War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning

by Chris Hedges

  In war, death is often anonymous. When it is impossible to find out whether someone is dead or alive there is no closure, no way to fix the end of a life with a time and a place. The atrocity is compounded by the atrocity committed against memory. The lack of closure tortures and deforms those who wait for an answer. This sacrilege against memory gnaws at survivors. Regimes use murder and anonymous death to keep their citizens off balance, agitated, and disturbed. It fuels war’s collective insanity. But it must be rectified if healing is to take place.

  The misery often spawns predators. Families in Iraq pay huge bribes to find out whether relatives are dead or alive. Occultists promise to put people in touch with those who are missing, often stringing families along for weeks as they pass on supposed messages from prisons, mines, or work camps. I have sat in on such encounters in El Salvador and Algeria, watching as tearful women struggle to believe that they are communicating with missing sons or husbands. These women, repeatedly rebuffed by the security forces and government bureaucrats, find comfort in mediums, although most realize after a few months that they have been had. Memory, even manufactured memory, seems better for a while than silence. Hope, however farfetched, is prolonged. But the ache over the missing eventually evolves into a single need—the recovery of the body.

  A film by the French director Bertrand Tavernier, Life and Nothing But (1989), captured this need, with two women combing the remains of an old battlefield, looking for the same corpse. The Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman touched on the same theme in his novel Widows. He wrote of a village in Greece during World War II where a body is discovered washed up on a riverbank. It is battered beyond recognition. An elderly peasant woman, who has lost her two sons, her husband, and her father, claims the body and refuses to give it to the authorities. Soon thirty-seven women who have lost relatives also claim the body, setting off a struggle over the corpse and the military dictatorship that thought it could erase history.2

  The violence of war is random. It does not make sense. And many of those who struggle with loss also struggle with the knowledge that the loss was futile and unnecessary. This leaves psychological wounds among survivors as well as veterans. Many of the soldiers who fought in Vietnam must grapple with the realization that there was no higher purpose to the war, that the sacrifice was a waste. It is easier to believe the myth that makes such loss noble and necessary, despite the glaring contradictions.

  In Argentina in the 1970s and 1980s most of the 20,000 “disappeared” in the Dirty War were not armed radicals but labor leaders, community organizers, leftist intellectuals, and student organizers. Few of them had any connection to guerrilla campaigns. Indeed, by the time of the 1976 Argentine coup the armed guerrilla movements, such as the Montoneros, had largely been wiped out. They had never been a threat to the state, but the abductions spawned a vast underground prison system that soon existed mostly to extort money from the victims’ families.

  In Marguerite Feitlowitz’s The Lexicon of Terror, she writes of the experiences of one Argentine prisoner, a physicist named Mario Villani.3 The collapse of the moral universe of the torturers is displayed when, in between torture sessions, the guards take Villani and a few pregnant women prisoners to an amusement park. They make them ride the kiddie train. A guard, whose nom de guerre is Blood, brings his six- or seven-year-old daughter into the camp to meet Villani. Villani runs into one of his principal torturers a few years later, a man known in the camps as Julian the Turk. Julian recommends that Villani go see another of his former prisoners to ask for a job.

  Julian the Turk was free because military pressure put a stop to the post-junta trials. After the convictions of five of the nine commanders, repeated military uprisings persuaded President Raúl Alfonsin to propose laws setting a time limit on prosecutions and exempting all men below a certain rank from any prosecution. The Argentine congress quickly passed both laws. Alfonsin’s successor, Carlos Saúl Menem, then pardoned the commanders who had been convicted, along with several dozen other prisoners. In neighboring Chile, General Augusto Pinochet sits protected in his lifetime Senate seat, immune from prosecution.

  Until the lie is discredited and history is recovered, societies continue to speak in euphemisms. They use words to mask reality. It was the Argentine junta that gave us words like desaparecido (disappeared person, almost always a euphemism for someone who had been secretly executed), chupado (sucked up, or kidnapped) and trasladar (transfer, a euphemism for take away to be killed). Terms like these blunt the campaign of terror. On the battlefield it is much the same. Soldiers get “waxed” rather than killed. Victims who are burned to death are “toasted.”

