The war within
The leaders who send warriors into battle rarely pay the price, laments poet/professor SAMUEL HAZO
It’s not often that a war correspondent reveals the darker consequences of military service. David Wood does so in a new book called “What Have We Done: The Moral Injury of Our Longest Wars.”
Mr. Wood, a Quaker who conscientiously objected to the Vietnam War and rendered alternative service, subsequently became a war correspondent for four decades, earning a Pulitzer Prize for his work. He has reported from the front lines in Europe, South America, Africa and the Middle East.
“What Have We Done” tells the stories of Marines and others who were permanently damaged by what they were ordered to do. A Marine named Nik was with his platoon invading Fallujah when he saw a boy with something in his hand. Because there had been reports of children being used to attack Americans in the area, he trained his rifle on the boy, hesitated, waited, thought, re-thought and then fired, killing the boy. The object in the boy’s hand turned out to be a toy. On returning to the United States, Nik became obsessed with what he had done, even though his orders had been to shoot anything that moved. His obedience to that order ruined his life.
Another instance involved a corporal who stepped on a land mine and lost one leg. His sergeant, who came to rescue him while warning others of a second mine, stepped on the second mine himself and was blown to pieces. The corporal survived but remains haunted by the sergeant’s death.
Then there there was an incident in which a Marine stabbed an Iraqi civilian in the chest and never could forget the man’s slow dying afterward.
According to Mr. Wood, incidents like these injure surviving victims and perpetrators morally, just as war itself does, particularly wars begun by the fiat of presidents while impotent Congresses just watch. Soldiers returning with their memories from such wars often try to find relief in drugs, in alcohol or, when counseling is unavailable, delayed or ignored, in suicide. The resulting statistics are shocking.
A definitive survey of suicides of men on duty from all services found that the average number per day from the Johnson-Nixon phase of the Vietnam War to the Afghanistan-Iraq era has been 22 per day. That amounts to 8,030 verifiable military suicides every year — not including suicides after discharge.
Mr. Wood claims that suicidal impulses arise when soldiers have to reconcile what they are ordered to do with a moral code by which they had lived prior to combat. He emphasizes that war reverses the moral order. Murder is legalized on a grand scale to ensure victory, which is the point of military conflict — although poet William Stafford, also a Quaker and a conscientious objector, claimed that all wars really have two losers.
The effects of war on those obliged to carry out lethal orders are downplayed or dismissed. Military training does not involve discussing this, but Mr. Wood thinks it should if only to prevent further psychological damage, which is sure to come. For example, the pilot of the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima was said to have suffered severe repercussions when he learned later of the devastation and loss of life.
In World War II, Gen. George Patton famously slapped a convalescing soldier and called him a
coward because the man broke down when Gen. Patton visited him. The blame for such instances, however, should land mostly on the “deciders” who place soldiers in situations that inflict moral dilemmas on them. Blame also belongs to those who, even with the best of intentions, “support the troops” and “thank them for their service” if they have not taken it upon themselves to examine whether the issues provoking a war were valid in the first place.
The Nuremberg trials established once and for all that no one is obliged to obey an unjust order, but also that those who do so are not absolved from guilt. In the case of an illegal war, a similar stipulation applies.
It is a matter of record that leaders of virtually every religious denomination (including Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, Jewish and Muslim) saw no legal basis for the invasion of Iraq. But, after the invasion, many were silent. Why? Did their silence not make them guilty of accepting in practice what they rightly condemned in theory?
For instance, Pope John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis opposed the war in Iraq, but many in the American Catholic hierarchy said little if anything. They tended to encourage prayers for the military but avoided the moral issue.
The same fate has befallen military forces other than our own. In a recent book called “Our Harsh Logic,” a number of Israeli soldiers made known their protests over what they had been ordered to do in the West Bank and particularly in Gaza during the 2014 conflict, when more than 2,000 Palestinians were killed, including upwards of 600 children. Homes were demolished, and Palestinians were imprisoned without trial. Some 70 Israelis also were killed.
Many Israeli soldiers involved in such morally crucifying actions ended up taking their own lives. Some 237 have committed suicide over the past decade, or approximately 24 annually.
When Richard Nixon abolished the draft in 1973 during the Vietnam War and created an all-volunteer military, he created military employees. He assumed that enlistees would do what they were ordered to do because they were volunteers. A stagnant economy meant that young men who could not find employment were ripe for recruiters’ pitches. The result is that enlistees are seen as being able to fight presidentially chosen wars indefinitely.
The Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz-Perle cabal that launched the illegal war in Iraq assumed it had the right to change regimes of any country of its choice simply because it had the power to do so. If people died as a result (Americans and inhabitants), then that simply was the price that had to be paid. The authors of such “preventive” wars, as in the case of Iraq, are rarely held to account and subsequently retire in affluence. It not so easy for the men and women who fight these wars to leave them behind.
Mr. Wood has detailed their suffering in soulnumbing detail. Read his words and grieve.
Samuel Hazo, the founder of the International Poetry Forum, is McAnulty Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at Duquesne University. His latest book of poems is “They Rule the World.”