War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning - Chris Hedges [72]
Viktor Frankl, in Man’s Search for Meaning, writes of the grim battle between love and Thanatos in Auschwitz. He recalls being on a work detail, freezing in the blast of the Polish winter, when he began to think about his wife, who had already been gassed, although he did not know this at the time.
A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth—that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.9
The Thanatos instinct is a drive toward suicide, individual and collective. War celebrates only power—and we come to believe in wartime that it is the only real form of power. It preys on our most primal and savage impulses. It allows us to do what peacetime society forbids or restrains us from doing. It allows us to kill. However much soldiers regret killing once it is finished, however much they spend their lives trying to cope with the experience, the act itself, fueled by fear, excitement, the pull of the crowd, and the god-like exhilaration of destroying, is often thrilling.
I have watched fighters in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, the Sudan, the Punjab, Iraq, Bosnia, and Kosovo enter villages, tense, exhausted, wary of ambushes, with the fear and tension that comes from combat, and begin to shoot at random. Flames soon lick up from houses. Discipline, if there was any, disintegrates. Items are looted, civilians are battered with rifle butts, units fall apart, and the violence directed toward unarmed men, women, and children grows as it feeds on itself. The eyes of the soldiers who carry this orgy of death are crazed. They speak only in guttural shouts. They are high on the power to spare lives or take them, the divine power to destroy. And they are indeed, for a moment, gods swatting down powerless human beings like flies. The lust for violence, the freedom to eradicate the world around them, even human lives, is seductive. And the line that divides us, who would like to see ourselves as civilized and compassionate, from such communal barbarity is razor-thin. In wartime it often seems to matter little where one came from or how well-schooled and moral one was before the war began. The frenzy of the crowd is overpowering.
Bob Kerrey, a former United States senator who won the Medal of Honor for his military service in Vietnam, once led a combat mission that caused the deaths of thirteen to twenty unarmed civilians, most of them women and children. When this story was first revealed in the spring of 2001, there was, among an unknowing public, an expression of shock and an effort to explain such behavior. But the revelation was, rather than an anomaly, an example of how most wars are fought. It was a glimpse into the reality of war that many in the public, anxious not to see war’s sordid nature, worked hard to shut. Kerrey, in a speech at the Virginia Military Institute soon after the incident was made public, said: “I have been haunted by it for thirty-two years.”
The raid, which took place in 1969, saw Kerrey, then a twenty-five-year-old lieutenant who had arrived in Vietnam a month earlier, lead a group of six Navy Seals—the informal name for Sea-Air-Land units—behind enemy lines. They hoped to capture a Vietcong leader who was reported to be holding a meeting that