  The Soviet writer Vasily Grossman’s novel Life and Fate was about the fight to remember and defeat anonymous death. The mother in the novel, based on Grossman’s own mother, was massacred along with 30,000 other people, most of them Jews, by the Nazis in his native town of Berdichev in Ukraine during World War II. In one chapter he wrote the letter he believed his mother would have written to him before she was executed, a final message to her only child. The letter revealed the gaping wound that Grossman, who was unable to communicate with his mother before her execution, must have endured.

  Describing neighbors who, given license by the Nazi occupiers, have turned her into a pariah, the mother wrote dispassionately “I really don’t know which is worse,” she said, “gloating spite, or these pitying glances like people cast at a mangy, half-dead cat.”

  Then she wrote: “But now I’ve seen that the people who shout most loudly about delivering Russia from the Jews are the very ones who cringe like lackeys before the Germans, ready to betray their country for 30 pieces of German silver. And strange people from the outskirts of town seize our rooms, our blankets, our clothes. It must have been people like them who killed doctors at the time of the cholera riots. And then there are people whose souls have just withered, people who are ready to go along with anything evil—anything so as not to be suspected of disagreeing with whoever’s in power.”4

  When Life and Fate was completed in i960, four years before Grossman died, the K.G.B. seized the manuscript. He was never allowed to publish again.

  It is rare that we are able to expose the crimes of a regime while it is still in power. This is usually part of the long recovery process once the killers have been ousted. But in Iraq we had the unique opportunity to peer inside the guts of Saddam Hussein’s regime and confront a regime with its crimes.

  After the Gulf War, the Kurds in northern Iraq were given a safe area that was under the protection of NATO warplanes. With the Iraqi military gone from the area, it became possible to investigate the crimes of Saddam Hussein’s regime even as he remained in power. Mass graves, torture chambers, elaborate prison systems, and secret police files attested to the inner workings of one of the region’s harshest dictatorships. Gravesites regularly contained hundreds of bodies of men, women, and children. I stood one afternoon as diggers uncovered the remains of 1,500 soldiers who had apparently been executed after refusing to fight in the war during the 1980s against Iran. Until the bodies were identified, the dead had “disappeared.”

  Kurdish leaders estimated that more than 180,000 Kurds had vanished at the hands of the Iraqi secret police. The Iraqis killed anyone, including young children, whom they believed supported the outlawed Kurdish guerrilla movement or belonged to a family that had ties with the Kurdish rebels. More than 4,000 villages—primarily those near the Turkish or Iranian borders that were regarded by the Iraqis as sanctuaries for Kurdish rebels—were demolished under the program, which reached its peak of intensity in 1987 and 1988, toward the end of the Iran-Iraq war.

  The killing sites are often found a few feet from the mass graves. On Kalowa Hill, five tires filled with cement were all that remained of the spot where many people were shot to death. Earthen embankments bordered the site. Prisoners, blindfolded with their hands tied behind ten-foot metal poles, had their feet planted in the cement and were shot.

  Of
course those who lived nearby knew that something was happening. When I spoke with those in the vicinity of Kalowa Hill, they said they often heard screams and volleys of shots, but were threatened if they tried to peer into the high-walled compound. Stray dogs used to trot back with human bones or a fleshy limb, after getting inside the compound. The Iraqi guards began to shoot the dogs.

  At Kalowa Hill I stood with my seven bodyguards. The Iraqi regime had put a price on the heads of all foreigners who worked in the Kurdish-controlled areas. Several had been shot and killed, including a German photographer I worked with. We watched a Kurdish woman, Pershan Hassan, clamber quickly up the dirt track leading to the site. As she hurried forward, she clutched to her chest a framed black and white photograph of a young boy. At the top of the rise, a crowd that had gathered parted silently as she stumbled forward.

  She suddenly stopped and let out a gasp of pain and recognition. Before her, nine years after he had disappeared from a schoolyard, lay the skeletal remains of her thirteen-year-old son, Shafiq. A faded blue blindfold was tightly wrapped around his skull and spent bullets were scattered among his now dark-brown bones.

