{"id":222756,"date":"2022-10-31T12:00:43","date_gmt":"2022-10-31T12:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=222756"},"modified":"2022-10-26T04:19:57","modified_gmt":"2022-10-26T03:19:57","slug":"my-war-never-ends","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2022\/10\/my-war-never-ends\/","title":{"rendered":"My War Never Ends"},"content":{"rendered":"

Writing on War and Living in a World from Hell<\/em><\/strong><\/h3>\n
\"\"<\/a>

Cover Design by Mr. Fish<\/p><\/div>\n

25 Oct 2022 – <\/em>As this century began, I was writing War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning<\/a>, <\/em>my reflections on two decades as a war correspondent, 15 of them with the New York Times<\/em>, in Central America, the Middle East, Africa, Bosnia, and Kosovo. I worked in a small, sparsely furnished studio apartment on First Avenue in New York City. The room had a desk, chair, futon, and a couple of bookshelves \u2014 not enough to accommodate my extensive library, leaving piles of books stacked against the wall. The single window overlooked a back alley.<\/p>\n

The super, who lived in the first-floor apartment, smoked prodigious amounts of weed, leaving the grimy lobby stinking of pot. When he found out I was writing a book, he suggested I chronicle his<\/em> moment of glory during the six days of clashes known as the Stonewall Riots<\/a>, triggered by a 1969 police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a gay club in Greenwich Village. He claimed he had thrown a trash can through the front window of a police cruiser.<\/p>\n

It was a solitary life, broken by periodic visits to a small antique bookstore in the neighborhood that had a copy of the 1910-1911 Encyclopedia Britannica<\/a>, the last edition published for scholars. I couldn\u2019t afford it, but the owner generously let me read entries from those 29 volumes written by the likes of Algernon Charles Swinburne, John Muir, T.H. Huxley, and Bertrand Russell. The entry for Catullus<\/a>, several of whose poems I could recite from memory in Latin, read: \u201cThe greatest lyric poet of Rome.\u201d I loved the certainty of that judgment \u2014 one that scholars today would not, I suspect, make, much less print.<\/p>\n

There were days when I could not write. I would sit in despair, overcome by emotion, unable to cope with a sense of loss, of hurt, and the hundreds of violent images I carry within me. Writing about war was not cathartic. It was painful. I was forced to unwrap memories carefully swaddled in the cotton wool of forgetfulness. The advance on the book was modest: $25,000. Neither the publisher nor I expected many people to read it, especially with such an ungainly title. I wrote out of a sense of obligation, a belief that, given my deep familiarity with the culture of war, I should set it down. But I vowed, once done, never to willfully dredge up those memories again.<\/p>\n

To the publisher\u2019s surprise, the book exploded. Hundreds of thousands of copies were eventually sold. Big publishers, dollar signs in their eyes, dangled significant offers for another book on war. But I refused. I didn\u2019t want to dilute what I had written or go through that experience again. I did not want to be ghettoized into writing about war for the rest of my life. I was done. To this day, I\u2019m still unable to reread it.<\/p>\n

The Open Wound of War<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yet it\u2019s not true that I fled war. I fled my<\/em> wars but would continue to write about other people\u2019s wars. I know the wounds and scars. I know what\u2019s often hidden. I know the anguish and guilt. It\u2019s strangely comforting to be with others maimed by war. We don\u2019t need words to communicate. Silence is enough.<\/p>\n

I wanted to reach teenagers, the fodder of wars and the target of recruiters. I doubted many would read War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning<\/em>. I embarked on a text that would pose, and then answer, the most basic questions about war \u2014 all from military, medical, tactical, and psychological studies of combat. I operated on the assumption that the simplest and most obvious questions rarely get answered like: What happens to my body if I\u2019m killed?<\/p>\n

I hired a team of researchers, mostly graduate students at Columbia University\u2019s School of Journalism, and, in 2003, we produced an inexpensive paperback \u2014 I fought the price down to $11 by giving away any future royalties \u2014 called What Every Person Should Know About War<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n

I worked closely on the book with\u00a0Jack Wheeler<\/a>, who had graduated from West Point in 1966 and then served in Vietnam, where 30 members of his class were killed. (Rick Atkinson\u2019s The Long Gray Line: The American Journey of West Point\u2019s Class of 1966<\/a> <\/em>is the story of Jack\u2019s class<\/a>.) Jack went on to Yale Law School after he left the military and became a presidential aide to Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush, while chairing the drive to build the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington.<\/p>\n

He struggled with what he called \u201cthe open wound of Vietnam\u201d and severe depression. He was last seen on December 30, 2010, disoriented and wandering the streets of Wilmington, Delaware. The next day, his body was discovered as it was dumped from a garbage truck into the Cherry Island Landfill. The Delaware state medical examiner\u2019s office said the cause of death was assault and \u201cblunt force trauma.\u201d Police ruled his death a homicide, a murder that would never be solved. He was buried in Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors.<\/p>\n

