Dangerous Recent Reading: The Necessity(?) of Evil in War

U.S. military soldiers tend to a local Afghan man, who was shot after being suspected of planting an IED roadside bomb in Genrandai village in September 2012. (Tony Karumba /AFP/Getty Images)

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/22579-commemorating-the-vietnam-war-one-marines-perspective

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/18/moral-injury_n_4959285.html

The Will to Resist, Dahr Jamail

Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt

Kill Anything that Moves, Nick Turse

The need to read

"Why do you read this stuff? You know it's going to upset you. No one will listen to you, and knowing you, you won't keep it to yourself. You have no business trying to shape my morality or anybody else's, so shut up already. Give it a rest!" 

The unexamined life ain't worth a wet cracker

So maybe you can turn away from the horrors of life and party like it's 1999. I can't. I spent a lot of time thinking about the problem, daydreaming, enduring nightmares, and the like, even though I never came closer than a bug's bellybutton to being drafted or placed anywhere close to a gun. The M1s we carried in Army ROTC (compulsory for the first two years at John Carroll University in 1961 and 1962) were wooden mockups--the kind we bought for play as youngsters from Army-Navy surplus stores. 

In America you really didn't have to go to war. You just had to pay attention to the movies--The Deer Hunter, Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, Apocalypse Now, or the first twenty minutes of Saving Private Ryan. John Wayne war movies, like most war movies made during WWII, we discarded as blatantly unrealistic propaganda. Or maybe you just had to be a sensitive kid.

Ol' blood and guts

Except for cutting myself with an X-Acto blade while trimming airplane parts out of balsa wood I never beheld a human wound until an eight year old younger brother of a neighbor pal fell against an old rusty wire on his backyard fence and opened a nine inch gash in his belly one summer day when we were playing "war" of all things. He screamed as he toppled and we all ran back to help. 

Picking him up off the wire we saw the wound gape before us in all its anatomical glory and freshness. It wasn't yet dripping with blood but we could see the subcutaneous layers, the tears in the muscle and fat. Fortunately the internal organs were not torn or falling out of the wound. I ran to fetch his mom from the nearby kitchen, more because if I'd stayed I would have fainted than out of a desire to help. I think this memory for me forever linked uncontrolled screaming and pain. That ended our war play for the week.

The gnat's umbilicus

In 1966 my leaving graduate school meant sacrificing a student deferment and becoming eligible for the draft. For the first time in my life I became a potential participant in a real live war. Within a month the local draft board notified me to report to Indianapolis for a medical evaluation. They were obviously unaware that I was opposed to the war on moral grounds in addition to the universal complaint that serving in a war you're much likelier to get hurt. 

As a dedicated reader of the radical '60s Ramparts magazine I thought the moral grounds of objecting to our widely recognized practices of torturing prisoners and indiscriminate bombing was enough to save my wimpy ass. Review of the materials on conscientious objection belied that. One could not be a "selective CO," objecting to this or that war because one didn't like one aspect or another. Rather you had to show that you objected to all wars irrespective of the various niceties. I wasn't a Mennonite, a Quaker, or other qualifying religion. It looked grim.

Before going to the exam I made an appointment with the dean of the graduate school to explore whether getting hired as a lab assistant in research would restore my deferment. He brusquely, if academically, drummed me out of his office for trying to wheedle a "sinecure." He sounded like he approved of the war and wasn't going to help people escape the inevitable. I was embarrassed that despite my six years of Latin I had to look up the meaning of sinecure.  It's stuff like that that separates the deans from the dropouts. 

The other possibility was to accept a job with the US Public Health Service tracking the spread of venereal diseases from person to person, getting them treated, and hopefully cured. That was worth a deferment but it sounded too much like working for the House Committee on Un-American Activities asking people to "name names." Besides it seemed more like a job for a sexually experienced adult than for a retired altar boy like me. Not being able to qualify for CO I resigned myself to having to accept a prison term because there was no position in the army for "squeamish medic."

