War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning - Book Reviews

War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning. By Chris Hedges. New York: Public Affairs, 2002, 210 pages. $23.00.

We all know the adage, "War is hell." It isn't news to anyone that war is a grue-some, nauseating experience that grinds up innocence and spits out hatred. What Chris Hedges reminds us in War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, however, is that war also can be strangely compelling, even addictive. Those who live surrounded by chaos and conflict, stalked by an indiscriminant reaper of souls, have no time for the trivial. Their treatened existence takes on an intensity that is unmatched in peacetime. Friends become comrades worth dying for. Romantic attachments become loves that will last beyond the grave. Political, ideological, religious, and ethnic differences become causes that justify slaughter. Life in the face of war is at once more terrifying and more meaningful.

Chris Hedges has seen war, not as a combatant or a refugee, but as a journalist. Hedges spent 15 years as a foreign correspondent, during which time he bore witness to man's inhumanity to man in El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Colombia, Israel, Palestine, the Sudan and Yemen, Algeria, the Punjab and Romania, before covering the Gulf War, Kurdish rebellions in northern Iraq and Turkey, the Bosnian War, and the war in Kosovo. He remarks that he has been "in ambushes on desolate stretches of Central American roads, shot at in the marshes of southern Iraq, imprisoned in the Sudan, beaten by Saudi military police, deported from Libya and Iran, captured and held for a week by Iraqi Republican Guard during the Shiite rebellion following the Gulf War, strafed by MiG-21s in Bosnia, fired upon by Serb snipers, and shelled for days in Sarajevo with deafening rounds of heavy artillery that threw out thousands of deadly bits of iron fragments." His book is his attempt to piece together some insights from all that he ha s observed into a coherent picture of the disturbing attraction war seems to hold for humanity.

Hedges' project is a worthy one, but there are some faults with his realization of it. The reader is at once drawn in by his obvious sincerity and depth of feeling and put off by his sometimes pompous and ornate prose. Phrases such as "all the sacrifice had been for naught" seem antiquated against the gritty backdrop of modern combat. Of greater concern is Hedges' tendency to make sweeping generalizations about the nations and individuals who prosecute wars. In his desire to draw dramatic conclusions and definitive "lessons learned," he ignores the true moral complexity that defines our reality. For example, despite having previously noted that "war is not a uniform experience or event," he writes:

States at war silence their own authentic and humane culture. When this destruction is well advanced they find the lack of critical and moral restraint useful in the campaign to exterminate the culture of their opponents. By destroying authentic culture -- that which allows us to question and examine ourselves and our society--the state erodes the moral fabric. It is replaced with a warped version of reality. The enemy is dehumanized; the universe starkly divided between the forces of light and the forces of darkness. The cause is celebrated, often in overt religious forms, as manifestation of the divine or historical will. All is dedicated to promoting and glorifying the myth, the nation, the cause.

Does he really mean to assert that all states at war behave this way? In his rush to condemn what is indeed an evil when it occurs, he presents an indefensible over-generalization.

Hedges includes several timely references to the US response to the terrorist attacks of II September 2001, and the then-prospective war with Iraq. He makes it clear that he does not approve of war with Iraq (calling it "as ill-conceived as the war we lost in southeast Asia"), but he again does not offer any reasoned arguments to justify his position. And given what he has seen of genuine oppression, his insistence that nationalist fervor in America has turned us all into Jerry Falwells--"We embrace gross and overtly racist notions of Islam... . Questioning of the nationalist line.. . is branded unpatriotic, intellectual treason, just as it was in Argentina in 1982"--rings hollow.

Hedges seems torn in his emotions toward the men and women who actually fight in modern wars. He states that he is not a pacifist, and expresses admiration for the professional soldier who is heir to the legacy of the Roman legions. Yet he labels all killing in war "murder," is intensely skeptical of the heroic ideal, and claims that early in the 20th century, "The accepted principles of humanity, the archaic code of the warrior, became quaint and obsolete." He is aware of the bond of love that forms among comrades-in-arms and wants to be respectful of it, but somehow misses the mark when he writes, "Combatants live only for their herd."

The author gives several examples of war journalists, including himself, who repeatedly sought out conflicts to cover. He compares these journalists to drug addicts, unable to live for too long away from the intensity of the hot zones. The psychology of these journalists is interesting, but it is should not be confused with that of the professional warrior. The journalist who told Hedges he thought he was "trying to be a hero and get exclusive pictures" has a different concept of heroism than that of a Navy SEAL.

Hedges is at his best when he is describing his own wartime experiences and when he is giving the reader detailed facts about specific conflicts -- in other words when he is writing like a journalist. He is at his worst when he tries to move from the particular to the universal. His strongest general conclusions are those about the link between war and sex, explored in the final chapter. Yet his book is well worth reading, despite its flaws. Hedges may over-reach, but what he is aiming for--to protect us from the seduction of war--is noble, and he gives us much to think about along the way.

COPYRIGHT 2003 U.S. Army War College
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