THIS IS WHAT WAR DOES
John Chuckman
A Canadian photographer named Bryan Adams (yes, the rock
singer) has done something extraordinary in publishing a book of photographs
of what war does to soldiers. The wounds of his subjects are not covered with
gore as they would be on the battlefield. His pictures are clean studio shots. The
subjects sometimes even are smiling. Their wounds are healed, at least as much
as such wounds can ever be called healed, but the surrealistic sense of the
pictures says something profound story about our society. We’ve done these
savage things to our own young, and then left them to spend the rest of their
lives struggling with the results.
For an institution which quite literally dominates human
history, it is a remarkable that the real face of war is never seen by most
people. The press goes so far in avoiding it that it creates a fantasy picture,
in many respects resembling those beautifully done dioramas of lead soldiers in
famous battles. It’s the same psychology at work when caskets containing the
blasted remains of soldiers are draped with bright, cheery flags. And when war
is over, there’s the home town parade with flags and drums and high-stepping
baton twirlers in cute little sequined outfits, with no sign of death or
gore to be seen.
A few times in my life a bit of the truth has leaked out.
During Vietnam, the first major war in the mature television age, the public
was exposed to some of it. Not a great deal, mind you, but it was enough to
provide governments a harsh warning on the effects such images have upon the
public’s support for war.
Fairly early, television showed us Marines dutifully torching
the thatched homes of peasants, I’m sure never giving a thought to someone’s
doing the same to Mom and Dad’s farmhouse back in Indiana. But still we never
saw a hint of the wholesale slaughters of a war which extinguished three
million lives. We saw the distant flashes and puffs of smoke of bombings,
including the instantaneous infernos of that hellish stuff, napalm, ripping
across a landscape, but never a single frame of the resulting incinerated
bodies. No newsreel ever showed close-ups of a village or city after American carpet-bombing
by B-52s. We did see the odd distant shot of a prisoner falling from a
high-flying helicopter but never the preceding close-up scene of his being
hurled out by American Special Forces or intelligence operatives unhappy with
his answers to questions.
I recall an American deserter speaking at a public meeting in
Toronto of his raping a young Vietnamese woman and then emptying his rifle into
her, an atrocity which is reported to have been repeated many times over the
years. After all, what do you think happens when young men, often from the most
marginal backgrounds, are dumped in a foreign place they cannot understand and
often hate, armed with powerful weapons and under no normal restraints? Young
men, especially under stress, are capable of almost any savagery, and you do
have a responsibility to consider that reality before sending them off to
terrorize others.
Early during Vietnam I recall another young man briefly
interviewed on television whose face had been turned into a molten-looking mass,
perhaps from napalm, his mouth consisting of a hole into which a straw could be
inserted. What purpose could possibly be worth that sacrifice? I’m not sure,
but I know it wasn’t a dirty colonial war in Vietnam started by cheating and
lying to the people who had to fight it.
When Britain went to war in the Falklands, the warning of
Vietnam was heeded. All the British people saw were selected, cleaned-up images
of another dirty colonial war, images like a stalwart Maggie Thatcher waving
off the Falklands fleet, and who on this planet could better play the role of a
stern and impressive god of war than Mrs. Thatcher? She gave Winston Churchill
himself a run for his money.
I did read of one instance of a dead or dying invading British
soldier having been photographed on the beach with bowels torn open and spilled
out, but the image was suppressed.
Some very heroic cameramen from the Middle East did obtain
shocking images of the savagery of America’s war in Iraq, a war in which
cluster bombs were heavily used but also white phosphorus and depleted uranium
shells. I recall images of horribly mangled children, burnt smudgy corpses, a
woman virtually smashed into the ground, and others, but they were only a small
sample of America’s destruction of a million or so souls.
The images were found on not-widely-known sites on the Internet,
even Al-Jazeera itself being then not
familiar to most Americans. The images never made their way onto the pages of The New York Times or the evening news
on NBC where they would have been seen by the millions of ordinary Americans in
whose name the atrocities were committed. The American military does appear to
have made an effort to target foreign journalists trying to capture some truth,
killing the messengers, as it were, in the spirit of vicious boys ripping the
wings off butterflies.
There were still other images from Iraq on the Internet, and
these came straight from America’s own dear “boys in harm’s way.” There was an
Internet site, briefly, which provided young American soldiers with free access
to raw pornographic sexual images in return for their submitting raw
pornographic war images, as from cell phones and the like. There were
reportedly large numbers of takers on the offer, sending in their snaps of
things like bloody boots with bits of leg sticking out or of a human head half
turned into beef tartar before Pentagon matrons dedicated to decency in war closed
the operation down.
