Seeing through the lie that is war: from the nightmare of the battlefield, a warning against national self-worship - Cover Story - War Is the Force that Gives Us Meaning - Book Review

National Catholic Reporter, Nov 29, 2002 by Tom Roberts

Within hours of the attacks on the World Trade Center, amid the grief and mourning and confusion, the flags began to appear. Before long, the country was awash in war rhetoric and wrapped in red, white and blue bunting. Bald eagles soared into World Series stadiums and fighter jets roared overhead at all manner of public gatherings.

High school ROTC units marched with greater pride and a more determined step before sporting events, and the recording industry began to pump out new collections of patriotic songs.

Everyone was extolling the newfound virtue of patriotism, and President George W. Bush was affirming that we would be "plenty tough" in hunting down "the evildoers."

Some would even venture to say we were on our way to healing the doubts that had crept into the national psyche during the Vietnam era.

Chris Hedges would issue a stern warning: "Patriotism, often a thinly veiled form of collective self-worship, celebrates our goodness, our ideals, our mercy and bemoans the perfidiousness of those who hate us." Self-worship requires that we turn a blind eye on "the murder and repression done in our name." It means that we dismiss how others might see us and perceive our actions in the world. "We define ourselves. All other definitions do not count."

It is the beginning of the myth and the lie that must exist for wars to be prosecuted, Hedges writes in his searing indictment of international violence, WAR Is the Force that Gives Us Meaning (PublicAffairs, $23).

This is no pacifist tract. Hedges, 46, a war correspondent for 15 years and currently a New York Times reporter, went to the battlefield, first in El Salvador in 1982 (where he free-lanced for National Catholic Reporter) out of Harvard Divinity School. "I am not a pacifist," he said in an interview from his home in New Jersey. "I wish I was but I am a reporter. I have to see the world as it is, not as I want it to be."

Though an unrelenting critic of war, he sees some as necessary, an ethical responsibility that he compares to taking poison, "just as a person with cancer accepts chemotherapy to live," he writes. "We cannot succumb to despair. Force is, and I suspect always will be, part of the human condition. There are times when the force wielded by one immoral faction must be countered by a faction that, while never moral, is perhaps less immoral."

Yet even within that acceptance--and this apparent paradox raises some perplexity--his critique of war is so total that it is difficult to see how any might be legitimate. Though despairing that those who oppose war and who dare to puncture the war myths will ever win over those intent on making war, Hedges urges vigilance. "Reinhold Niebuhr aptly reminded us that we must all act and then ask for forgiveness. This book is not a call for inaction. It is a call for repentance."

Repentance seems an especially out-of-place admonition by the time Hedges finishes his account, laced through with references that ground his observations in the wisdom of the classics as well as modern psychology. For what makes this more than just another treatise on the futility of war is the personal witness Hedges brings to the subject. He has seen an indescribable amount of grotesque death and human suffering. He was a self-described addict whose drag of choice was the battlefield, and he has seen them in El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Colombia, Algeria, the West Bank, Gaza, the Sudan, Bosnia, Kosovo, the Persian Gulf and Turkey. During the Shiite uprising in Southern Iraq following the Gulf War, Hedges was captured by the Iraqi Republican Guard and held for a week. He has broken the addiction--he is done with war reporting. But it is not a profession from which one easily walks away. He has, he says, paid dearly for seeing such a great amount of violence and death the world over.

At one point in Kosovo in 1998, he was with a group of mourners in a small Albanian village waiting for an eerie cargo delivery.

   When the truck pulled into the yard I climbed into the back. Before each
   corpse, wrapped in bloodstained blankets and rugs, was lifted out for
   washing and burial I checked to see if the body was mutilated. I pulled
   back the cloth to uncover the faces. The gouged-out eyes, the shattered
   skulls, the gaping rows of broken teeth, and the sinewy strands of flayed
   flesh greeted me. When I could not see clearly in the fading light I
   flicked on my Maglite. I jotted each disfigurement in my notebook.

The bodies were passed silently out of the truck. They were laid on crude wooden coffin lids placed on the floor of the shed. The corpses were wound in white shrouds by a Muslim cleric in a red turban. The shed was lit by a lone kerosene lamp. It threw out a ghastly, uneven, yellowish light, In the hasty effort to confer some dignity on the dead, family members, often weeping, tried to wash away the bloodstains from the faces. Most could not do it and had to be helped away.

   It was not an uncommon event for me. I have seen many such dead. Several
   weeks later it would be worse. I would be in a warehouse with 51 bodies,
   including children, even infants, women and the elderly from the town of
   Prekaz. I had spent time with many of them. I stared into their lifeless
   faces. I was again in the twilight zone of war. I could not wholly believe
   what I saw in front of me.