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By Root 852 0

tragic, wasteful, and immoral. War as an instrument of change is brutal, savage, impersonal and counterproductive. It mocks the fantasy of individual heroism and the absurdity of utopian goals, such as the imposition of Western-style democracy or the liberation of women. In an instant, industrial warfare can kill dozens, even hundreds of people, who never see their attackers. The power of industrial weapons is indiscriminate and staggering. They can take down apartment blocks in seconds, burying and crushing everyone inside. They can demolish villages and send tanks, planes, and ships up in fiery blasts. The wounds, for those who survive, result in terrible burns, blindness, amputation, and lifelong pain and trauma. No one returns the same from such warfare. And once these weapons are employed, all talk of human rights is a farce. The explosive blasts of these weapons systems, for those of us who have witnessed them at work, inevitably kill and maim civilians, including children.

In Peter van Agtmael’s 2nd Tour, Hope I Don’t Die and Lori Grinker’s Afterwar: Veterans from a World in Conflict, two haunting books of war photographs, we see pictures of war which are almost always hidden from public view. They are shadows, for only those who go to and suffer from war can fully confront the visceral horror of it, but the books are at least an attempt to unmask war’s savagery.

“Over ninety percent of this soldier’s body was burned when a roadside bomb hit his vehicle, igniting the fuel tank and burning two other soldiers to death,” reads a caption in van Agtmael’s book. The photograph shows the bloodied body of a soldier in an operating room:His camouflage uniform dangled over the bed, ripped open by the medics who had treated him on the helicopter. Clumps of his skin had peeled away, and what was left of it was translucent. He was in and out of consciousness, his eyes stabbing open for a few seconds. As he was lifted from the stretcher to the ER bed, he screamed “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy,” then “Put me to sleep, please put me to sleep.” There was another photographer in the ER, and he leaned his camera over the heads of the medical staff to get an overhead shot. The soldier yelled, “Get that fucking camera out of my face.”

“Those were his last words. I visited his grave one winter afternoon six months later,” van Agtmael writes, “and the scene of his death is never far from my thoughts.”27

“There were three of us inside, and the jeep caught fire,” Israeli soldier Yossi Arditi says in Grinker’s book. He is describing the moment a Molotov cocktail exploded in his vehicle. “The fuel tank was full and it was about to explode, my skin was hanging from my arms and face—but I didn’t lose my head. I knew nobody could get inside to help me, that my only way out was through the fire to the doors. I wanted to take my gun, but I couldn’t touch it because my hands were burning.”

Arditi spent six months in the hospital. He had surgery every two or three months, about twenty operations, over the next three years.

“People who see me, see what war really does,” he says.28

Filmic and most photographic images of war are shorn of the heart-pounding fear, awful stench, deafening noise, screams of pain, and exhaustion of the battlefield. Such images turn confusion and chaos, the chief elements of combat, into an artful war narrative. They turn war into porn. Soldiers and Marines, especially those who have never seen war, buy cases of beer and watch movies like Platoon, movies meant to denounce war, and as they do, they revel in the destructive power of weaponry. The reality of violence is different. Everything formed by violence is senseless and useless. It exists without a future. It leaves behind nothing but death, grief, and destruction.

Chronicles of war that eschew images and scenes of combat begin to capture war’s reality. War’s effects are what the state and the media, the handmaidens of the war-makers, work hard to keep hidden. If we really saw war, what war does to young minds and bodies, it would be impossible