by Chris Hedges
“I, too, belong to this species,” J. Glenn Gray wrote. “I am ashamed not only of my own deeds, not only of my nation’s deeds, but of human deeds as well. I am ashamed to be a man.”13
When Ernie Pyle, the American war correspondent in World War II, was killed on the Pacific island of Ie Shima in 1945, a rough draft of a column was found on his body. He was preparing it for release upon the end of the war in Europe. He had done much to promote the myth of the warrior and the heroism of soldiering, but by the end he seemed to tire of it all.
But there are many of the living who have had burned into their brains forever the unnatural sight of cold dead men scattered over the hillsides and in the ditches along the high rows of hedge throughout the world.
Dead men by mass production—in one country after another—month after month and year after year. Dead men in winter and dead men in summer.
Dead men in such familiar promiscuity that they become monotonous.
Dead men in such monstrous infinity that you come almost to hate them. These are the things that you at home need not even try to understand. To you at home they are columns of figures, or he is a near one who went away and just didn’t come back. You didn’t see him lying so grotesque and pasty beside the gravel road in France.
We saw him, saw him by the multiple thousands. That’s the difference.14
Discarded veterans are never a pretty sight. They are troubled and some physically maimed. They often feel betrayed, misunderstood and alone. It is hard to integrate again into peacetime society. Many are shunted aside, left to nuture their resentment and pain.
I found Kazem Ahangaron in Naushahr, on Iran’s Caspian coast, not long after the end of the eight-year war with Iraq. He was once a disciple of war. But the violence he turned on Iraqi soldiers he had turned against himself.
“I tried to do it with pills, Valium and depressants, mostly,” the gaunt twenty-eight-year-old veteran said, seated on a white pebble beach. “They pumped my stomach out at the hospital. But twelve of my friends have killed themselves this year.”
The Caspian resort city, skirted by jagged mountains and towering fir trees, was once the summer capital of the shah. Its faded yet elegant whitewashed villas belonged to the officials of the monarchy before the 1979 Islamic revolution.
When I visited the seedy remains of Naushahr it had one of the highest rates of suicides in Iran, most by unemployed and disillusioned veterans of the war with Iraq. Figures in Iran are hard to come by and often unreliable, but doctors in the city told me that there had been 400 suicides of the town’s 80,000 people in the past year. The men, out of work and alienated from the puritanical rule of the clerics, were unable to find a home or marry. They looked back on the raw carnage of the war with bitterness and ahead with despair. Drugs took the place of battle. Suicide took the place of heroic death.
Many of the suicides in Naushahr were caused by Phostoxin, small phosphate tablets known as “rice pills” that were used in granaries to kill insects. The tablets would paralyze the nervous system and send the young men into a coma. The city did not have a psychiatrist. Many rice merchants, in an effort to curb the suicides, had stopped selling the German-made tablets.
The Islamic clerics who took over Iran sought to reshape the country into a nation of devout Muslims. They spurned the decadence of the West, including what the clerics condemned as the West’s loose sexual mores, drug use, and thirst for sensual gratification.
Naushahr’s dance halls and bars had been turned over to shopkeepers or boarded over. The beaches were segregated by sex and patrolled by squads of morality police. At the crest of a hill, the lavish Chinese Horse casino, which once glittered through the night like a huge ocean liner, lay in rubble.
But rather than build a new generation of believers, the fundamentalist leaders created a generation of men who were alienated and infected with the hopeless despair of war and violence.
“Life has become a charade,” Ahangaron said. “We carry out one life in public and another in private.”
The war, once, captured their imaginations. But the years of slaughter had left them listless and addicted to hashish and opium. Many were volunteers who believed that they were not only defending their nation but helping to create a new society in the war with Iraq. The disillusionment was total.
“Iran’s best wrestlers come from Naushahr,” said Ramazan Gharib, a thirty-five-year-old veteran, “and the army recruiters, very cleverly, used this. When the war started we were all exhorted to show our strength, our manliness, and we went down to enlist.”