The idea for the book came from the work of Harold Roland Shapiro, a New York lawyer who, while representing a veteran disabled in World War I, investigated that conflict, discovering a huge disparity between its reality and the public perception of it. His book was, however, difficult to find. I had to get a copy from the Library of Congress. The medical descriptions of wounds, Shapiro wrote, rendered \u201call that I had read and heard previously as being either fiction, isolated reminiscence, vague generalization or deliberate propaganda.\u201d He published his book, What Every Young Man Should Know About War,<\/em> in 1937. Fearing it might inhibit recruitment, he agreed to remove it from circulation at the start of World War II. It never went back into print.<\/p>\n

The military is remarkably good at studying itself (although such studies aren\u2019t easy to obtain). It knows how to use operant conditioning \u2014 the same techniques used to train a dog \u2014 to turn young men and women into efficient killers. It skillfully employs<\/a> the tools of science, technology, and psychology to increase the lethal force of combat units. It also knows how to sell war as adventure, as well as the true route to manhood, comradeship, and maturity.<\/p>\n

The callous indifference to life, including the lives of our soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines, leapt off the pages of the official documents. For example, the response to the question \u201cWhat will happen if I am exposed to nuclear radiation but do not die immediately?\u201d was answered in a passage from the Office of the Surgeon General\u2019s Textbook of Military Medicine<\/a><\/em> that read, in part:<\/p>\n

Fatally irradiated soldiers should receive every possible palliative treatment, including narcotics, to prolong their utility and alleviate their physical and psychological distress. Depending on the amount of fatal radiation, such soldiers may have several weeks to live and to devote to the cause. Commanders and medical personnel should be familiar with estimating survival time based on onset of vomiting. Physicians should be prepared to give medications to alleviate diarrhea, and to prevent infection and other sequelae of radiation sickness in order to allow the soldier to serve as long as possible. The soldier must be allowed to make the full contribution to the war effort. He will already have made the ultimate sacrifice. He deserves a chance to strike back, and to do so while experiencing as little discomfort as possible.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Our book, as I hoped, turned up on Quaker anti-recruitment tables in high schools.<\/p>\n

\u201cI Am Sullied\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

I was disgusted by the simplistic, often mendacious coverage of our post-9\/11 war in Iraq, a country I had covered as the Middle East bureau chief for the New York Times<\/em>. In 2007, I went to work with reporter Laila Al-Arian on a long investigative article in the Nation<\/em>, \u201cThe Other War: Iraq Veterans Bear Witness<\/a>,\u201d that ended up in an expanded version as another book on war, Collateral Damage: America\u2019s War Against Iraqi Civilians<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n

We spent hundreds of hours interviewing 50 American combat veterans of Iraq about atrocities they had witnessed or participated in. It was a damning indictment of the U.S. occupation with accounts of terrorizing and abusive house raids, withering suppressing fire routinely laid down in civilian areas to protect American convoys, indiscriminate shooting from patrols, the large kill radius of detonations and air strikes in populated areas, and the slaughter of whole families who approached military checkpoints too closely or too quickly. The reporting made headlines in newspapers across Europe but was largely ignored in the U.S., where the press was generally unwilling to confront the feel-good narrative about \u201cliberating\u201d the people of Iraq.<\/p>\n

For the book\u2019s epigraph, we used a June 4, 2005, suicide note left by Colonel Theodore \u201cTed\u201d Westhusing for his commanders in Iraq. Westhusing (whom I was later told had read and recommended War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning<\/em>) was the honor captain of his 1983 West Point class. He shot himself in the head with his 9mm Beretta service revolver. His suicide note \u2014 think of it as an epitaph for the global war on terror \u2013 read in part:<\/p>\n

Thanks for telling me it was a good day until I briefed you. [Redacted name] \u2014 You are only interested in your career and provide no support to your staff \u2014 no msn [mission] support and you don\u2019t care. I cannot support a msn that leads to corruption, human right abuses and liars. I am sullied \u2014 no more. I didn\u2019t volunteer to support corrupt, money-grubbing contractors, nor work for commanders only interested in themselves. I came to serve honorably and feel dishonored.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The war in Ukraine raised the familiar bile, the revulsion at those who don\u2019t go to war and yet revel in the mad destructive power of violence. Once again, by embracing a childish binary universe of good and evil from a distance, war was turned into a morality play, gripping the popular imagination. Following our humiliating defeat in Afghanistan and the debacles of Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen, here was a conflict that could be sold to the public as restoring American virtue. Russian President Vladimir Putin, like Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein, instantly became the new Hitler. Ukraine, which most Americans undoubtedly couldn\u2019t have found on a map, was suddenly the front line in the eternal fight for democracy and liberty.<\/p>\n

