The Nightmare Reality

Those who opposed the Vietnam War in the mid to late 1960s were a reviled minority, derided as radical and unpatriotic, and risking life (from armed soldiers and angry fellow citizens) and more often lungs (from the nearly ubiquitous tear gas) to protest in public. But whatever convictions motivated them, they--we-- were also armed with information.

Some of that information was analytical, historical, geopolitical-- but much of it concerned what was actually happening in the Vietnam war, and later in Laos and Cambodia when the war widened. At first it was reported only in "underground" newspapers and magazines, or clearly radical periodicals like Ramparts. But there was one seemingly unlikely publication that was not really underground, yet not really an organ of journalism: it was the New York Review of Books.

Sometimes in essays which contained original reporting, and then as time went on, in long, descriptive reviews of books on the subject, the realities of the war were revealed. These realities were otherwise unknown, ignored and especially denied by government officials and much of the press. I still remember how I felt reading the review of Air War-Vietnam by Frank Harvey, a book I suspect is long out of print. (There are other, bloodless books of that title by other authors still around.) There was on the scene reporting, and simple if devastating facts. The review featured long quotations. I also remember standing in our college coffee shop during one of our periodic "teach-ins" and reading some of these quotations, at one point not able to control the emotion in my voice.

We are in the midst of another war now. With far less censorship or as censorious a public, we are just as in the dark as then. The mystery of what really is happening in Iraq is the result of the dangers there, certainly, but also the result of timid and inadequate reporting by lazy, cowardly, greedy corporate media, and by a particular yet perennial wish to be spared those realities here in America. And I don't want to see those photos or read those accounts any more than anyone else does.

So it takes courage to get in our faces with it, and we again must rely on the New York Review of Books to tell us the truth. Michael Massing did so in a review of two new books and consideration of four others in a December issue. A major part of the mystery, as Massing knows and shows, is mystification. Some of it, as in Vietnam, is official misinformation, disinformation, secrecy and lying. But much of it, as in Vietnam, is in language. Including most particularly the abstractions that mask the realities of what warfare is doing to the Iraqi people and civilization, to Iraq itself, and to the Americans sent there with terrible weapons in their hands, ordered to do terrible deeds.

We have our particular abstractions now, bloodless yet aggressive, the language of Pentagon briefings, television reporting, and video games. That language is used in some of the books Massing mentions. For example: McElhiney realized he would have to fight in close quarters and destroy the Iraqi air defenses one at a time. Using 30mm guns and rockets, he took out the mosque...Covered by Cobras, the Marines headed north to the town from the western side of the Gharraf River, paralleling Highway 7. Craparotta's 3/1 moved up and...cleared the town.

But what "took out the mosque" and "cleared the town" means in human terms is left to some of the other on the ground accounts in other books:

We pass a bus, smashed and burned, with charred human remains sitting upright in some windows. There's a man in the road with no head and a dead little girl, too, about three or four, lying on her back. She's wearing a dress and has no legs.

Heading north, the Marines find themselves amid the palm trees and canals of the Fertile Crescent, but all around are signs of death. Along the highway are torched vehicles with "charred corpses nearby, occupants who crawled out and made it a few meters before expiring, with their grasping hands still smoldering." Lying beside one car is the mangled body of a small child, face down, whose clothes are too ripped to determine the gender.."

This brutality inevitably affects those who find themselves committing it, but new innocents are sent to do the same, because no one can face these realities, no one wants to be accused of being 'against the troops':

"After leaving the corps, Fick drifted. Combat, he realized, "had nearly unhinged me." Worst of all, he writes, were the "blanket accolades and thanks from people 'for what you guys did over there.' Thanks for what, I wanted to ask—shooting kids, cowering in terror behind a berm, dropping artillery on people's homes?"

Some of these books consider the effects of the machinery of war. For example, the "smart bombs" get all the publicity, but most of the damage in the initial invasion and more traditional battles is done by imprecise but highly destructive artillery fire. In the terrorist phase, the slaughter of innocent civilians by Americans with immense firepower is common. One Marine says of the civilians:

"They're worse off than the guys that are shooting at us. They don't even have a chance. Do you think people at home are going to see this—all these women and children we're killing? Fuck no. Back home they're glorifying this motherfucker, I guarantee you. Saying our president is a fucking hero for getting us into this bitch. He ain't even a real Texan."

This is all part of modern warfare, though it gets more terrible and obscene with each increase in the technology of rending human bodies and blowing lives and landscapes apart. And so is the civilian squeamishness. There were exhibits in the capitals of both sides in World War I, in both London and Berlin, that purported to show how comfortable the trenches were for the soldiers. In that war (as attested by books like All Quiet on the Western Front) the lies and denial at home were part of what bound soldiers together, more strongly than national identity, in the knowledge and the experience of war that only they had.

The utter horror of war should be its greatest deterrent, but it cannot be, if warfare is nothing but abstraction and romance, sport and patriotic expression. When we soaked ourselves in the awful truths of Vietnam, we risked despair, and I suspect that it dogged us all our lives since. But the alternative is this abstract opposition, without the hard urgency to end the automatic madness, and to see that such an infantile response to the manipulations of leaders without conscience has led us again into such thoughtless, unfeeling consent to make war without extreme cause.

If you had read those reviews in the Vietnam era, you would have known before this war started what horrors were ahead. It's time to face what's happening now, end it, and remember, for the proposed next time. And forget the sentimentalities of the Greatest Generation, or the war hero, or thanking soldiers for their service. We can't ignore our responsibilities to returning soldiers--to do so is the other side of denial and sentimentality. But to simply engender another generation of sacrificial killers is not going to put the end to war.