The emerging war lover - no lover at all
If you happen to be someone who thinks George Bush is a hero and war is somehow noble or at least necessary - don't read this. It will just piss you off.
If you can't stand blunt talk with sexual references, don't read this - you'll just get offended.
But if you want to face head on the reality of the sickness called war, the ultimate evil of men who claim they are doing good, read on. There is a mainstream emerging that for me started long ago with a book my father recommended, John Hersey's novel, "The War Lover." But as it emerges, “lover” is the wrong term – this is a sickness more akin to rape where the sex has nothing to do with love and everything to do with violence. This thinking gained some intellectual - and experiential - respectability many years later with Chris Hedges "War is a Force We Need," and found a curious, almost quaint confirmation in an old book I stumbled across recently, James J. Fahey's "Pacific War Diary, 1942-1945." (Just being re-released, apparently.) But oh my god! Who is this guy Swofford?
I'm just starting to find out. I'm not sure where he's heading. But to use one of the fighting man's favorite cliches, he "hits the deck running" in "Jarhead."
Richard Davis put me onto "Jarhead," a book he hadn't finished at the time, but was impressed with what he had read. It's about - and by - a Marine sniper in the Gulf War. I thought - and still do - that it would be fascinating to read it at the same time I read "Pacific War Diary 1942-1945." I thought the contrast would be enlightening. Study the two dust jackets and you will see they both set the tone for their respective books. Two very different generations of American youth embarking on the same terrible journey. One up close and personal with death, the other a bit removed both by culture and by his experience aboard a ship, rather than on the ground with a rifle.
Well Bren picked up "Jarhead" for me yesterday and if the first few pages are any example, fasten your seat belt. I'm going to write more about this as I digest the books, but for starters, recall this passage from Fahey's WWII diary written while aboard a light cruiser in the South Pacific:
After being in so many campaigns, you’re disappointed if one passes you by. There’s always the next one. When you find yourself in it, there’s always the realization of how crazy you were in thinking that way. When this one’s completed, never again. When it’s finally terminated, you’re always ready for the next one. It gets to be a disease after a time.
Then listen to Anthony Swofford as he writes on the same theme. It is August, 1990 and he is in a Marine sniper unit that has just been put on alert. He and his buddies rent every war movie they can find, get a bunch of beer, and then spend the next three days in a Rec room watching the war movies and drinking beer. The films they like best are the ones on Vietnam. Here's how Swofford sees it:
"There is talk that many Vietnam films are antiwar, that the message is war is inhumane and look what happens when you train young Americans to fight and kill, they turn their fighting and killing everywhere, they ignore their targets and desecrate the entire country, shooting full automatic, forgetting they were trained to aim. But actually, Vietnam war films are all pro-war, no matter what the supposed message, what Kubrick or Coppola or Stone intended. Mr. and Mrs. Johnson in Omaha or San Francisco or Manhattan will watch the films and weep and decide once and for all that war is inhumane and terrible, and they will tell their friends at church and their family this, but Corporal Johnson at Camp Pendleton and Sergeant Johnson at Travis Air Force base and Seaman Johnson at Coronado Naval Station and Spec 4 Johnson at Fort Brag and Lance Corporal Swofford at Twentynine Palms Marine Corps base watch the same films and are excited by them, because the magic brutality of the films celebrates the terrible and despicable beauty of their fighting skills. Fight, rape, war, pillage, burn. Filmic images of death and carnage are pornography for the military man; with film you are stroking his cock, tickling his balls with the pink feather of history, getting him ready for his real First Fuck. It doesn't matter how many Mr. and Mrs. Johnsons are antiwar - the actual killers who know how to use the weapons are not. . . ."I enter the room and look at the faces of my fellows. We are all afraid, but show this in various ways - violent indifference, fake ease, standard-issue bravura. We are afraid, but that doesn't mean we don't want to fight. It occurs to me that we will never be young again. I take my seat and return to the raging battle. The supposedly antiwar films have failed. Now is my time to step into the newest combat zone. And as a young man raised on the films of the Vietnam War, i want ammunition and alcohol and dope. I want to scew some whores and kill some Iraqi motherfuckers."
Is there a difference between Fahey and Swofford? I don't think so. I will reserve final judgment. But to me they are both living out the fantasies of my youth as I got off watching war films. As kids we played soldier, imitating our screen heroes - killing like them and dying like them, pretending to ask for a cigarette with our last painful breath. The war films we watched with John Wayne were sanitized, just as Fahey's writing is sanitized. It doesn't dig deep. It doesn't get ugly. It is plain vanilla and in a way, the more frightening for it. But dig deep into his cool words and you see the same ugly heat of our common humanity at its worst. The only thing that separates us, is our ability to control these primal instincts.
I never went to war, in part because I always wished for a "just war," and in part because I was just plain lucky enough to be declared 4-F when I was called by my draft board and examined in 1963. At the time I wished I had been born twenty years before I was born so I could fight in WWII. I'm not so sure any more that was as just a war as it had seemed. But that's another topic. The point is, as Chris Hedges has pointed out so well, there is something primal in war - something that brings out the worst in us, and acts like a drug, dragging us back to it despite our fears. It is government-sponsored pornography. Fahey repeats this theme several times, seeming not to grasp it in its depth, but knowing it is there. Hedges explores it thoroughly drawing on his intellectual resources and his years of experience in combat zones. And Swofford jumps into it with both feet on page 6!
What I hear in these voices is the same thing I see when I look into that deer-in-the-headlights vacancy of the eyes of George Bush as he tries to strut to the podium, or see the glazed, barely restrained sparkling in Donald Rumsfeld's eyes as he does a press conference - and Dick Cheney, he's the dirty old man of the group, off in the bathroom somewhere, looking at the latest strike photos. These are our porno lords, capitalizing on our weaknesses.
But of the three, Bush is the most pitiful. He's the tail being wagged by the big dogs. He's a warrior wannabe. He played at warrior when a fighter pilot, but missed his chance because he dodged the real war. Now he's still playing at war, getting others killed, and strutting across the deck of an aircraft carrier wearing his pilot costume. (I keep thinking how one good intern might have saved the world a lot of pain.) Will he ever grow up? I doubt it.
The question is, will we ever grow up? Or will we wipe ourselves out first, responding to the dark side, while all the time chanting the themes of peace and love? My hopes rest in the simple fact that we are at last letting the demons come to the surface. They are showing themselves in books like that by Hedges and Swofford.
Or in the end, are these just like the movies about the Vietnam war - pretending to be anti-war - perhaps striving in good faith to be so - while giving us one last sip at the cup too many of us secretly crave? I guess it depends on what lies beyond page 6. If he begins here, he may take me some place I'm not at all prepared to go. I'll try to keep an open mind. Stay tuned.