  “I know him by his clothes,” she whispered, her voice breaking as she lifted the garments and kissed them. “I raised him without a father.”

  In all such scenes there is grief. But there is also a palpable sense of relief. The lost son or husband is recovered. The salutary effect makes it possible to go forward in life. It took the efforts of Iraq’s leading dissident, Kanan Makiya and Human Rights Watch, to make sure that truckloads of documents, including photographs and videotapes of executions, were transported out of northern Iraq to safety.

  I leafed through the long, typewritten lists that were in abandoned secret police headquarters that chronicled killing after killing, sometimes for what seemed to be trivial offenses. One man was sentenced to death because he had a picture of a rebel Kurdish leader in his wallet.

  A picture I found in a police file showed what appeared to be three Iraqi officials squatting like big game hunters next to the slumped body of a man who was recently killed. One of the Iraqis, wearing a beret, grinned while holding a knife to the corpse’s neck. It was, once again, the strange need by killers to display human corpses as trophies.

  I watched hours of videotapes shot by the Iraqi secret police of their own executions. Prisoners would be tied to poles, riddled with gunfire, and left slumped on the ground. There was a deadening sameness to it all and a strange and sickening fascination. The recording of such acts came out of a collapse of the moral universe, a world where right and wrong had been turned upside down. In the world of war, perversion may become moral; guilt may be honor, and the gunning down of unarmed people, including children, may be defined as heroic. In this world the “liquidation” of the enemy, with the enemy defined as simply the other, is part of the redemption of the nation.

  The hill in northern Iraq began to draw hundreds of Kurdish women looking for lost children or husbands. The plaintive cries of those who recovered the remains of their loved ones would rise above the murmur of the crowd. Most, however, watched mutely day after day.

  And circling the huge pit, a pit hacked at by men with shovels and pickaxes, were the gaunt survivors of the vast secret police prison network. They spoke of torture, beatings, hunger, and the long severance, sometimes for years, of all contact with the outside world.

  A few weeks later, I traveled to Shorish, a suburb of Sulaimaniya, with Jamal Aziz Amin, a courtly forty-five-year-old headmaster. We entered a soundproofed room in the darkened remains of the Sulaimaniya central security prison, where he spent a year in detention. Large hooks hung from the ceiling where Amin, an Iraqi Kurd, was suspended during torture. He was handcuffed behind his back, he said, and hoisted onto the hooks at the wrist. He said he was stripped, questioned about his ties to Kurdish guerrilla groups, and given electric shocks until he fell unconscious.

  “You would scream,” he told me, “and it would sound as if you were yelling from the bottom of a deep, deep well.”

  The huge prison, its tiers of cells piled one on top of the other, stood bleak and deserted. When it was attacked in 1991 by Kurdish fighters and enraged civilians, 300 Iraqi secret policemen and guards, including the warden, held out for three days. None of the defenders survived.

  Amin and his fellow Kurdish prisoners, after the attack, had the rare experience of standing over the bodies of many of their torturers.

  “We wanted them to all come back to life,” he said, “so we could kill them again.”

  At the prison, inmates subsisted on thin soup, bread, and weak tea. Amin said that by the time he was released, he had lost sixty pounds. The walls of the cells, many marked with crudely drawn calendars, carried the messages of those who tried to leave some testament, some record of their suffering.

  “These were my friends, arrested with me,” a prisoner named Ahmed Mohammed wrote, listing five names. “All were executed.”

  Another prisoner had written a message to his mother: “Oh, mother, in this dark room my dreams trouble me and I shake. Then comes the kicking against my door and a voice telling me to get up. It is time for my interrogation. I awake to the unconscious.” Amin wound his way to the crude latrine, a hole in the cement, at the end of a corridor of cells.

  “I wanted to show you this,” he said, a small shaft of light streaming in from a tiny, barred window fourteen feet above him. “Here is where we would come at night so we could pull ourselves up the walls to hear the sound of the dogs barking in the distance. To hear the dogs, this was everything for us.”

