commit atrocity, because you are so deathly afraid — and with good reason. But the consequences are devastating, because what you have done is to shed innocent blood, and often the blood of children. So you bring back not only the trauma of the violence, but that deep darkness that you must carry within you for the rest of your life — that you have been responsible for the death of innocents.

So it isn’t just an issue of trauma; it is, as well, an issue of morality. This is a horrible burden to inflict, especially on a young life. It’s why war should always be waged as a last resort, because the costs are so tremendous, not only to families who lose loved ones and will spend the rest of their lives grieving, but for those who return and for the rest of their lives bear these emotional and psychological burdens.

People cope with that in different ways. Some of course deny it. Some, even combat veterans, will try to perpetuate the mythology of glory and honor and heroism and patriotism. Others, who have more courage and more honesty will confront what they did by trying to live a life of atonement, by seeking a kind of redemption for the acts they carried out. I think that leads them to a much healthier response, and hopefully sets many on the road to recovery. I think we saw this with the conflict in Vietnam, although not exclusively with Vietnam, because my father and all my uncles fought in World War II — the supposedly “good” war — and they hated war when they came back.

van Gelder: What do well-publicized incidents, such as those at Abu Ghraib, contribute to the burden of the people returning from war, who may feel associated with acts that they did not participate in and would not have condoned?

Hedges: Abu Ghraib is the natural consequence of war and has happened in every single war that has ever been fought. What you are doing in war is turning human beings into objects either to provide gratification or to be destroyed, or both. And almost no one is immune from that — the contagion of the crowd sees to that.

Sarah Ruth van Gelder is the editor of YES! Magazine.

Reprinted from YES! magazine, PO Box 10818, Bainbridge Island, WA 98110. Subscriptions: 800/937-4451 Web: www.yesmagazine.org.

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