War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning - Chris Hedges [37]
The men in the battalion, aged thirty-seven to forty-two, were not elite troops. They were not highly trained nor had they been specially picked for the job. They were of middle- or lower-class origin. And their behavior, given the savagery of modern warfare, has been widely replicated. There are no shortages of former soldiers and militiamen in Algeria, Argentina, Rwanda, El Salvador, Iraq, or Bosnia who have done the same. There are always people willing to commit unspeakable human atrocity in exchange for a little power and privilege.
The task of carrying out violence, of killing, leads to perversion. The seductiveness of violence, the fascination with the grotesque—the Bible calls it “the lust of the eye”—the god-like empowerment over other human lives and the drug of war combine, like the ecstasy of erotic love, to let our senses command our bodies. Killing unleashes within us dark undercurrents that see us desecrate and whip ourselves into greater orgies of destruction. The dead, treated with respect in peacetime, are abused in wartime. They become pieces of performance art. Corpses were impaled in Bosnia on the sides of barn doors, decapitated, or draped like discarded clothing over fences. They were dumped into rivers, burned alive in homes, herded into warehouses and shot and mutilated, or left on roadsides. Children could pass them on the street, gape at them and walk on.
There are few anti-war movies or novels that successfully portray war, for amidst the horror is also the seduction of the machine of war, all-powerful, all-absorbing. Most of the effective anti-war novels—such as Elsa Morante’s History: A Novel—focus on the effects of war, on those who bear the brunt of war’s brutality. Morante, who spent a year hiding among remote farming villages south of Rome at the end of World War II, set out to write a novel about those whom history ignores and forgets. Her world was that of victims. It is was a world not of heroics and glory but of rape, bombing raids, crime, cattle cars filled with human beings being taken to slaughter, soldiers dying of frostbite, and the fear of secret police and the military. In her world, no one had control.6
Pity is often banished in war. And the desperate struggle of the weak to survive, so fundamental to what war is about, rarely seems able to achieve the centrality it deserves.
Following the Gulf War, during the Shiite uprising in Basra, I was captured by the Iraqi Republican Guard. The soldiers threw me onto the floor in the back of my jeep, pressed the barrel of an AK–47 assault rifle to my forehead, and drove into the desert. They stripped me of my M–65 jacket, useful to them in the cold desert night. In the pocket were three books: Antony and Cleopatra, The Iliad, and Joseph Conrad’s Outcast of the Islands. I was bereft of reading material, left to cling to those lines of Shakespeare and poems by W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, and William Butler Yeats I had memorized in my youth. Over and over during my captivity I pieced them back together, phrase by phrase, line by line, resurrecting passages uttered over a decade before as a student actor, along with poems that constant repetition had made a part of me.
In the misery of the fighting—our small convoy was heavily ambushed on the second day, sixty miles north of Basra—and gnawing uncertainty, these passages at once consoled, pained, and protected me, often from myself.
One afternoon, in the driving rain, I was seated in a Pajero jeep, hot-wired and stolen by my Iraqi captors during the frantic flight from Kuwait City. We