Anzac Day

One-hundred-one years ago today began the Gallipoli campaign, a devastating eight-month battle that produced over half-a-million casualties and yet remains the defining national myth for both sides: Turkey and Australia and New Zealand. Such is war, a time of carnage and valor – and the central reality of human history. “If we were to take any random hundred-year period within the last five thousand years,” writes Caroline Alexander in the introduction to her new translation of the Iliad, “we would find on average ninety-four of that hundred to have been occupied with large-scale conflicts in one or more regions of the globe.”

By chance, I was reading her words when an old friend sent me “My Vietnam Song,” his 46-year journey home from Vietnam, where he had arrived as a Marine 2^nd lieutenant not long after his college roommate had been killed. It’s a moving story of his struggle to understand himself and make sense of his war, a poignant antidote to today’s reflexive “Thank you for your service,” five words he never heard. Achilles would understand, writes Alexander. Far from “glorifying war’s destructive violence,” the Iliad “makes explicit the tragic cost of such glory, even to the greatest warrior.”

“I am tired and sick of War,” said William Tecumseh Sherman, a warrior who scorched the earth from Atlanta to the sea. “Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have never fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is hell.”

And it endures.

Off the Books

Yesterday I heard on the radio the story of Marine Captain T.S. Williams, who crash landed his bullet-riddled jet fighter on an airstrip in Korea in February 1953, hitting the grass without flaps or wheels at 200 miles per hour. Ted Williams resented being called back to active duty six years after serving in World War II. He was a professional baseball player – the best pure hitter in history. But he was also a citizen-soldier who considered it his duty to go. He flew 39 combat missions before resuming his career. The four Blackwater employees who were sentenced to prison on Monday for killing 14 unarmed people in Nisour Square eight years ago were mercenaries hired by our government to prosecute its war in Iraq. None of us who weren't there can judge those men – only our justice system can do that, and it seems, once again, to have done a more credible job of protecting our principles in times of terror than many other institutions.

We can, however, condemn the things the men did in our country's name. And above all, we can criticize a government that fights its wars with hired hands, outside any chain of command and unfettered by military regulations, whose presence enabled the Bush administration to conduct operations off the books and out of sight, so that we still have no full accounting of the financial or human costs of this disastrous war.

There may be things to privatize, but America’s defense is not one of them.

Documentary of Death

The scenic beauty and technical sophistication are chilling. The camera looks down from above – the classic angle of cinematic omnipotence – as 21 pairs of men walk along a beach on the southern Mediterranean, waves breaking on the shore, the sea stretching to the flat horizon. Twenty-one men in orange jump suits, each accompanied by another dressed in black, masked and carrying a machete. Those in orange are Coptic Christians. The others are their ISIS executioners. The film, writes The New York Times, features “slow motion, aerial footage and the quick cuts of a music video. The only sound in much of the background is the lapping of waves.” I cannot bring myself to watch this film – which seems intended as a propaganda piece for ISIS’ power and a recruiting tool for fanatic killers – but the still photos have a concern with artistry and technical virtuosity that give them the aura of a horrific ballet.

The mixture of art and propaganda did not begin with ISIS. Critics called the pathologically dishonest Nazi filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl, “an artist of unparalleled gifts” who made “the two greatest films ever directed by a woman.” And D.W. Griffith, whom Charlie Chaplin called “the teacher of us all,” was lionized for The Birth of a Nation, which became a recruiting tool for the Ku Klux Klan during a time of widespread lynching in the South. But what "artist" could have made this slick documentary that celebrates the beheading of 21 innocent men in orange jump suits?

“We Are at War”

A friend, whom I have come to know solely through this blog, sent me a video of French Prime Minister Manuel Valls’ speech to the National Assembly after the Charlie Hebdo attack. Valls spoke with a clarity of language – and of purpose – that penetrated even my sorry French. Both have been too-often absent in our own leaders. “We are at war,” he said, against radical Islamic jihad. We are not at war against any religion, but against terrorism.

