Habitués of Running After My Hat know, I think, that I resist the intrusion of politics into my posts here. And although I’ve never been tested on this, I’m pretty sure that’s one area in which I would likely resort to editing (or outright banning) comments of certain kinds. If you’re after debate, even of the reasoned sort, there are plenty of other sites around the Internet whose proprietors are more than happy (and better equipped than I) to offer it.
As my newest review at The Book Book begins:
Like (probably) most Americans, I have never fought in a war, and am unlikely ever to do so. Like (probably) most Americans, I nonetheless hold plenty of opinions about war in general as well as about specific conflicts. Those opinions are important to us, and we regard holding onto them in the face of opposing views as a matter of psychological — almost theological — life and death.
But civilian opinions one way or the other about war, any war, shred like tissue paper when you try to wrap them around the hard, spiky reality of soldiers’ experiences. It simply doesn’t matter what John Q. Public (let alone his favorite talk-show host) thinks.
War, by Sebastian Junger, is all about the daily lives of soldiers on the front line in the war in Afghanistan. (He spent a year embedded with a company there, in 2007-2008.) I won’t kid you: although it is a quick read, it’s not easy reading. What these young men have to deal with, and how they deal with it, is so far from the experience of civilian life that wanting it not to exist, or pretending it doesn’t, is completely understandable. Even if you’re open to knowing about it, I likewise understand the difference between that agreeability and a willingness to spend a few days reading about it.
But I think one thing Junger says, almost in passing, strikes me as one of the main reasons to read the book:
Perfectly sane, good men have been drawn back to combat over and over again, and anyone interested in the idea of world peace would do well to know what they’re looking for. Not killing, necessarily — that couldn’t have been clearer in my mind — but the other side of the equation: protecting. The defense of the tribe is an insanely compelling idea, and once you’ve been exposed to it, there’s almost nothing you’d rather do.
What soldiers are looking for: If you think it’s a desire to win their particular war, or to “get” the “enemy,” or, simply, a desire to get home ASAP (where the “S” represents Safely as well as Soon), you might want to at least sample some of Junger’s book.
Again, though, despite the title and the above quoted passage: this isn’t a book about war, but about battle — combat — and how men adapt to it. If you undertake reading War, prepare yourself for some moments of high intensity (also some low comedy, and emotionally moving passages).
Sounds like a worthwhile read to me, JES. Thanks for the recommendation. :)
You have such a good sense of what quotes to use and how to use them. I was in a graduate class with a young man whose job it had been in the first Gulf war to pick up the dead bodies on the roadside. That certainly taught me I have no idea what I’m talking about on the subject.
The desire to protect is so strong that is why so many VietNam veterans came back so embittered and hating the government. They realized they were’nt protecting anyone. They were often killing the people they meant to protect. We will see what happens in Iraq and Afghanistan over history.
Darc: I don’t know what your non-fiction reading tastes are, but you might like this one. There’s an “arc” of sorts, since Junger’s deployment there followed the course of the company’s.
Of course, you have to make do with a good number of unhappy/unsatisfactory endings…
marta: To some extent, it makes a difference which vet you talk to. But if I’d talked to the pick-up-the-bodies guy, then yeah, I think that would pretty much leave me with nothing to say, too.
Squirrel: I believe you’re right in that analysis of post-Vietnam woes. As for Iraq and Afghanistan vets… Towards the end of the book, Junger does meet up with a couple of the guys he was embedded with. An awful lot of confusion there, which may simply reflect the confusion of the country at large.
Junger points out that many of the skills and personality traits which make one an ideal soldier are completely useless — counter-productive — as skills in civilian life. Since many of the men go overseas and into combat when they’re so young, that constitutes almost their entire experience of what it means to be a functioning adult. I’d be confused, too.
The ‘protective urge’ idea is interesting. I experienced that once very powerfully myself, during military training with the army reserves while a teenager at university. We were doing a house-clearing exercise – a particularly high-anxiety scenario – and had reached the staircase leading up from the ground floor. 4 or 5 of us were clustered round the foot of the stairs (bad form!) when there was a rustle of movement above us, and then something dropped through the air on to the stairs and began, oh so slowly, to bounce down them. Not only did I retreat backwards down the corridor three or four yards in the space of about 2 seconds, but I grabbed hold of the guy next to me by the back of his webbing (as we quaintly term the equipment harness you clip your ammo pouches and so on onto) and dragged – practically carried – him with me, and then threw us both to the ground, through a doorway into another room. We were the only two deemed to have ‘survived’ by our sergeant instructor. This wasn’t ‘training’: we hadn’t really been told what to do in such a situation. It wasn’t a conscious decision: there wasn’t time to think – it was just instinct. (And, of course, it wasn’t even real danger: the terrifying object falling on the stairs was only an empty Coke can representing a “grenade”.)
Is the spectrum of fear and cowardice no more than a question of the balance between the instinct to protect oneself and the instinct to protect others?
But then, I think a lot of the seductive appeal of war has to do with the sheer adrenalin-rush excitement of facing danger yourself. It might be a bit glib, but I think there’s a lot of truth in Churchill’s remark (along the lines of),“Nothing is more exhilarating for a young man than to have people shoot at him – and miss.”
Froog: I think combat, like certain video games, must be some sort of drug-pusher which feeds the (primarily) male brain. Junger talks some about this:
Less theoretically, he also describes many incidents where soldiers behaved with the sort of reflexive protectiveness you experienced in that Coke-can-grenade incident. I don’t know how far along you were in your training at the time, and you may be one of those who require minimal training anyway, but apparently one of the points of military training is to increase the likelihood that soldiers will behave exactly that way — because units in which soldiers look out for themselves, historically, are units whose performance collapses on the battlefield.
(I love that story, by the way.)
I am sometimes haunted by the thought that perhaps I was just using the guy I dragged with me as a human shield….
Froog: Not to worry. I’m pretty sure “willing to throw myself on a can of carbonated beverage for my brother-in-arms” qualifies as genuine altruism!