The orgiastic celebration of violence took off.<\/p>\n

The Ghosts of War<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s impossible, under international law, to defend Russia\u2019s war in Ukraine, as it is impossible to defend our invasion of Iraq. Preemptive war is a war crime, a criminal war of aggression. Still, putting the invasion of Ukraine in context was out of the question. Explaining<\/a> \u2014 as Soviet specialists (including<\/a> famed Cold War diplomat George F. Kennan) had \u2014 that expanding NATO into Central and Eastern Europe was a provocation to Russia was forbidden. Kennan had called<\/a> it \u201cthe most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era\u201d that would \u201csend Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 1989, I had covered the revolutions in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Romania that signaled the coming collapse of the Soviet Union. I was acutely aware of the \u201ccascade of assurances\u201d given<\/a> to Moscow that NATO, founded in 1949 to prevent Soviet expansion in Eastern and Central Europe, would not spread beyond the borders of a unified Germany. In fact, with the end of the Cold War, NATO should have been rendered obsolete.<\/p>\n

I naively thought we would see the promised \u201cpeace dividend,\u201d especially with the last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev reaching out to form security and economic alliances with the West. In the early years of Vladimir Putin\u2019s rule, even he lent the U.S. military a hand in its war on terror, seeing in it Russia\u2019s own struggle to contain Islamic extremists spawned by its wars in Chechnya. He provided logistical support and resupply routes for American forces fighting in Afghanistan. But the pimps of war<\/a> were having none of it. Washington would turn Russia into the enemy, with or without Moscow\u2019s cooperation.<\/p>\n

The newest holy crusade between angels and demons was launched.<\/p>\n

War unleashes the poison of nationalism, with its twin evils of self-exaltation and bigotry. It creates an illusory sense of unity and purpose. The shameless cheerleaders<\/a> who sold us the war in Iraq are once again on the airwaves beating the drums of war for Ukraine. As Edward Said <\/a>once wrote<\/a> about these courtiers to power:<\/p>\n

Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires, as if one shouldn\u2019t trust the evidence of one\u2019s own eyes watching the destruction and the misery and death brought by the latest mission civilizatrice<\/em>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I was pulled back into the morass. I found myself writing for Scheerpost<\/a> and my Substack site<\/a>, columns condemning the bloodlusts Ukraine unleashed. The provision of more than $50 billion in weapons and aid to Ukraine not only means the Ukrainian government has no incentive to negotiate, but that it condemns hundreds of thousands of innocents to suffering and death. For perhaps the first time in my life, I found myself agreeing with Henry Kissinger<\/a>, who at least understands realpolitik<\/em>, including the danger of pushing Russia and China into an alliance against the U.S., while provoking a major nuclear power.<\/p>\n

Greg Ruggiero, who runs City Lights Publishers<\/a>, urged me to write a book on this new conflict. At first, I refused, not wanting to resurrect the ghosts of war. But looking back at my columns, articles, and talks since the publication of War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning<\/em> in 2002, I was surprised at how often I had circled back to war.<\/p>\n

I rarely wrote about myself or my experiences. I sought out those discarded as the human detritus of war, the physically and psychologically maimed like Tomas Young<\/a>, a quadriplegic wounded in Iraq, whom I visited recently in Kansas City after he declared that he was ready to disconnect his feeding tube and die.<\/p>\n

It made sense to put those pieces together to denounce the newest intoxication with industrial slaughter. I stripped the chapters down to war\u2019s essence with titles like \u201cThe Act of Killing,\u201d \u201cCorpses\u201d or \u201cWhen the Bodies Come Home.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Greatest Evil Is War<\/a><\/em> has just been published by Seven Stories Press.<\/p>\n

This, I pray, will be my final foray into the subject.<\/p>\n

______________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize\u2013winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for\u00a0<\/em>The New York Times,\u00a0where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief. He previously worked overseas for\u00a0<\/em>The Dallas Morning News,\u00a0The Christian Science Monitor, and<\/em> NPR. He used to be the host of the Emmy Award-nominated <\/em>RT America show\u00a0<\/em>On Contact.<\/em><\/p>\n

Copyright 2022 Chris Hedges<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original – chrishedges.substack.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Writing on War and Living in a World from Hell<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":222757,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67],"tags":[867,417,433,91,112,278,961,2200,70],"class_list":["post-222756","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews","tag-anglo-america","tag-bullying","tag-europe","tag-nato","tag-pentagon","tag-russia","tag-ukraine","tag-us-empire","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222756","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=222756"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222756\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/222757"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=222756"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=222756"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=222756"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}