"You, there, with the thick glasses"

Cheeks having been spread and cough coughed I stood near the end of the exam process when an examiner noticed that the afternoon sun was fractioning into spectral light as it passed through the very thick lenses I wore to correct for my extreme near-sightedness. 

"You, there, with the thick glasses, have we weighed them yet?"  I showed him the vision portion of my papers was incomplete. "Bring those here a minute, will you?" He prompted me to step forward, took my glasses and placed the right lens in the center of a diopter measuring device that looked like an intersected telescope projecting a beam on the screen in front of him. When the crosshairs of a vertical and horizontal line matched those on the center of the screen one could read the degree of correction from the dials. 

He turned a knob on the instrument. The lines got closer and closer until the rear portion holding my glasses fell out of the track and onto his desk with a metallic thud. "Well, son, I wouldn't want you holding a gun until the enemy was actually in your house and I was several blocks away," he stated and made some check marks on the exam paper. "You can go see the lady at the front and she'll give you your draft card. No need to wait around here." 

What the examiner stated was a fair description of what my 1-Y rating actually meant. Except that in the real event of the enemy being in my home I should still serve in a clerical capacity behind a typewriter and leave the gun stuff to my sister.

[As I sought to clarify in my addendum to Notes from the Front, cf., Nov. 2013, that was as far as I went in war protest at that time. I had no conviction that the war was politically reprehensible and I chose to avoid involvement until much later in the  face of the Iraq and Afghanistan misadventures. I could claim that I chose to be busy with my life and career, as did so many others, who like me by that choice became guilty of shirking our corporate moral duty to resist.]

PTSD vs. moral injury

The three part series by David Wood in the Huffington Post argues that our soldiers suffer something new in the recent wars that is not PTSD despite many similarities, that must be treated only in a manner that recognizes the difference, and that can be tragically debilitating enough to account for the increase in suicides during these war years. It may be a new name for something not clearly in evidence in our many previous wars.

It is what experts are coming to identify as a moral injury: the pain that results from damage to a person’s moral foundation. In contrast to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, which springs from fear, moral injury is a violation of what each of us considers right or wrong. The diagnosis of PTSD has been defined and officially endorsed since 1980 by the mental health community, and those suffering from it have earned broad public sympathy and understanding. Moral injury is not officially recognized by the Defense Department. But it is moral injury, not PTSD, that is increasingly acknowledged as the signature wound of this generation of veterans: a bruise on the soul, akin to grief or sorrow, with lasting impact on the individuals and on their families. (David Wood, Moral Injury, Pt. 1 "The Grunts,"  Huffington Post, March 18, 2014)

Wood's leading example is the stress suffered by a soldier who in self-defense shoots a thirteen year old boy shooting a rifle at him. Another example is of a soldier who lobs a grenade into a house hoping to end a standoff with several Taliban insurgents only to discover that the Taliban have used women and children as human shields who are slaughtered when the grenade goes off.

These are "good guys" who to their minds have done evil things--slaughter children, women, the wrong people, or they have failed their buddies and sent them into a path strung with devastating IEDs, or they have survived when their colleagues have died, or they have handled body parts of people they have known or not known. They find no comfort in being told they did what they had to do. War is morally ambiguous by nature. It was never anything else. 

What I had to do? Really?

Some achieve manageable discomfort for these unfortunate events by fractioning responsibility. For instance in the killing of a child: the Taliban 50%, the victim himself 5%, the Marine Corps 5%, God, maybe 10%, you, the killer, 30%. Other in-country approaches might be writing on a sheet of paper the thing you most regret and then burning it, as others also burn theirs, in a ceremony to close the stress. 

Although the instances cited can be resolved in classical ethics as situations in which one could not do otherwise, either one could not have known innocents would be killed, or one had to kill the innocents to preserve one's own or the lives of comrades, others would not be so easily dispatched. One instance arousing guilt to which many soldiers confessed was that they experienced a thrill in killing and looked forward to more opportunities. How could they regard themselves as "basically really good people" having discovered the monsters within?

