Page 1 of 2 DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA
What it means when the US goes to war
By Chris Hedges
Troops, when they battle insurgent forces, as in Iraq, or Gaza or Vietnam, are
placed in "atrocity producing situations". Being surrounded by a hostile
population makes simple acts, such as going to a store to buy a can of soda,
dangerous. The fear and stress push troops to view everyone around them as the
enemy. The hostility is compounded when the enemy, as in Iraq, is elusive,
shadowy and hard to find. The rage soldiers feel after a roadside bomb
explodes, killing or maiming their comrades, is one that is easily directed,
over time, to innocent civilians who are seen to support the insurgents.
Civilians and combatants, in the eyes of the beleaguered troops, merge into one
entity. These civilians, who rarely interact with soldiers or marines, are to
most of the occupation troops in Iraq
nameless, faceless and easily turned into abstractions of hate. They are
dismissed as less than human. It is a short psychological leap, but a massive
moral leap. It is a leap from killing - the shooting of someone who has the
capacity to do you harm - to murder - the deadly assault against someone who
cannot harm you.
The war in Iraq is now primarily about murder. There is very little killing.
The savagery and brutality of the occupation is tearing apart those who have
been deployed to Iraq. As news reports have just informed us, 115 American
soldiers committed suicide in 2007. This is a 13% increase in suicides over
2006. And the suicides, as they did in the Vietnam War years, will only rise as
distraught veterans come home, unwrap the self-protective layers of cotton wool
that keep them from feeling, and face the awful reality of what they did to
innocents in Iraq
American marines and soldiers have become socialized to atrocity. The killing
project is not described in these terms to a distant public. The politicians
still speak in the abstract terms of glory, honor and heroism, in the necessity
of improving the world, in lofty phrases of political and spiritual renewal.
Those who kill large numbers of people always claim it as a virtue. The
campaign to rid the world of terror is expressed within the confines of this
rhetoric, as if once all terrorists are destroyed evil itself will vanish.
The reality behind the myth, however, is very different. The reality and the
ideal tragically clash when soldiers and marines return home. These combat
veterans are often alienated from the world around them, a world that still
believes in the myth of war and the virtues of the nation. They confront the
grave, existential crisis of all who go through combat and understand that we
have no monopoly on virtue, that in war we become as barbaric and savage as
those we oppose.
This is a profound crisis of faith. It shatters the myths, national and
religious, that these young men and women were fed before they left for Iraq.
In short, they uncover the lie they have been told. Their relationship with the
nation will never be the same. These veterans give us a true narrative of the
war - one that exposes the vast enterprise of industrial slaughter unleashed in
Iraq. They expose the lie.
War as betrayal
"This unit sets up this traffic control point, and this 18-year-old kid is on
top of an armored Humvee with a .50-caliber machine gun," remembered Sergeant
Geoffrey Millard, who served in Tikrit with the 42nd Infantry Division. "And
this car speeds at him pretty quick and he makes a split-second decision that
that's a suicide bomber, and he presses the butterfly trigger and puts 200
rounds in less than a minute into this vehicle. It killed the mother, a father
and two kids. The boy was aged four and the daughter was aged three.
"And they briefed this to the general," Millard said, "and they briefed it
gruesome. I mean, they had pictures. They briefed it to him. And this colonel
turns around to this full division staff and says, 'If these f---ing hajis
learned to drive, this shit wouldn't happen'."
Millard and tens of thousands of other veterans suffer not only delayed
reactions to stress but this crisis of faith. The God they knew, or thought
they knew, failed them. The church or the synagogue or the mosque, which
promised redemption by serving God and country, did not prepare them for the
awful betrayal of this civic religion, for the capacity we all have for human
atrocity, for the stories of heroism used to mask the reality of war.
War is always about betrayal: betrayal of the young by the old, of idealists by
cynics, and of troops by politicians. This bitter knowledge of betrayal has
seeped into the ranks of America's Iraq War veterans. It has unleashed a new
wave of disillusioned veterans not seen since the Vietnam War. It has made it
possible for us to begin, again, to see war's death mask and understand our
complicity in evil.
"And then, you know, my sort of sentiment of, 'What the f--- are we doing, that
I felt that way in Iraq,'" said Sergeant Ben Flanders, who estimated that he
ran hundreds of military convoys in Iraq. "It's the sort of insanity of it and
the fact that it reduces it. Well, I think war does anyway, but I felt like
there was this enormous reduction in my compassion for people. The only thing
that wound up mattering is myself and the guys that I was with. And everybody
else be damned, whether you are an Iraqi - I'm sorry, I'm sorry you live here,
I'm sorry this is a terrible situation, and I'm sorry that you have to deal
with all of, you know, army vehicles running around and shooting, and these
insurgents and all this stuff."
The Hobbesian world of Iraq described by Flanders is one where the ethic is
kill or be killed. All nuance and distinction vanished for him. He fell, like
most of the occupation troops, into a binary world of us and them, the good and
the bad, those worthy of life and those unworthy of life. The vast majority of
Iraqi civilians, caught in the middle of the clash among militias, death
squads, criminal gangs, foreign fighters, kidnapping rings, terrorists, and
heavily armed occupation troops, were just one more impediment that, if they
happened to get in the way, had to be eradicated. These Iraqis were no longer
human. They were abstractions in human form.
"The first briefing you get when you get off the plane in Kuwait, and you get
off the plane and you're holding a duffel bag in each hand," Millard
remembered. "You've got your weapon slung. You've got a web sack on your back.