But the front lines, where Iranian units were butchered en masse as they tried to sweep in human waves across the mud flats, held little glory. And many who survived the war, which began in 1980 and ended in 1988, returned changed and unsettled by the senseless carnage.
The town’s leading cleric, Mohammed Masha Yekhi, had called on young people to choose life rather than suicide. He said he would not allow those who committed suicide a Muslim burial.
I sat one morning with two war veterans on the porch of a dilapidated villa overlooking the Caspian. The men, who fished and used their boats to take people water skiing, were slumped in wicker chairs drinking cups of sweet tea.
The two men told me that they had easy access to the drugs, homemade beer, and grain alcohol that was sold on the beach. They smuggled out tins of caviar from the state-run packaging plant and traded it with Russian sailors, anchored offshore, for vodka. For a price they guided couples to secluded beaches, where women could swim in bathing suits and embrace their boyfriends, activities the clerics had forbidden. The money they earned was swallowed by their addiction.
“I will never be normal again,” said one of the men, who spent twenty-three months at the front. “I am nervous. I can’t control my anger. If anything disturbs me, like a minor car accident, I explode.”
The second man, who was a lieutenant in the war, looked out over the water and said in a monotone, “My battalion was ordered across the flats early one morning. Within a couple of hours 400 soldiers were dead and hundreds more wounded. It was a stupid, useless waste. When we got back they called us traitors.”
In the shade of a stone wall, just in front of the villa, with its collection of drooping cots and dirty shag carpets, a young man, dressed in a black shirt and pants, stared blankly at the water.
“He comes here every day,” one of the veterans said. “He just finished his army service, but he has no job and nowhere to go. He smokes hash and watches the surf.”
The men said they lived on the margins of existence, sometimes sleeping under grass-roofed huts. The pittance the men earned, the psychological burdens they bore, and their inability to afford a place to live had crushed them.
“All we have left is the Sea,” a former officer said, “and the sea is what keeps us here. But then one day even the sea isn’t enough.”
As long as we think abstractly, as long as we find in patriotism and the exuberance of war our fulfillment, we will never understand those who do battle against us, or how we are perceived by them, or finally those who do battle for us and how we should respond to it all. We will never discover who we are. We will fail to confront the capacity we all have for violence. And we will court our own extermination. By accepting the facile cliché that the battle under way against terrorism is a battle against evil, by easily branding those who fight us as the barbarians, we, like them, refuse to acknowledge our own culpability. We ignore real injustices that have led many of those arrayed against us to their rage and despair.
Late one night, unable to sleep during the war in El Salvador, I picked up Shakespeare’s Macbeth. It was not a calculated decision. I had come that day from a village where about a dozen people had been murdered by the death squads, their thumbs tied behind their backs with wire and their throats slit.
I had read the play before, but in my other life as a student. A thirst for power at the cost of human life was no longer an abstraction to me. It w
as part of my universe.
I came upon Macduff’s wife’s speech made when the murderers, sent by Macbeth, arrive to kill her and her small children: “Whither should I fly?” she asks,
I have done no harm. But I remember now
I am in this earthly world—where to do harm
Is often laudable, to do good sometime
Accounted dangerous folly.15
Those words seized me like furies and cried out for the dead I had seen lined up that day in a dusty market square, the dead I have seen since, the dead, including the two thousand children who were killed in Sarajevo. The words cried out for those whom I would see later in unmarked mass graves in Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq, the Sudan, Algeria, El Salvador, the dead who are my own, who carried notebooks, cameras, and a vanquished idealism and sad addiction into war and never returned. Of course resistance is usually folly, of course power exercised with ruthlessness will win, of course force easily snuffs out gentle people, the compassionate, and the decent. A repentant Lear, who was unable to love because of his thirst for power and selfadulation acknowledges this in the final moments of the play.
