“You didn’t see where those bullets landed. You didn’t see what happened when the mortar landed. A puff of smoke is not what a mortar looks like when it explodes, believe me. There are horrors that were completely left out of this war. … Was this journalism or was this “coverage”? … [We got] a glorious wonderful picture that had a lot of people watching and a lot of advertisers excited about cable news. But it wasn’t journalism because I’m not sure that we in America are hesitant to do this again, to fight another war, because it looked like a glorious and courageous and so successful, terrific endeavor. We got rid of a horrible leader, … But we didn’t see what it took to do that.”When we hear, for instance, that the United States has bombed a wedding party, that sounds awful, but the word “bombed” can do nothing to convey what it is like for human beings who are faced with seeing their loved ones in pieces in front of them on what was supposed to be a joyful day. The true “horror” (a word we use constantly because there is none other, although it is so inadequate as to be almost useless) is literally indescribable. The reality of what it means for the United States to do something like this is so hideous that anyone who was there and saw it first-hand would likely be traumatized for life.
Chris Hedges, who spent decades as a war correspondent for the New York Times, is deeply troubled by our collective lack of understanding of what war actually does to people. His new book The Greatest Evil is War is an effort to show just what a monstrous thing war is and to make readers determined to eliminate war from the Earth for good. (...)
Hedges shows us the darkest parts of war, the parts left out of Call of Duty. He introduces us, for instance, to Jessica Goodell, a Marine in the Mortuary Affairs unit, whose job it was in Iraq to collect and process the remains of dead marines. Goodell had to go around the scenes of explosions picking up bits of corpses. She saw how real people, with letters and photos of their families in their pockets, were turned by IEDs into nothing but piles of meat, to be scooped into bags. (“We would open a body bag and there was nothing but vaporized flesh. There were not four hands or a whole leg in a bag. We tried to distribute the mush evenly throughout the bags. We had the last body bag come in. We opened it up and it was filled with the heads. I looked at four before looking away. Not only did we have to look at them, we had to pick them up and figure out who it belonged to. The eyes were looking back at us.”).
Goodell’s experience never aired as part of the cable news coverage showing the glorious American entry into Baghdad. But when George W. Bush sent young people into that war, that’s what he was sentencing them to. His decisions meant some of them would become heads in a bag, and others would have to sort and process those heads. Many, many more Iraqis would meet similar violent deaths thanks to Bush. Similar fates have now been inflicted on thousands of Ukrainians and Russians by Vladimir Putin.
The dead are not the only ones affected, of course. Hedges also looks at the veterans and their families who must suffer with lifelong trauma from exposure to extreme violence, or who live with debilitating physical injuries. The casualties of war do not appear in U.S. armed forces recruitment material, and Donald Trump infamously specified he didn’t want “wounded guys” in his military parade, because they wouldn’t look good. But Hedges wants us to come face to face with those who have burns across 90 percent of their bodies, who are paralyzed and disfigured. As he writes:
“If we really saw war, what war does to young minds and bodies, it would be harder to embrace the myth of war. If we had to stand over the mangled corpses of the schoolchildren killed in Afghanistan or Ukraine and listen to the wails of their parents, the clichés about liberating the women of Afghanistan or bringing freedom to the Afghan or Ukrainian people would be obscene. Therefore, war is carefully sanitized. Television reports give us the visceral thrill of force and hide from us the effects of bullets, tank rounds, iron fragmentation bombs, and artillery rounds. We taste a bit of war’s exhilaration, but are protected from seeing what war actually does, its smells, noise, confusion, and most of all its overpowering fear… The wounded, the crippled, and the dead are, in this great charade, swiftly carted offstage. They are war’s refuse. We do not see them. We do not hear them. They are doomed, like wandering spirits, to float around the edges of our consciousness, ignored, even reviled. The message they tell is too unpleasant for us to hear.”
by Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs | Read more:
Image: Nathan J. Robinson