Surely, he is right. If we didn’t believe so yesterday, we must believe today, after the unspeakable immolation of the young Jordanian pilot.

Valls spoke with resolve. France has accepted the reality of this war; it has not launched its own. This is not Bush’s “global war on terror,” with its indiscriminate bombings, invasions and torture. In this war, Valls said, we do not jettison our values, we assert them. “There is a fundamental difference between democracy and terrorism.”

Finally, he spoke of inclusion to a deeply divided nation. We have suffered an attack on our people, he said, all our people – and on our values, “liberty, equality, fraternity.” Not all French people accept those values, and France doesn’t always live up to them. But Valls took the moment to reaffirm them.

A speech is only words. But words matter. They call us to our ideals, even as they reveal our continuing distance from their reality. And they call us together.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident . . .”

The Pilot

Perhaps no image from 2014 seared itself into my mind so forcefully as the face of the young Jordanian pilot being taken into captivity by ISIS fighters. He looks traumatized, terrified and very young. He has not been heard from since. First Lt. Moaz al-Kasasbeh is a soldier, a warrior, trained for war. Yet he’s hardly more than a boy, 26, younger than my youngest son. His training had stressed that capture – that torture – was possible. But he could not have been prepared for this. He was married in July, a proud, handsome young pilot, now paraded before the world without his pants. His is the face of war, as much as are those of his hooded captors. And this is what war does. It devours our young.

If ever there were a just war – by which I mean a war waged to stop a greater evil such as genocide, slavery or conquest – the fight against ISIS seems to meet its definition. But too often a just war morphs into a holy war, waged to impose a particular set of beliefs on others. Even now the lieutenant’s family appeals “to the jihadists to welcome him as a fellow Muslim.” I would do anything to save my family, but Kasasbeh’s fate should be a matter of his humanity, not his religion.

The Glories of War

I had just finished Elizabeth Samet's thought-provoking article, “When is War Over?”, when I learned that Chuck Hagel had resigned under pressure. A Vietnam veteran, Hagel is the only former enlisted man ever to serve as Secretary of Defense. He leaves amid questions about his ability to manage America’s endless war – even as President Obama was once again extending the exit date for American forces from Afghanistan, the longest war in American history. Samet is a professor of English at West Point, and she poses her question through the unusual prism of a course on world literature. It’s reassuring, in an age when the humanities have been deemed irrelevant, that our future military leaders continue to study them.

Samet focuses on Alexander the Great’s 13-year military campaign, which ended with his death at the age of 32. He assured those soldiers who balked at spending all their lives at war that “it is sweet to live bravely and die leaving behind an immortal fame.”

The only person who gained immortal fame from those interminable wars, of course, was the young emperor, and while his troops – and their victims – lived short, hard lives, the exploits of Alexander continue to nourish the glories of war two millennia later.

Chuck Hagel, whatever his shortcomings at the Pentagon, understood war from its underside – as did Coenus, a loyal Macedonian who dared tell Alexander, “If there is one thing above all others a successful man should know, it is when to stop.”

“My Name is Ozymandias, King of Kings”

Calling ISIS a "greater threat than we've seen before," Prime Minister David Cameron raised Britain’s terror level on Friday from “substantial” to “severe.” "The root cause of this threat,” he said, “[is] a poisonous ideology of Islamist extremism that is condemned by all faiths and faith leaders. It believes in using the most brutal form of terrorism to force people to accept a warped world view and to live in an almost medieval state.”

The march of ISIS across Mesopotamia, with its calculated public viciousness and its appalling human suffering, is unbearable to watch.