Shakespeare celebrates, at his best, this magnificence of failure. When we view our lives honestly from the inside we are all failures, all sinners, all in need of forgiveness. Shakespeare lays bare the myths that blind and deform our souls. He understands that the world of the flesh and the world of the spirit are indivisible, that they coexist in a paradox, ever present.
Shakespeare reminds us that though we may not do what we want, we are responsible for our lives. It does not matter what has been made of us; what matters is what we ourselves make of what has been done to us.
I returned from the Balkans to America in the fall of 1998, to a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard, after fifteen years abroad mostly reporting wars. I no longer had the emotional and physical resilience of youth. The curator of the Nieman program, Bill Kovach, suggested that I see James O. Freedman, the former president of Dartmouth, for advice on how to spend the year. Freedman recommended the classics and urged me to take Greek or Latin.
I had studied Greek in seminary so I opted for Latin. Of course, there is nothing sacred, or necessarily redeeming, about ancient texts. The German and Italian fascists used and misused classical literature, especially Virgil’s Aeneid, in their propaganda. The Greeks and Romans embraced magic, slavery, the subjugation of women, racial triumphalism, animal sacrifice, and infanticide. The Roman emperors staged elaborate reenactments of battles in and outside the arena that saw hundreds and at times thousands of prisoners and slaves maimed and killed for sport. At lunchtime, in between shows, they publicly executed prisoners. Any democratic participation was the prerogative of male citizens and was snuffed out for long periods by tyrants and near-constant warfare.
But the classics offer a continuum with Western literature, architecture, art, and political systems. Our country’s past, our political and social philosophy, and our intellectual achievements and spiritual struggles cannot be connected without great holes in the fabric, and failures of understanding, if we are not conversant in the classics.
“All literature, all philosophical treatises, all the voices of antiquity,” Cicero wrote, “are full of examples for imitation, which would all lie unseen in darkness without the light of literature.”16 Thucydides, knowing that Athens was doomed in the war with Sparta, consoled himself with the belief that his city’s artistic and intellectual achievements would in the coming centuries overshadow raw Spartan militarism. Beauty and knowledge could, ultimately, triumph over power.
As my year at Harvard progressed, I devoured the classical authors but wasn’t always as sure about taking on a dead language. One of my favorite professors, Kathleen Coleman, stopped me one morning and announced that I needed a purpose behind my slog through Latin. Once a week, she instructed, I would appear at her office prepared to do a translation of a poem by Catullus or passage from Virgil. I had never read Catullus, but came to love him.
Carrying my books, I retreated in the afternoons to the Smyth Classical Library within Widener Library, with its huge oak tables and sagging leather chairs. My fondest memories revolve around this sanctuary with its well-thumbed volumes, noisy heating system, and glass cases with dusty displays of items like Roman table legs. I was freed to step outside myself, to struggle with questions the cant of modern culture often allows us to ignore.
All idylls must end. Mine was shattered on March 24, 1999, when NATO began its bombing of Kosovo. I had come to Cambridge from Kosovo. Kosovar Albanians I had known for three years were now missing or found dead along roadsides. I slept little. I was chained to the news reports. My translator in Kosova, Shukrije Gashi, a poet, vanished. (I returned to Kosovo that summer to find her family was searching for her in mass graves.) The horrors of Kosovo were abstractions to most people in Cambridge. I held a communion, in my final weeks at Harvard, with the long dead.
I had memorized a few poems by Catullus and parts of The Aeneid. I woke one morning well before dawn, haunted by a Catullus poem written to Calvus, whose lover Quintilia had died. Calvus had abandoned her, as I felt I had abandoned friends in Kosovo and an array of other conflicts. His grief was mingled with his guilt. In the end, these words give me a balm to my grief, a momentary solace, a little understanding:
If anything welcome or pleasing, Calvus, can be felt
by silent tombs in answer to our grief,
from that painful longing in which we renew old loves
and weep for friendships we once cast away,
Surely Quintilia does not lament her early death
as much as she rejoices in your love.17
To survive as a human being is possible only through love. And, when Thanatos is ascendant, the instinct must be to reach out to those we love, to see in them all the divinity, pity, and pathos of the human. And to recognize love in the lives of others—even those with whom we are in conflict—love that is like our own. It does not mean we will avoid war or death. It does not mean that we as distinct individuals will survive. But love, in its mystery, has its own power. It alone gives us meaning that endures. It alone allows us to embrace and cherish life. Love has power both to resist in our nature what we know we must resist, and to affirm what we know we must affirm. And love, as the poets remind us, is eternal.
