A dispassionate, brilliant little war book

Chris Hedges has done it again, this time with the most unusual, truth-telling, dispassionate, yet blood-curdling war book I have ever seen.

It’s called “What Every Person Should Know About War” and while it is Hedges name that is on the cover, the way he describes it, it really was put together by a highly qualified team of researchers. These ranged from his graduate students at the Columbia University School of Journalism, to John Wheeler, West Point graduate, Vietnam Veteran, and the man who chaired the drive to build the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C.

It is a book for soldiers and pacifists, for recruits and families of veterans, for teachers and psychologists, journalist and b novelists, editors and publishers, movie directors and media magnates, and most of all politicians who sit safely behind desk, or strut bravely in front of cameras and crowds, while ordering men, women and children to die in ways that defy imagination.

It reads like an old-fashioned sex manual. There are few adjectives, no axes to grind, no attempts to titillate or glorify or scare. Just a simple effort to get at the truth and to ask and answer all those questions we all have and never ask. It is computer-like in its relentless, blunt language. It is not a rant against war. In fact, Hedges seems to believe wars are a necessary – or at least certain - evil. Like taxes and death, war will be with us into the foreseeable future. But they are an evil and as such they are poorly depicted in most news media.

As I write this I think of walking past a newsstand yesterday and seeing the cover on a Time magazine special memorial book on the Iraq war. It is a wonderful, close-up picture of a US combat soldier. And my immediate thought was – they still don’t get it! Once more they are glorifying war in that single photograph. I didn’t look into that book, but it gave me the feeling of a souvenir program for the Super Bowl. We are so completely out of touch with reality.

Hedges brings us to earth. He writes in the introduction:

“We ennoble war. We turn it into entertainment. And in all this we forget what war is about, what it does to those who wage it and those who suffer from it.”

And a little later he notes:

“We kept the book direct and accessible, And we operated on the assumption that the simplest and most obvious question in life , and certainly war, often never get asked.”

Well they get asked here – and answered. The whole book is in Q&A format. From my pacifist perspective it is a terrific reference manual giving me a huge number of facts about the cost of war in dollars and in human lives. But it is much more than that. This is a book for all those who know a combat veteran and want to have some idea of what this person has experienced.

You can read this book randomly, turning to the section - the specific question – that interests you. A few random samples will convey the flavor:

What will a bullet do to my body?

It will damage or destroy tissue. A bullet must travel at 90 meter per second to penetrate your skin. When a bullet leaves an AK-47 it is traveling at 980 meters per second ( 730 meters per second when fired from an M-16). The shape of the bullet, how it is moving towards you, and where it enters, determines how much damage you will sustain. Bullets that fragment on impact, bullets that “tumble” after penetrating your skin, and bullets that strike you at an oblique angle will do more damage than bullets that hit you directly and travel straight through your body while remaining in one piece.

In this same section he goes on to answer questions about the best and worst places to get shot, what it feels like to be shot, what are your odds of surviving a wound, what type of injury you should be most afraid of, and whether a bullet can penetrate body armor. In other sections he answers soldiers’ questions such as “Will I lose interest in sex? Will I visit prostitutes? What are my chances of sustaining a non-battle injury, or contacting a disease?

While these sections are aimed directly at soldiers and potential soldiers, more general questions are asked and answered in other parts of the book, such as:

What is genocide?
How many genocides have occurred since World War I?
Why do children join armies?
What is the civilian experience in war.

I’ll give his answer to that last one because it is one of those things we tend to ignore the most. War movies and books focus on the experiences of the soldiers and even when they are at the most gory and realistic, they tend to glorify these experiences. But there is nothing glorious about being a civilian in war and the plain fact is, wars kill far more innocent children, women, and men, than soldiers. (Nearly twice as many.) But when was the last time you saw a Memorial Day parade featuring civilians who survived combat? Or honoring those who didn’t?

What is the civilian experience in war?

They are shot, bombed, raped, starved, and driven from their homes. During World War II, 135,000 civilians died in two days in the firebombing of Dresden. A week later, in Pforzheim, Germany, 17,800 people were killed in 22 minutes. In Russia after the three-year battle of Leningrad, only 600,00 civilians remained in a city that had a population of 2.5 million. One million were evacuated, 100,000 were conscripted into the Red Army, and 800,00 died. In April, 2003, during the Iraqi War, half of the 1.3 million civilians in Basra, Iraq were trapped for days without food and water in temperatures in excess of 100 degrees.

And you’ll find answers here about who builds arms, who supplies them to other countries, and in what numbers. As well as the deeply personal questions, such as:

What does it feel like to die? Will I feel pain when I am dying? Will I know I am dying?

And

What will happen to my bodily functions as I die?

The book is part pacifist source book, part military manual. It is authoritative and meticulously documented and footnoted so you know where to go for more information on any given subject.

It is truly “What Every Person Should Know About War.” Chris Hedges, author of ‘War is a Force that Give Us Meaning,” knows his subject well through personal experience, but draws here on a host of reliable sources.

Both his books are excellent in their own way, though “War is a Force” is much more passionate and personal, coming from Hedges the theology student and veteran war correspondent who himself has been drunk on the high war can bring. Read them and weep for humanity – that as a race we can be smart enough to write such things and stupid enough to continue fighting wars is beyond my comprehension.

What every Person Should Know about War

War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning