High on war

A foreign correspondent and eyewitness to horror argues that war and patriotism are lethal addictive drugs and America should go cold turkey.

By Gary Kamiya

Nov. 25, 2002 |

There is no more implacable opponent of a drug than someone formerly addicted to it. For Chris Hedges, the drug was war. "War and conflict have marked most of my adult life," he writes in "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning." For 15 years, Hedges covered wars from El Salvador to the Sudan to Kosovo, mostly as a foreign correspondent for the New York Times. He saw men die yards away from him, witnessed the carnage left by death squads, observed the blood lust, the frenzy, the madness of war. And, he says, he fell in love with it. "I learned early on that war forms its own culture. The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug, one I ingested for many years."

War is intoxicating, Hedges writes, because its extremity offers meaning, elevates life above the trivial. "Many of us, restless and unfulfilled, see no supreme worth in our lives. We want more out of life. And war, at least, gives a sense that we can rise above our smallness and divisiveness." But the drug ends up destroying its users, Hedges writes -- not just physically but psychologically and spiritually.

During his five-year stint in El Salvador, Hedges was evacuated three times because of tips that death squads planned to kill him. "By the end I had a nervous tic in my face," he writes. "Yet each time I came back. I accepted with a grim fatalism that I would be killed in El Salvador. I could not articulate why I should accept my own destruction and cannot now. When I finally did leave, my last act was, in a frenzy of rage and anguish, to leap over the KLM counter in the airport in Costa Rica because of a perceived slight by a hapless airline clerk. I beat him to the floor as his bewildered colleagues locked themselves in the room behind the counter ... I carry a scar on my face from where he thrust his pen into my cheek. War's sickness had become mine."

And that wasn't the end: Hedges went on covering war for another 10 years.

"War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning" is a peculiar book: At once scattershot and obsessively single-minded, it contains brilliant observations and crude generalizations, sometimes in the same paragraph. But if there is overstatement and some fuzzy thinking here, the book succeeds in its primary goal: It reminds us that war is dreadful beyond all imagining, and demolishes the myths we and our leaders embrace about war. Hedges speaks with authority about war's visceral, sexually tinged appeal, the sucking void of its necrophiliac horror rush, the way it corrodes everything that humans take pride in. He sheds a merciless light on subjects we inevitably romanticize. Modern war, he reminds us, is industrial slaughter. As one of the few reporters who broke away from the official reporter pool and actually covered the Gulf War, he knows whereof he speaks.

Like Goya's "Disasters of War," a series of etchings that remains one of the most shocking depictions of the savagery of war, Hedges' book aims to cut off all escape; it is unqualified. Goya's etchings bear dreadful, simple titles like "This always happens" or "Nobody knows why": In similar fashion, Hedges simply refuses to indulge in any discourse that normalizes the unspeakable.

Drawing on his own experiences on the front lines, on the home front and in the burned-out aftermath of war; on works of literature from Catullus and Shakespeare to Philip Larkin and Ivo Andric; and on writings on war by Primo Levi, Ernie Pyle, Ryszard Kapuscinski and many others, Hedges opens a withering line of fire on every single aspect of war and every belief that justifies it. Hedges stares down as if from some great height upon the human race's millennia-old lust for organized killing; in a staccato tone in which anger, weariness and compassion seem compressed, he warns us not to open that door.

Hedge's pronouncements are so sweeping, his condemnation so total, that distinctions, gradations, the whole spectrum of moral and ideological judgment, tend to vanish. Yet this weakness is also the book's strength. The arguments in "War Is a Force" are not all convincing, but its passion, its sometimes stammering urgency, is. Nothing reveals the power of the sun more than the blind eyes of someone who has stared into it.

"One of the most difficult realizations of war is how deeply we betray ourselves, how far we are from the image of gallantry and courage we desire," Hedges writes, describing the terror one feels under fire as "an elephantine fear that grabs us like a massive bouncer who comes up from behind." He believes that Shakespeare's Falstaff, who runs away from battle and scoffs at honor and glory as empty words, may be a more representative soldier than Henry V, he of the lofty "once more into the breach, dear friends" exhortations. He relates a story about a time when suspicious guards in the Sudan aimed their guns at him and another reporter. Without thinking, he quickly stepped behind his colleague. "Better to have any bullets pass through him first ... To this day I have not had the heart to tell him."

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