Many returned home unable to resume life as "the good father, husband, or son," having encountered the dark side of themselves and were forever rendered "unclean" by doing what they had to do, and worse, enjoying it. Self medication with drugs and alcohol could not obliterate the moral injury. The altered self-evaluation resulting from war experiences could not be removed by PTSD-style repeated desensitization. 

At no point in the Wood article is there any significant mention of the government's responsibility for placing our soldiers in morally ambiguous territory where they would suffer these injuries. It regrettably fails to discuss whether these wars were based on lies, deceptions, and ulterior motives. Wood fails to question the role of the necessity for the wars themselves or to treat the problems of these being "wars of choice." Yet many of the "morally injured" complained "for what? I killed for what?" as they see the nation walk away from the conflicts worsening and suffering unresolved.

The Will to Resist

Dahr Jamail's book allows soldiers to voice that concern. First, that they were tricked into service by the conflation of 9/11 and Saddam Hussein. Second, that the military never really intended to benefit the Iraqis or the Afghans.  And third, that actual military operations were nothing but covers for officers to get promoted, contractors to be overpaid, etc., the customary complaints of the grunts.

The complaining soldiers get to the heart of many moral injuries--the ones which occur when you realize you did horrible things to another people, another country, for no good reason. Worse, in this era of volunteer forces only, the soldiers did what they had to do, not just once but many times over. When the scales of manipulative deceptions had finally fallen from their eyes they resisted--career ruining acts fraught with peril for themselves and their families. 

One resistance, a variant of "search and destroy" patrols, was called "search and avoid" which required complicity of the patrol official. The men simply left the base, found a place where they could relax (many desperate for sleep), called in periodically to report their "moves" about the territory, and return to base at the proper time to submit fudged reports. 

Other resistances involved going AWOL (absent without official leave) for the day of deployment, some fleeing to Canada, some going so far as to make their refusal public record which led to prosecution, jail, and dishonorable discharge. Some committed suicide rather than return for additional deployments. 

Since many of the resisters were originally rural or urban youth with few options for work, training, or college, the sacrifice of their military careers meant they would return to their original desperate condition disgraced and the futures of their families in jeopardy.

Kill Anything and Commemorating the Vietnam War

My Lai, Nick Turse shows, was anything but a one-off. Rather it was symbolic of what becomes of rational men placed in irrational circumstances beyond their control.  Many soldiers quickly became aware of the contradictions of the war and came to question and reject its premises. In the meantime they had to avoid getting sucked in by the terrible lure of killing to feed the daily body count while avoiding adding themselves to the "enemy's" body count.

Unlike soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan they didn't have to redeploy. There were no stop loss orders that stretched their service tours. There were nonetheless many opportunities to do "their jobs" which resulted in moral injuries aplenty.  While homeside demonstrations against the war helped end the conflict, the veterans felt themselves doubly undone: first by their own disillusionment and then by their countrymen's rejection. Homelessness, unemployment, and degeneration became the  hallmarks of the Vietnam vet.

Eichmann in Jerusalem

Eichmann who, if we consider numbers and degrees of horror, should have suffered "moral injury"more than any of the soldiers discussed earlier, didn't. Ms. Arendt relates he was filled with revulsion by what he encountered in one visit to a death camp but apparently one revulsion does not a moral injury make. Or maybe it was just Eichmann and his inability to relate to anything human beyond his concern for advancement in the Nazi regime. Arranging trains to transport millions to their deaths  was too remote from the actual killing and could be dismissed as simply "obeying orders"--doing what he had to do. 

War is too confused with excuses if that one qualifies. It didn't, and Eichmann was hanged for his "murders by bureaucracy." He was not repentant and died like a good Nazi, trusting in no afterlife where he would have to suffer as he had helped so many others to suffer.

