When the terror of battle gives way to the love of combat

Chris Hedges never flinches when describing the complex reality of contemporary armed conflicts. As a veteran war reporter from the killing fields of El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Colombia, the West Bank, Gaza, the Sudan, Yemen, Algeria, the Punjab, Romania, the Persian Gulf, Turkey, northern Iraq, Bosnia and Kosovo, Hedges bellows out a reminder that war is ugly and morally perverse yet also profoundly alluring. Combat is a drug that is polluting and addictive. War fulfills many of humanity’s fantasies, giving meaning to our lives by drawing attention to the trivia of placid domesticity.

On the front lines, Hedges (a reporter formerly for the Christian Science Monitor, among others, and now for the New York Times) spoke with many ordinary men and women who said they derived pleasure out of acts of extreme violence against others. Combatants are often unabashed about their eagerness to kill. As American forces have learned since the Vietnam War, when fear is eliminated from combat, many other restraints to violence are also removed. War photographer Tim Page, when asked to compile a photographic book that would “take the glamour out of war for good,” responded: “Take the glamour out of war! I mean, how the bloody hell can you do that? ... It’s like trying to take the glamour out of sex, trying to take the glamour out of the Rolling Stones .... It just can’t be done.”

War’s dark charm must be resisted, however. Without exception, war brutalizes. Few war journalists are as sensitive as Hedges to the humiliation that pervades war culture. During the Persian Gulf War, Hedges observed the monstrous ease with which American explosives transformed battalions of young Iraqis into dismembered carcasses. He writes with passion about the “cold and brutal efficiency of industrial warfare.”

Honor and courage crumble and, as Hedges shamefacedly admits, even journalists like himself ended up using their friends as shields against bullets. Indeed, this entire book is a powerful indictment of the role played by war journalists. The willingness, even eagerness, of large sections of the media to assume responsibility for maintaining the morale of service members and civilians is dangerous. Their willingness (during the Gulf War, for instance) to cooperate with strict censorship constraints was scandalous. By ensuring that the victims remained “faceless and nameless phantoms” within entertaining tales of daring deeds, the media abnegated their responsibilities. War journalists and photographers “wanted to be used.” They were seduced by the glamour of war and knew they were an integral part of the war effort.

Hedges is man enough to include himself in his unflattering assessment of the press corps. After all, he also felt immense relief when tons of explosives decimated his country’s enemies. Hedges’ tortured complicity in the violence of war makes for uneasy reading, but his keen sense of empathy never abandons him. The weak cries of a dying El Salvadoran rebel in 1982, crooning a final “sad cadence” for his mother, cut through “the absurd posturing of soldiering.” Survivors are left with the memory of such pitiful cries. In the words of a British soldier writing to his mother after the Battle of the Somme in 1916: “I have witnessed a terrible sight that I shall never forget as long as I live... they had no feeling whatever for us poor chaps.” War stories are composed out of such gut-wrenching encounters between terrified individuals.

For those people on the front lines, the terror of battle makes slipping into barbarity easier. Individuals suddenly find themselves consumed with bloodlust. Respect for strangers vanishes. The enemy is dehumanized--warriors become “rodent exterminators,” as American troops in the Pacific during World War II styled themselves. When enemy soldiers are classified as inhuman, they all became fair game.

Such notions tie into ideas in common circulation about humans and warfare: It is in man’s instincts to kill. There is no point in feeling guilty for what is inherent in human nature. Even decent warriors find themselves collecting ghoulish mementos from the corpses of their enemy. For instance, Hedges described the way Iraqi officials during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s squatted “like big game hunters” over the bodies of slain men, reveling in their prowess as martial heroes.

Hedges has no illusions about the capabilities of Americans to act in a similar fashion. Carnevalesque rituals help making war bearable: They forge an individual’s identity as a “warrior” engaged in a life-or-death struggle. Gruesome rites also cement group bonds and comradeship among men who are far from both their prewar personas and society back home. In the grotesque, men are able to confront “the horror, the horror.”

Even at some distance from the killing zones, war corrupts. Morality is muddled. Hedges shows how the possibility of imminent war silences all that is humane within society. He attacks the ease with which many people view real-life military violence on television without any sense of unease.

Evil-doings became the sole property of the enemy. “Our” boys always fight an honorable war. Even in the cool calculation of many military histories and war journals, it is common to read that atrocious behavior committed by “our side” should remain outside any censorious gaze. In other words, in the heat of battle, atrocious behavior easily becomes an integral and excusable part of warfare. The disproportionate use of violence and spectacular demonstrations of brutality are part of the Western arsenal. The responses of American civilians to the wars and military interventions that have been ordered in their name tell us more than we may perhaps want to know about our own society’s heart of darkness.

Within this gory articulation of the experience of war, Hedges attempts to provide a solution. He is no pacifist. He admits that he supported armed intervention in Sarajevo and Kosovo, and he claims that this book was written “not to dissuade us from war but to understand it.” Nevertheless, he urges that a powerful brake be applied to our warmongering impulses. How this is to happen is less clear. Hedges convincingly argues that even a “just” war turns its participants into monsters. Hedges really wants us to believe that the “force that gives us meaning” is not war but love. He exhorts readers to embrace Eros instead of Thanatos, love instead of death. In his words: “Love, in its mystery, has its own power. It alone gives meaning that endures .... Love has power to resist in our nature what we know we must resist, and to affirm what we know we must affirm.” But love is one of the main mechanisms enabling people to hate. In the words of Capt. Julian Henry Francis Grenfell, writing to his mother in England in 1915, just before he was killed: “It is all the best fun. I have never, never felt so well, or so happy, or enjoyed anything so much .... One loves one’s fellow-man so much more when one is bent on killing him.”

Hedges’ call for an honest confrontation with America’s past is forcefully heard throughout this book. War’s addiction, the “Oz-like world” of repression and deception and the mythical dreamland of the military crusade, are to be feared. Our responses to terrorist attacks must not be allowed to distort democracy. In Hedges’ words: “The whole truth may finally be too hard to utter, but the process of healing only begins when we are able to at least acknowledge the tragedy and accept our share of the blame.” This book is an example of the best kind of war journalism: It is bitterly poetic and ruthlessly philosophical. It sends out a powerful message to people contemplating the escalation of the “war against terrorism.”