The Jaws of War

Listen to Corporal Michael Poggi, a marine who has just returned to Boston after combat in Iraq. He is encountering civilians: "I notice ten mindless ignorant people…. You can't talk to them about the horror of a dead child's lifeless mutilated body staring back at you from the void, knowing you took part in that end, or laugh at the humor and terror in your weapon jamming in a firefight." Poggi boils with alienation in this account from Operation Homecoming: Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Home Front in the Words of U.S. Troops and Their Families(2006). War has nearly consumed him. John Hersey sums up the effect of all war in Into the Valley: Marines at Guadalcanal: "War is, among other things, a school and during the rest of World War ii, I learned some lessons…. One of the things I learned was that war makes no national or racial or ideological distinctions as it degrades human beings."

Corporal Poggi may be more fully understood in the context of literature, specifically the Iliad(c. 800–600 b.c.). Focusing on book X, