TV REVIEW : ‘FACES OF THE ENEMY’: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF WAR

What better time to air “Faces of the Enemy” than in the shadow of Memorial Day? America has warmly honored its war dead, Monday’s prayers and parades having sunk in along with TV’s cluster of somber pictures. Now comes Sam Keen with this PBS program exploring the psychology of war.

Participation in war first requires the creation of an enemy, Keen says in this fascinating and challenging hour titled after his book on the same topic. It airs tonight at 10 on Channel 28 (having aired earlier in the week on other PBS stations).

“How is it that people become enemies?” Keen asks. Striking pictures fill the screen--shrill, screaming works of propaganda from all nations, each showing the enemy as “always a demon, the barbarian, the aggressor, a liar, a madman” of such vileness that his extinction becomes not only justified, but mandatory.

“You are trained as a soldier to see the enemy as an abstraction,” Keen is told by William Broyles Jr., the former Newsweek editor and Vietnam War veteran who returned to the scenes of his battles to confront his past and write “Brothers in Arms.”

Even an abstraction can have an ugly outline, though. “The soldier’s most powerful weapon is not his rifle, but . . . the idea of the enemy,” Broyles says. He and his platoonmates fought gooks, not humans. “You had to use those sort of repugnant expressions . . . as part of the dehumanizing process. . . . They saw us the same way . . . as huge, ungainly, evil-looking.”

That makes killing easier. But Keen, a former contributing editor for Psychology Today, sometimes wanders from this solid ground onto marshier turf. He interviews imprisoned David Rice, a fringe-rightist who murdered a family of four in the false belief that they were Communists.

Although acknowledging the folly of making an individual’s behavior a metaphor for nations, Keen does so anyway. Rice’s “delusions were based on reality,” Keen says. “We perceive the Soviets as our enemy and they perceive us as theirs.” Oh, please. Rice’s deranged behavior a byproduct of mainstream anti-Communism? That’s farfetched, to say the least.

Even more troubling is Keen’s apparent preclusion of the possibility that some enemies are not manufactured. After all, David Rice is an enemy of society because of his actions, not because his evil was fabricated. More broadly, although Hitler’s hateful propaganda machine did manufacture scapegoats, the Fuehrer himself was a self-made enemy who did not have to be created through illusion. And his soldiers were bona fide enemies of civilization--not as individuals but as representatives of a regime that exterminated millions of innocent victims.

Keen raises profound questions, though, and “Faces of the Enemy” does cause you to rethink the concept of war and the nature of foes, and to wonder how it is that veterans on both sides can often reunite warmly only a few years after having tried to kill each other. As Broyles wrote so poignantly in the New York Times this week:

“Few soldiers of any era had ever seen so much war. Yet when I returned to Vietnam two years ago and met the men and women I had fought against, I was constantly amazed at how little war seemed to have affected them. We talked for hours, but their eyes and voices never seemed troubled by doubt or guilt about what blood might have been on their hands, and (were) unmarked with anger or bitterness about what blood might have been on mine.”