On page 109 of the diary, when he describes visits to Auschwitz, Treblinka and a mass grave at Minsk in Russia, the experience becomes almost too much for him.

"Corpses, corpses, corpses. Shot, gassed, dead... they sprung out of the ground as the grave was opened. The stink... it was a fantasy of blood. It was an inferno, a hell, and I defy anyone to say that I wasn't going crazy from it."

In his trial, which lasted from April 11 to August 14 1961, Eichmann expressed no repentance, no hatred, no remorse and no bitterness, save that he did not understand why the Jewish people hated him, because he had merely obeyed orders and surely that was a trait worthy of admiration in any man? (Allan Hall, The Guardian, August 11, 1999, Eichmann memoirs published)

Arendt goes on to discuss some issues raised by the Nuremburg war crimes trials. One among them is whether the victors are morally justified in trying the vanquished of any war as if victory determines who was "right" in a war. Had the outcome been different, could not the Axis powers have tried the Allies for their merciless incendiary bombings of European and Japanese cities, or for the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? 

Another is that so many of the Jews went cooperatively obedient to their trains, led by Jewish leaders made up of respected Jewish elders often recruited by Eichmann himself. Realizing that they were going to die anyway could they not have risen up and overwhelmed the guards rounding them up? Or did they calmly board the trains lest their captors wreak even more torment on others should some Jews resist? 

Was open resistance possible?

The author discusses the complicity of many of the conquered nations in facilitating the final solution. The task of the killing was so huge it could not have been accomplished with such speed had not many of other nations risen eagerly to the challenge.

But there were some people who resisted, particularly the Danes. Having learned that the Nazis were soon to round up and deport the 8,000 Jews of Copenhagen to death camps in eastern Europe, the Danes organized as a nation to aid  the Jews to leave for Sweden who had offered asylum.  In defiance of the German government Danish fishermen used their fishing boats to ferry 7,200 Jews to Sweden. Other Danes sheltered them in their homes or hid them in the countryside. Of the 500 Jews who were captured and taken to Theresienstadt, Czechoslovakia, all but 51 survived to return to Denmark, because Danish officials kept pressure on the Germans to see to the safekeeping of the Jews they had deported. Some nations did what they could--Poland hid 20,000, French clergymen whisked 12,000 Jewish children and hid them in southern France, or smuggled them into Spain or Switzerland. 

Ms. Arendt does not discuss whether the Danes, because of their being categorized as an Aryan people, received a milder hand from the Nazis. Nonetheless, there is always the possibility of resistance. Speaking up against the Nazi hatred of the Jews in the earliest years might have had some effect. Refusing conscription in the early years might also have reduced their capacity for war. Sheltering Jews, complaining before the courts--who can state what tactics would have been effective?

Conclusions for today

If you have concluded that the war is not what you can morally do, you must decide not to participate and must resist in all ways possible the war's continuation. Else you have morally injured yourself. The prosecution of one's own conscience will be unrelenting. This is why moral injury is different from PTSD. What these injured are struggling for is forgiveness. 

Just who can provide that forgiveness is impossible to discern for each--people are so different. Certainly the dead cannot provide it--which may be why many veterans revisit the war territories in the hope an exchange of sorrow and regret with those who were once enemies will deliver that forgiveness. Others, so severely injured they cannot conceive forgiveness as a possibility, end their torment by taking their own lives.

It is not sufficient to opt out for yourself and leave the evil to others. Even if an individual soldier has made the decision to resist for himself, that alone will have been a fearsome step. Given the bonding methods built into military training a resister will likely feel he has turned on his buddies, has failed the brothers who may have died to save his life. Which is why many of the dispirited will refuse further deployment and join with others to work against the furtherance of the war.

The same goes for an uninvolved citizen--which is what I became at the draft medical exam. I was no more in danger of having to refuse to kill or torture helpless Vietnam villagers. I continued in society as if everything was all right when I should have been in the protests, adding my voice to stop the evil being done in my name.