And yet, as others point out, ISIS is not just a terrorist organization. It has acquired territory, governs an (unrecognized) state and seeks to impose its ideology on the world. There is a word for this – imperialism – which is neither new nor Islamic. It’s what the Romans and – a millennium later – the Roman church did. It was the aim of both Stalin’s Soviet policy and Putin’s Russian expansionism. It propelled Hitler’s “Lebensraum” and Japanese militarism. Lenin called it the Highest Stage of Capitalism, and it was embedded in our own “manifest destiny,” as those in its way well understood. And who should know more about imperialism than Great Britain, which established, with staggering cruelty, an empire on which the sun never set?

It drives the ruthless, in the name of some greater go(o)d, while the rest of us hope only to live our short time here in peace.

One Hundred Years Ago

I have an old friend, now dead, whose father was a young lieutenant in Britain’s Coldstream Guards 100 years ago. Years later he described flying to North Africa soon after the war had ended; and as his plane crossed low over Belgium and France, he saw that it took only minutes to fly over trenches that had so recently seemed a universe of mud, stench and death. He was stunned by the mindlessness of it all. In early August 1914, the Great War began, as all wars do, with patriotic pomp and the chest pounding of national leaders. This war will be short, they assured their people, and it will end in a decisive victory by the forces of good. Only then will we have peace and prosperity. The virtuous enthusiasm spread to millions of young men, eager for valor. Four years later over 37 million people were dead. A century later no one is quite sure why.

This was “the war to end war,” wrote H.G. Wells, the war, Woodrow Wilson assured us, that would "make the world safe for democracy." Less than three decades later, 80 million people died in the Good War, and across the arc of the 20^th century, writes Milton Leitenberg in Deaths in Wars and Conflicts in the 20^th Century, “231 million people died in wars and human conflict.”

When numbers get so large, they lose all meaning. As we grow numb to them, we choose to forget that each of those who died was not a statistic.

The One-Eyed Soldier

In his 1938 novel, Johnny Got His Gun, Dalton Trumbo communicates the horrible realities of war through the mind of a young soldier who wakes up in a hospital, his body literally obliterated by an artillery shell. In “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda,” Eric Bogle sings of a young Australian who returns legless from Gallipoli, as a searing criticism of those who glorify war. In his State of the Union address, President Obama used Sergeant First Class Cory Remsburg for the longest – and almost the only – bipartisan applause line of the evening. My heart goes out to SFC Remsburg, an Army Ranger who was blown to pieces by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan and who continues his long, courageous and painful struggle to recover. We should all stand for him. But we should also ask, what exactly is it we were applauding? Remsburg was wounded during his 10^th mission to Iraq and Afghanistan, which tells you all you need to know about our nation’s shared sacrifice in the war on terror. (Not to be outdone, Republican Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers’s response melded “the boundless opportunity that lies ahead” with the recent death of Sgt. Joseph Hess of Spokane.)

Trumbo’s hero wanted to tour America in a glass box to make people see what really happens in war. It is not enough that we give SFC Remsburg a two-minute standing ovation and then go home to bed, reinvigorated in our patriotism. We should walk in his shoes.

Peace on Earth

Ninety-nine years ago, in history’s most famous and curious soccer game, German soldiers beat their British counterparts 3-2 between the icy trenches of Flanders. World War I was barely five months old when a Christmas Truce spontaneously broke out along parts of the western front. Featuring carol singing and the intermingling of troops in “no man’s land”, the lull appears to have been entirely the initiative of young enlisted men. By Dec. 27^th each side was back in its own trenches trying to annihilate the other. Infuriated high commands ensured such fraternization would never happen again, nationalist propaganda machines set out to dehumanize an enemy who lived only yards away, and Europeans killed each other by the millions in history’s most senseless war. I thought of this story driving home from dropping my son at the airport, listening to news that told of nothing but war and violence: South Sudan, Thailand, Beirut. And yet, I read that the world has never been more peaceful, that statistically, the violence we commit against each other continues its centuries-long decline. How do we square that with the news – and with the foreboding we feel, even in our own relative safety? Is humanity's natural state that of war or community? Part of the answer lies in the trenches. Those in them stopped to celebrate Christmas. Those behind them insisted on war. “I'm fed up with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in,” said George McGovern.

