War Book

Just Say No

Young men have fantasies about being soldiers. But whatever it is they imagine combat to be, it isn't this - the unremitting discomfort of heat, fleas, and filth; the obvious futility of all their efforts to do a job which is impossible; the unrecognized stress of being a continual target of bullets from the enemy, hate and suspicion from the local populace, and disdain by their superiors; the inevitable incompetence of those in command of a situation which they never comprehend; and the knowledge that the experience of numbness one is undergoing is fundamentally incommunicable to anyone who isn't sharing it.

But young men seem never to get the eternally recurring message: This experience is likely to damage you beyond repair; it will haunt you and be the source of life-long regret. If you survive it with your body intact, your mind will have absorbed not just your own pain and degradation, but that of your friends and perhaps even your enemies. This pain and degradation will not make you a better man; it will make you an invalid. As Junger reports: "By the time the tour was over, half of Battle Company was supposedly on psychiatric meds."

The further one is from those who are shot at and shoot back to kill, the more fantasy takes hold. Of course, the majority of a military force never actually know what's going on: "Nearly a fifth of the combat experienced by the 70,000 NATO troops in Afghanistan is being fought by the 150 men of Battle Company." One need not go far up the chain of command to get the point: "It's only on rear bases that you hear any belligerent talk about patriotism or religion." Senior officers, faced with the unfamiliar, are at best incompetent and at worst seriously deluded: "...the war also diverged from the textbooks because it was fought in such axle-breaking, helicopter-crashing, spirit-killing, mind-bending terrain that few military plans survive intact for even an hour."

The laws of unintended consequences constitute the unchanging physics of war. War is the only demonstrable perpetual motion machine as it creates the conditions necessary for its continuance: "...war came to the Korengal when timber traders from a northern faction of the Safi tribe allied themselves with the first U.S. Special Forces that came through the area in early 2002. When the Americans tried to enter the Korengal they met resistance from local timber cutters who realized that the northern Safis were poised to take over their operation... For both sides, the battle for the Korengal developed a logic of its own that sucked in more and more resources and lives until neither side could afford to walk away."

Frankly I am exhausted hearing the old shibboleths about war evoking the best human traits of compassion, self-sacrifice, courage, and solidarity. Junger has a familiar anecdote: "Moreno put his hands on him and started to pull him out of the gunfire. A Third Squad team leader named Hijar ran forward to help, and he and Moreno managed to drag Guttie behind cover before anyone got hit. By that time the medic, Doc Old, had gotten to them and was kneeling in the dirt trying to figure out how badly Guttie was hurt. Later I asked Hijar whether he had felt any hesitation before running out there. 'No,' Hijar said, 'he'd do that for me. Knowing that is the only thing that makes any of this possible.'"

Exactly. It is the intense caring for each other by soldiers in combat that makes the whole enterprise of war possible. The entire complex machine of the military has been geared to generate and to exploit this fundamental force of fellow-feeling among men who come largely from the margins of society and who have no clue about the process to which they're being subjected. Indoctrination is the official term; brainwashing is the more accurate. To me this is at least as obscene as the violence that it permits. This is the open secret of all armies everywhere. It is also a source of immense guilt, regret, and psychosis among those who are its product. By distorting and intensifying the natural sympathy among men, the military creates zombies who are emotionally neither dead nor alive.

Is it too much to hope that, despite their hormonal disturbances, someday young men who are encouraged to wage war will tell the old men who insist on war to fuck off?