Post by Moses on Nov 22, 2004 17:28:27 GMT -5
www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/oped/chi-0411210492nov21,1,486287.story?coll=chi-newsopinioncommentary-hed
Succeed or fail, war is hell and everyone loses
By Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite, president and professor of theology at the Chicago Theological Seminary
November 21, 2004
Did we doubt that our American military men and women would be able to succeed in Fallujah, Iraq? No, and dangerously enough, the fact that Americans simply expect that their fighting forces can do anything we ask of them is one of our worst problems today. It can look too easy. We usually don't see the human costs.
Those who have fought in war, like Civil War Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, who coined the phrase, "War is hell," know it better than those who merely write the stories of war and those of us who read or view their analyses. To know war as a soldier is to know that it is horrific. The departure of Secretary of State Colin Powell means that no one senior in the Bush administration actually knows war and knows it is hell.
Hell can be defined simply as the furthest away you can get from what is good and right, the furthest away you can get from God; war is hell because whether we succeed or fail in our military objective, everybody finally loses a lot, even those who live through it.
Pictures have raced around the world again, like the famous photos of the partying torturers at the Abu Ghraib prison. This time the pictures are of a U.S. Marine fatally shooting an apparently unarmed and wounded Iraqi insurgent at a Fallujah mosque. Yes, this so-called "incident" needs a full military investigation. But just for a moment consider that the conditions that would move someone to kill another who is wounded and helpless are the very definition of hell. The insurgent, lying there, perhaps conscious of the fact that he was about to be killed; the American who waves his gun and shoots him--this is it, this is hell. You don't get much further away from what is good and right than that.
The American Friends Service Committee has placards with the names (when they can find them), ages and locations of the Iraqi dead and the American soldiers who have died in this conflict to date. There is, in fact, a huge dispute over the number of Iraqi dead. There have been estimates that range from 14,000 to 100,000. There are also the more than 1,000 Americans killed. Many, many thousands more have been severely wounded. Surely those figures in themselves indicate hell is just around the corner.
But consider if you will the young American Marine who has killed someone unarmed, someone wounded. For the rest of his life, whatever his military punishment or exoneration, he will live in hell. The term "shell shock," first developed in World War I, was coined to describe him. Create a situation where military men (and now women) are constantly in fear, fatigued beyond belief, surrounded by gunfire and bomb explosions, capable of responding with fatal violence in a situation that is anything but clear and you have the conditions that make for shell shock. Gen. George S. Patton, who famously slapped a soldier who was hospitalized for this condition (and who was probably himself suffering from shell shock), did not believe war itself could wound the psyche so grievously. But it can and it does. We now call this condition "post-traumatic stress disorder." Shell shock is a better term, more evocative.
My grandfather spent three years in the trenches in France. He was one of those for whom the term shell shock was invented. He came home from the Great War without a physical scratch on him and he was a ruined human being. Those who knew him before he went off to France described him as fun-loving and kind; he returned furiously angry, unable to concentrate and became an alcoholic, self-medicating for his psychic pain. He lived with our family and most nights he would awake in the night, screaming. He screamed for about 50 years. After the war he lived the rest of his life, simply, in hell.
Here's another thing: Those who work with victims of post-traumatic stress disorder say trauma is contagious. Just being constantly exposed to the descriptions of acts of extreme violence can give you shell shock, say the psychologists who study this phenomenon. In my terms that means, seriously, that "hell is contagious." As we Americans view the violence of war on our TV screens, as we read about military action in the newspapers, as we hear commentary on the radio, we all are a little bit shell shocked from it. It is common for Americans today to complain about the fact that everybody's temper is short, that we are not civil to each other, that we all are distracted and irritable. We were miserably uncivil to each other in this last presidential campaign. Shell shock.
Everything that led up to that incident in the Fallujah mosque is part of what happens when you decide as a nation to go to war. Let's not single out this Marine and distance ourselves from him.
