Enough is Enough

Tim O’Brien wrote in The Things They Carried that, in war, “the angles of vision are skewed.” I take his word for it both because he was once a soldier and because his description rings true for me about what an atmosphere of military engagement would be like. You can try to understand what is going on in a war but you can’t really know because you can’t get a good look at it, because lots of people are shooting lots of different kinds of guns and you’re too terrified for your life to get a good look around. The all-encompassing danger and violence of the situation prevents and accurate assessment of what is going on. I’ve only read his fiction, but based on the tone of his work I infer that Tim O’Brien doesn’t have a high opinion of war.

Otto von Bismarck was a different sort of man than Tim O’Brien, but he didn’t like war much either. He didn’t like it because you couldn’t control the outcome, and a man like Bismarck was very big on control. He did his best to avoid war in his campaign to create a German state, because he knew the same thing Tim O’Brien would learn in Vietnam years later: once a war begins, you know only two things for sure. First, you know that people will die. Second, you know that you can’t tell which people will die. Bismarck didn’t like that uncertainty, so, even though he was no pacifist, he didn’t much care for war.

Control, as the Blasphemy Blog never tires in pointing out, is mostly an illusion, no matter what it is you’re doing, whether it’s raising a child or planting a garden. We can’t actually control most of the things we think we can. However, when you mistakenly believe you have control over the plants growing in your garden, the worst that can happen is that you’re disappointed when the aphids come. The consequences of false belief in control of a war are far, far worse.

This is what I thought when I heard about the bodies that they’re pulling out of the Tigris River in Iraq today. The newspaper articles about this situation are just a series of accusations and uncertainties; maybe victims were civilians, but maybe they were soldiers. The accusation is that Sunnis did it to Shiites. But which Sunnis, and which Shiites? Or is everyone to blame, and everyone also a victim?

That’s what war zones seem like to me: places where everyone is to blame, and everyone is a victim. The roles reverse with no warning at all. First I kill you, then your brother kills me. Then my brother kills your brother. By this point in human history, we’ve gotten pretty far down the line of brothers, and we’re not running out of brothers, or desire to avenge the ones who get killed.

We were meant for more than this. I know it’s crazy to say that everyone should just throw down their arms and forgive each other, but if someone doesn’t start doing that we’re dead anyway, so we might as well try. We do generally try in this country to fight only justified wars, but it’s a truly incompetent politician who can’t justify a war in a speech. Eventually, though, we’ll just end up justifying ourselves to death. Call me a dreamer, but all I really want is to stay alive.