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
1. Orwell, George, 1984 (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1949), P. 35.
2. Homer, The Odyssey, translated by Stanley Lombardo (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000), p. 138.
3. Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), pp. 380–381.
4. García Márquez, Gabriel, Chronicle of a Death Foretold (New York: Knopf, 1983).
CHAPTER 1
THE MYTH OF WAR
1. LeShan, Lawrence, The Psychology of War (New York: Helios, 1992), Chapter Two.
2. Weil, Simone, ‘The Iliad’ or ‘The Poem of Force,’ (Wallingford, PA: Pendle Hill Pamphlet, 1993), p. 11.
3. Shakespeare, William, Troilus and Cressida–“Dramatis Personae,” (Boston: Riverside Shakespeare, Houghton Mifflin, 1974), p. 448.
4. Ibid., Act V, sc. ii, p. 486.
5. Caputo, Philip, Rumor of War (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1977), p. 345.
6. Shakespeare, William, Troilus and Cressida, (Boston: Riverside Shakespeare, Houghton Mifflin, 1974), Act I, sc. i, p. 450.
7. Mowat, Farley, And No Birds Sang (Toronto: Seal, 1987), p. 195.
8. Shakespeare, William, Troilus and Cressida, (Boston: Riverside Shakespeare, Houghton Mifflin, 1974), Act V, sc. viii, p. 490.
9. Weil, Simone, ‘The Iliad’ or ‘The Poem of Force’ (Wallingford, PA: Pendle Hill Pamphlet, 1993), p. 36.
10. London Observer, November 18, 1822, quoted in Samuel Hynes, The Soldiers’ Tale (New York: Penguin, 1997), p. 17.
11. Myrivilis, Stratis, Life in the Tomb (London: Quartet Books, 1987), p. 137.
12. Freud, S
igmund, Civilization and Its Discontents (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), p. 72.
13. Orwell, George, Homage to Catalonia, quoted by F. Dyson, Weapons and Hope (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), p. 129.
14. Lasch, Christopher, The Culture of Narcissism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), pp. 7,15.
15. See Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part One, Henry IV, Part Two, and Henry V.
CHAPTER 2
THE PLAGUE OF NATIONALISM
1. Kiš, Danilo, On Nationalism, in the Appendix to Mark Thompson’s A Paper House (London: Vintage, 1992), p. 339.
2. Todorov, Tzvetan, Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps (New York: Metropolitan /Owl Books, 1996), p. 228.
3. Levi, Primo, The Drowned and the Saved (I Sommersi e i Salvati) (London: Abacus, 1991), quoted by Todorov, Tzvetan, Facing the Extreme (New York: Metropolitan/Owl Books, 1996), p. 238.
4. Duras, Marguerite, The War: A Memoir (New York: Pantheon, 1986), p. 48.
CHAPTER 3
THE DESTRUCTION OF CULTURE
1. Ignatieff, Michael, The Warrior’s Honor: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience (New York: Henry Holt, 1998), p. 56.
2. Shakespeare, William, Othello (Boston: The Riverside Shakespeare, Houghton Mifflin, 1974), Act IV, sc. i.
3. Sachs, Susan, Newsday, October 22, 1995, p. A04.
CHAPTER 4
THE SEDUCTION OF BATTLE AND THE PERVERSION OF WAR
1. Bartov, Omer, Mirrors of Destruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 45.
2. Remarque, Erich Maria, All Quiet on the Western Front (New York: Fawcett Crest, 1975), p. 114.