We need to choose peace.

Millennial Thinking

“Jamie, assuming that you do another piece on the Syria bombing, you might want to consider the fact that this will be the first time in the history of the U.S. House of Representatives that the RAPTURE will be a significant if unstated force in favor of passage.” The Rapture is the evangelical belief that the elect will be swept up into the clouds to meet Jesus when he returns to dispense ultimate justice to the rest of us. It was brought to prominence in the New World by Increase and Cotton Mather, the father-and-son team of 17^th-century Puritan divines who were the driving force behind the Salem Witch Trials. When you have no doubt of your own righteousness, you have little fear of Judgment Day.

Remember, in the wake of 9/11 and the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions that followed, how horrified we were by the epidemic of suicide bombings that killed thousands of innocent people? Who could do such a thing, we asked? Only zealots, we were told, young men (mostly) who had been drugged or blackmailed or, above all, promised a paradise filled with dark-eyed virgins just for them. Such fanaticism, we were assured, is the foundation of radical Islam. This is not a clash of civilizations. We are engaged in a war between civilization and barbarism.

For those who are convinced of their place in heaven, the fate of the earth becomes less important. We should beware of going to war for those who eagerly anticipate Armageddon.

War Crimes

Did U. S. Forces commit war crimes in Vietnam? And 50 years later, does it matter? In his relentless new book, Kill Anything that Moves, Nick Turse argues that the infamous slaughter of 500 unarmed women, children and the elderly at My Lai in March 1968 was not a rogue action that went out of control, but the inevitable result of a policy that came from the top and was intended to “produce a veritable system of suffering.” Turse methodically traces that suffering, and its cover-up, in long-secret files that document atrocities committed in pursuit of the “body count,” a policy that equated military progress with dead bodies. The grossly misleading numbers, which appeared nightly on American television screens in the 1960s, were themselves a result of the “mere gook rule” or MGR, which encouraged killing Vietnamese people with impunity.

What’s missing in Turse’s chilling history is the context in which U.S. troops lived and fought in a landscape filled with constant misery and omnipresent danger against a hardened and largely invisible enemy who didn’t play by the rules of Nuremburg either – a war brought searingly to life by Philip Caputo in A Rumor of War and Michael Herr in Dispatches.

War crimes were committed in Vietnam, as they are in all wars, by people who were trained to dehumanize others and in the process became dehumanized themselves. We cannot justify those crimes; but we must ask why we believe that something as horrific as war can be played by a set of civilized rules.

Cutting the Grass

The inevitable happened again again last week: Hamas began launching missiles into southern Israel; and the Israelis unleashed a furious response that produced hundreds of Palestinian casualties for that of each Israeli. Images of dead children, wounded non-combatants, and physical carnage filled the world’s newspapers, as the great powers called for a ceasefire and the proxy fighters dug in for more. One reason the almost-seven-decade war in the Middle East seems so insoluble, at least to me, is that the combatants are in so many respects mirror images of each other. Israelis and Palestinians are fighting for their survival and for what each insists is its homeland. Each carries deep wounds from their histories of unspeakable mistreatment, including genocide and forced Diasporas. Each has a collective story, forged over time, that insists on a right of return. Yet that story insists that the legitimacy of one negates the legitimacy of the other.

Each insists it is fighting a just war, which vindicates the use of horrendous practices in its pursuit. The Palestinians fire rockets indiscriminately into Israel. The Israelis respond with a disproportionate ferocity that, despite their sophisticated weaponry, kills hundreds of non-combatants. They call their tactic of periodically decapitating the Hamas infrastructure “cutting the grass.”

This is a war of missiles and bullets, blood and death. But it is also a war of the language of justification, which goes back at least to St. Augustine and which has rendered creative thinking impossible. Tomorrow I want to ask if it is logically possible for both sides to be fighting a “just war?”