You're dying of heat. You're tired. You're jet-lagged. Your mind is just full
of goop. And then you're scared on top of that, because, you know, you're in
Kuwait, you're not in the States anymore ... So fear sets in, too. And they sit
you into this little briefing room and you get this briefing about how, you
know, you can't trust any of these f---ing hajis, because all these f---king
hajis are going to kill you. And 'haji' is always used as a term of disrespect
and usually with the F-word in front of it."
The press coverage of the war in Iraq rarely exposes the twisted pathology of
this war. We see the war from the perspective of the troops or from the equally
skewed perspective of the foreign reporters, holed up in hotels, hemmed in by
drivers and translators and official security and military escorts. There are
moments when war's face appears to these voyeurs and professional killers,
perhaps from the back seat of a car where a small child, her brains oozing out
of her head, lies dying, but mostly it remains hidden. And all our knowledge of
the war in Iraq has to be viewed as lacking the sweep and depth that will come
one day, perhaps years from now, when a small Iraqi boy reaches adulthood and
unfolds for us the sad and tragic story of the invasion and bloody occupation
of his nation.
As the war sours, as it no longer fits into the mythical narrative of us as
liberators and victors, it fades from view. The cable news shows that packaged
and sold us the war have stopped covering it, trading the awful carnage of bomb
blasts in Baghdad for the soap-opera sagas of Roger Clemens, Miley Cyrus and
Britney Spears in her eternal meltdown. Average monthly coverage of the war in
Iraq on the ABC, NBC and CBS newscasts combined has been cut in half, falling
from 388 minutes in 2003, to 274 in 2004, to 166 in 2005. And newspapers,
including papers like the Boston Globe, have shut down their Baghdad bureaus.
Deprived of a clear, heroic narrative, restricted and hemmed in by security
concerns, they have walked away.
Most reporters know that the invasion and the occupation have been a
catastrophe. They know the Iraqis do not want us. They know about the cooked
intelligence, spoon-fed to a compliant press by the Office of Special Plans and
Lewis Libby's White House Iraq Group. They know about Curveball, the forged
documents out of Niger, the outed Central Intelligence Agency operatives, and
the bogus British intelligence dossiers that were taken from old magazine
articles. They know the weapons of mass destruction were destroyed long before
we arrived. They know that our military as well as our National Guard and
reserve units are being degraded and decimated. They know this war is not about
bringing democracy to Iraq, that all the cliches about staying the course and
completing the mission are used to make sure the president and his allies do
not pay a political price while in power for their blunders and their folly.
The press knows all this, and if reporters had bothered to look they could have
known it a long time ago. But the press, or at least most of it, has lost the
passion, the outrage, and the sense of mission that once drove reporters to
defy authority and tell the truth.
The legions of the lost and damned
War is the pornography of violence. It has a dark beauty, filled with the
monstrous and the grotesque. The Bible calls it "the lust of the eye" and warns
believers against it. War allows us to engage in lusts and passions we keep
hidden in the deepest, most private interiors of our fantasy lives. It allows
us to destroy not only things and ideas but human beings.
In that moment of wholesale destruction, we wield the power of the divine, the
power to revoke another person's charter to live on this Earth. The frenzy of
this destruction - and when unit discipline breaks down, or when there was no
unit discipline to begin with, "frenzy" is the right word - sees armed bands
crazed by the poisonous elixir that our power to bring about the obliteration
of others delivers. All things, including human beings, become objects -
objects either to gratify or destroy, or both. Almost no one is immune. The
contagion of the crowd sees to that.
Human beings are machine-gunned and bombed from the air, automatic grenade
launchers pepper hovels and neighbors with high-powered explosive devices, and
convoys race through Iraq like freight trains of death. These soldiers and
marines have at their fingertips the heady ability to call in airstrikes and
firepower that obliterate landscapes and villages in fiery infernos. They can
instantly give or deprive human life, and with this power they become sick and
demented. The moral universe is turned upside down. All human beings are used
as objects. And no one walks away uninfected.
War thrusts us into a vortex of pain and fleeting ecstasy. It thrusts us into a
world where law is of little consequence, human life is cheap, and the
gratification of the moment becomes the overriding desire that must be
satiated, even at the cost of another's dignity or life.
"A lot of guys really supported that whole concept that, you know, if they
don't speak English and they have darker skin, they're not as human as us, so
we can do what we want," said Specialist Josh Middleton, who served in the 82nd
Airborne in Iraq. "And you know, 20-year-old kids are yelled at back and forth
at Bragg, and we're picking up cigarette butts and getting yelled at every day
for having a dirty weapon. But over here, it's like life and death. And
40-year-old Iraqi men look at us with fear and we can - do you know what I
mean? - we have this power that you can't have. That's really liberating. Life
is just knocked down to this primal level of, you know, you worry about where
the next food's going to come from, the next sleep or the next patrol, and to
stay alive.
"It's like, you feel like, I don't know, if you're a caveman," he added. "Do
you know what I mean? Just, you know, I mean, this is how life is supposed to
be. Life and death, essentially. No TV. None of that bullshit."
It takes little in wartime to turn ordinary men into killers. Most give
themselves willingly to the seduction of unlimited power to destroy. All feel
the peer pressure to conform. Few, once in battle, find the strength to resist.
Physical courage is common on a battlefield. Moral courage, which these
veterans have exhibited by telling us the truth about the war, is not.
Military machines and state bureaucracies, which seek to make us obey, seek
also to silence those who return from war and speak to its reality. They push
aside these witnesses to hide from a public eager for stories of war that fit
the mythic narrative of glory and heroism the essence of war, which is death.
War, as these veterans explain, exposes the capacity for evil that lurks just
below the surface within all of us. This is the truth these veterans, often
with great pain, have had to face.
American Historian Christopher Browning chronicled the willingness to kill in Ordinary
Men, his study of Reserve Police Battalion 101 in Poland during World
War II. On the morning of
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