America’s horrors at Abu Ghraib were heavily censored. According
to America’s best investigative journalist, Seymour Hersh, we saw only the most
innocuous images of degrading treatment, the frat-boy pranks with naked humans,
dog leashes, and shit. We did not see the hard-core stuff of torture, rape, including
of children, and death, pictures which did in fact exist but were suppressed.
The stuff from Guantanamo was along the same lines, images of degrading
treatment, men in jump suits and chains kneeling in tiny cells – just enough
for the folks back home to say “Good, it’s what they deserve,” but not enough
to shock or terrify Americans about what was being done in their name.
I recall an image from Israel’s first savage assault on
Gaza, one killing several hundred children and more than a thousand others, an
image of a narrow street running with a
small river of blood and desperate people trying to pass without stepping into
it. Such images are rare because Israel allows no one access to document its
filthy work. Even after the savagery is over, various organizations and
officials generally are refused entry even on humanitarian missions, as is the case
today after a second mass murder in Gaza killing even more children than the
first.
War is such a time of fearful darkness and chaos that great
horrors can be hidden easily under its cover. In Afghanistan, three thousand
American prisoners were “disappeared” by one of America’s war lord allies by
being taken out in sealed trucks into the desert to suffocate, their bodies
then dumped into mass graves. This occurred shortly after American Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld made a shameful Nazi-like public statement that the
large numbers of Taliban prisoners being held in Afghanistan should either be
killed or walled away for the rest of their lives. This war crime was committed
right under the noses of occupying American soldiers and clearly with Mr. Rumsfeld’s
secret blessing, and it has never been featured or investigated except by a
British documentary film maker.
It is invariably human nature to show others our work, of
any kind, when we are proud of what it is that we have done. The great irony of
war is that we invariably are ashamed of what we have done, and yet we repeat,
some of us, the work again and again.
Another great irony of war is that it is almost never about
defending ourselves, although that is what the propaganda never stops telling
us that that is what it is about. That is why America uses the term Department
of Defense, and Israel calls its army the Israeli Defense Force.
What was America defending in Vietnam, in Cambodia, in
Serbia, in Afghanistan, or in Iraq? Only its right to tell others what to do, a
right based solely on the concept of might makes right, the slogan of the
bully. So too for its many violent and destructive interventions using hired
thugs into the affairs of others, whether in Cuba, Chile, Nicaragua, Guatemala,
Iran, Syria, Ukraine, or other places.
What does Israel defend in its endless assaults upon its
neighbors, none of them remotely capable of seriously threatening Israel much
less destroying it, and its ceaseless hectoring for even more war in the
region? Again, nothing more than the right to tell others what to do, a right
based only on might makes right. And what of its countless assassinations in
half a dozen countries, of its interference into the affairs of Egypt, Iran,
Syria, Iraq, and other countries?
I notice something in what I’ve written. While I started
with war’s effect upon soldiers, almost all my words deal with civilians, and
that brings us to the greatest irony of modern war: soldiers are just a tiny part
of those killed and brutally injured. It cannot be otherwise with missiles,
heavy bombing, and other indiscriminate weapons. Modern war is mass killing of
civilians, always and everywhere, a practice which evolved in World War II and
has done nothing but progress in that direction since. Even when they aren’t
the actual targets, as in America’s nightmarish assassination-by-drone project,
large numbers of dead or mangled civilians are the unavoidable consequence.
Well, if you’re in for killing mere suspects as in the drone project, I guess extra
civilians don’t mean much, do they? “In for penny, in for pound,” as they say.
We’ve even developed special language for the realities of
indiscriminate killing. Israel, at the very least, always is said to be killing
“militants.” I don’t know about you, but I’ve never met a “militant,” and I
doubt I’d be able to recognize one walking down the street. But our clever press
instantly recognizes them when they are shot full holes by Israeli soldiers. You
see, Israel simply can never be wrong in our press, so if it hasn’t killed terrorists,
it has to have killed “militants,” and that’s surely almost as good.
As for the tens of thousands maimed and slaughtered by
America’s hideous bombings in many lands, well, they are called, right on the
evening news by announcers in pancake makeup with blow-dried hair in
momentarily subdued tones just before moving on to the sports scores,
“collateral damage.”
