To hold war’s horror at bay, we touch it

THERE are some who would be shocked and disgusted at the very idea that our troops in Iraq are making home movies that feature charred and decapitated corpses while rock music plays in the background. But I’m not.

War by its very nature is a surreal experience and those involved in it become desensitized to its violence. It assumes the emotional equivalent of a movie or a video game, and the contrapuntal hisses and booms of combat constitute the driving tones of new music, played fortissimo.

I’m referring to a front-page piece a few days ago by Louise Roug, one of our reporters in the war zone, who wrote about soldiers carrying video cameras to depict the scenes of gore and then scoring the scenes with music.

Roug quotes one soldier as saying his cinema verite was a trophy, something to say, “I was there. I did this,” much as in earlier wars our troops collected Japanese flags or German bayonets to prove they had participated in the experience of a lifetime.

Friends who read Roug’s piece shuddered at the knowledge that our sons and daughters seemed almost to enjoy what they had accomplished in terms of human misery, sometimes adding humor to their video mixes. One friend, a teacher, said, “I can’t believe they’re doing that.”

I can.

Our generations exist in an Age of War that began in 1941 and has continued almost unabated ever since, in both larger and less notable ways. Those of us who participated in their horror and those simply raised in it have been damaged in ways that are beyond measurement.

It’s why we can accept the blood sport of video games played by kids and grown-ups alike, and why the gruesome special effects of war and murder on the big screen don’t horrify us, and why death on the streets has become an acceptable element of urban life. It’s also why we cheer verdicts of death and accept torture as a legitimate tool of military interrogation. In an Age of War, its trophies become, like trinkets from a trip to Disney World, nothing more than souvenirs.

Because war desensitizes, those in combat view it differently than those at home. During my time in the Korean War, our company was involved in an operation called Mousetrap, an ambush that took the lives of hundreds of Chinese and North Korean soldiers. A regimental photographer took pictures of the bodies strewn like broken toys over a bomb-blasted field; close-ups and wide-angle shots of humans torn by shrapnel and blackened by napalm.

He sold copies of the pictures, and I was among those who bought them. Our attitude for collecting them was reflected in the comment of a soldier who took videos of bodies in Iraq: “It doesn’t bother you so much,” he said, “taking pictures of the guy who was just shooting at you.”

A part of me cringed at the realization that the bodies depicted in the photographs had been living, breathing human beings who, like me, wanted nothing more than for the war to end. But the Marine Corps had trained me well, and the overwhelming instinct to survive had dimmed any compassion that might have lessened my effectiveness in combat. The closest I ever came to breaking down was during a search of enemy dead for whatever vital information they might have possessed.

What I found in the pocket of a Chinese soldier, carefully preserved in plastic, was a photograph of a woman and two small children, their smiles emulsified for the man, husband and father who carried them into battle. I placed the picture back into his pocket. But with very little effort, I can re-create the faces, and I think of them sometimes when the night is long and sleep is scarce.

But I didn’t break. I marched on, the way I was supposed to, and only when I came home with the photographs of Operation Mousetrap was their horror fully understood, first through the eyes of those who had never been at war and then with the dawning awareness in my own heart of what I had been a party to.

It’s why I am not shocked by the videos being taken by those who are trying to stay alive under intensely difficult situations. They have become conditioned to seeing pain and causing pain, to seeing death and causing death. Their video trophies are, as a scholar put it, diaries of what they are enduring, letters from an existential world distorted by its proximity to hell.

Only when they come home to stay will most of them realize, as I did, what horror we inflict on each other. And then, as I did, they can throw out the pictures they have collected and leave it to dark places in the mind to recall what it was like when the loud, hard music of war was playing.

Al Martinez can be reached at al.martinez@latimes.com.