  Historical memory is hijacked by those who carry out war. They seek, when the memory challenges the myth, to obliterate or hide the evidence that exposes the myth as lie. The destruction is pervasive, aided by an establishment, including the media, which apes the slogans and euphemisms parroted by the powerful. Because nearly everyone in wartime is complicit, it is difficult for societies to confront their own culpability and the lie that led to it.

  But societies that do not confront the past remain trapped in an Oz-like world, a world whose most important truths are felt—then repressed—every day, a world where official lies are perpetuated by a vast bureaucracy. For the rift between Trieste’s Slovene and Italian communities to be healed, the graves outside the city will have to be exhumed. The commissions set up in Chile, Argentina, and Brazil, as well as the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague, were created to give these nations a common vocabulary. Until then the factions will not communicate.

  There probably can never be full recovery of memory, but in order to escape the miasma of war there must be some partial rehabilitation, some recognition of the denial and perversion, some new way given to speak that lays bare the myth as fantasy and the cause as bankrupt. The whole truth may finally be too hard to utter, but the process of healing only begins when we are able to at least acknowledge the tragedy and accept our share of the blame.

  6

  THE CAUSE

  . . . all my means are sane, my motive and my object mad.

  •

  CAPTAIN AHAB IN Moby Dick

  WHEN I STEPPED OFF AN ARMY C-I30 MILITARY transport in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, to cover the Persian Gulf War, I was escorted to a room with several dozen other reporters and photographers. I was told to sign a paper that said I would abide by the severe restrictions placed on the press by the U.S. military. The restrictions authorized “pool reporters” to be escorted by the military on field trips. The rest of the press would sit in hotel rooms and rewrite the bland copy filed by the pool or use the pool video and photos. This was an agreement I violated the next morning, when I went into the field without authorization. The rest of the war, during which I spent more than half my time dodging military police and trying to talk my way into units, was a forlorn and lonely struggle against the heavy press control.

  The Gulf War made war fashionable again. It was a cause the nation willingly embraced. It gave us medi
a-manufactured heroes and a heady pride in our military superiority and technology. It made war fun. And the blame, as in many conflicts, lay not with the military but the press. Television reporters happily disseminated the spoon-fed images that served the propaganda effort of the military and the state. These images did little to convey the reality of war. Pool reporters, those guided around in groups by the military, wrote about “our boys” eating packaged army food, practicing for chemical weapons attacks, and bathing out of buckets in the desert. It was war as spectacle, war as entertainment. The images and stories were designed to make us feel good about our nation, about ourselves. The Iraqi families and soldiers being blown to bits by huge iron fragmentation bombs just over the border in Iraq were faceless and nameless phantoms.

  The notion that the press was used in the war is incorrect. The press wanted to be used. It saw itself as part of the war effort. Most reporters sent to cover a war don’t really want to go near the fighting. They do not tell this to their editors and indeed will moan and complain about restrictions. The handful who actually head out into the field have a bitter enmity with the hotel-room warriors. But even those who do go out are guilty of distortion. For we not only believe the myth of war and feed recklessly off of the drug but also embrace the cause. We may do it with more skepticism. We certainly expose more lies and misconceptions. But we believe. We all believe. When you stop believing you stop going to war.

  The record of the press as mythmaker stretches at least from William Howard Russell’s romantic account of the 1854 charge of the Light Brigade—he called the event “the pride and splendour of war”—to Afghanistan after September 11, 2001. The true victims of war, because we rarely see or hear them (as is usual in most war reporting), faintly exist. I boycotted the pool system, but my reports did not puncture the myth or question the grand crusade to free Kuwait. I allowed soldiers to grumble. I shed a little light on the lies spread to make the war look like a coalition, but I did not challenge in any real way the patriotism and jingoism that enthused the crowds back home. We all used the same phrases. We all looked at Iraq through the same lens. And at night, when the huge bombers dropped tons of high explosives on Iraqi positions, lighting up the night sky with red fireballs, I felt immeasurable reassurance along with the soldiers.