Every American bears responsibility for what is done in our name.
Welcome to hell.
Copyright © 2004, Chicago Tribune
Succeed or fail, war is hell and everyone loses
By Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite, president and professor of theology at the Chicago Theological Seminary
November 21, 2004
Did we doubt that our American military men and women would be able to succeed in Fallujah, Iraq? No, and dangerously enough, the fact that Americans simply expect that their fighting forces can do anything we ask of them is one of our worst problems today. It can look too easy. We usually don't see the human costs.
Those who have fought in war, like Civil War Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, who coined the phrase, "War is hell," know it better than those who merely write the stories of war and those of us who read or view their analyses. To know war as a soldier is to know that it is horrific. The departure of Secretary of State Colin Powell means that no one senior in the Bush administration actually knows war and knows it is hell.
Hell can be defined simply as the furthest away you can get from what is good and right, the furthest away you can get from God; war is hell because whether we succeed or fail in our military objective, everybody finally loses a lot, even those who live through it.
Pictures have raced around the world again, like the famous photos of the partying torturers at the Abu Ghraib prison. This time the pictures are of a U.S. Marine fatally shooting an apparently unarmed and wounded Iraqi insurgent at a Fallujah mosque. Yes, this so-called "incident" needs a full military investigation. But just for a moment consider that the conditions that would move someone to kill another who is wounded and helpless are the very definition of hell. The insurgent, lying there, perhaps conscious of the fact that he was about to be killed; the American who waves his gun and shoots him--this is it, this is hell. You don't get much further away from what is good and right than that.
The American Friends Service Committee has placards with the names (when they can find them), ages and locations of the Iraqi dead and the American soldiers who have died in this conflict to date. There is, in fact, a huge dispute over the number of Iraqi dead. There have been estimates that range from 14,000 to 100,000. There are also the more than 1,000 Americans killed. Many, many thousands more have been severely wounded. Surely those figures in themselves indicate hell is just around the corner.
But consider if you will the young American Marine who has killed someone unarmed, someone wounded. For the rest of his life, whatever his military punishment or exoneration, he will live in hell. The term "shell shock," first developed in World War I, was coined to describe him. Create a situation where military men (and now women) are constantly in fear, fatigued beyond belief, surrounded by gunfire and bomb explosions, capable of responding with fatal violence in a situation that is anything but clear and you have the conditions that make for shell shock. Gen. George S. Patton, who famously slapped a soldier who was hospitalized for this condition (and who was probably himself suffering from shell shock), did not believe war itself could wound the psyche so grievously. But it can and it does. We now call this condition "post-traumatic stress disorder." Shell shock is a better term, more evocative.
My grandfather spent three years in the trenches in France. He was one of those for whom the term shell shock was invented. He came home from the Great War without a physical scratch on him and he was a ruined human being. Those who knew him before he went off to France described him as fun-loving and kind; he returned furiously angry, unable to concentrate and became an alcoholic, self-medicating for his psychic pain. He lived with our family and most nights he would awake in the night, screaming. He screamed for about 50 years. After the war he lived the rest of his life, simply, in hell.
Here's another thing: Those who work with victims of post-traumatic stress disorder say trauma is contagious. Just being constantly exposed to the descriptions of acts of extreme violence can give you shell shock, say the psychologists who study this phenomenon. In my terms that means, seriously, that "hell is contagious." As we Americans view the violence of war on our TV screens, as we read about military action in the newspapers, as we hear commentary on the radio, we all are a little bit shell shocked from it. It is common for Americans today to complain about the fact that everybody's temper is short, that we are not civil to each other, that we all are distracted and irritable. We were miserably uncivil to each other in this last presidential campaign. Shell shock.
Everything that led up to that incident in the Fallujah mosque is part of what happens when you decide as a nation to go to war. Let's not single out this Marine and distance ourselves from him.
Every American bears responsibility for what is done in our name.
Welcome to hell.
Copyright © 2004, Chicago Tribune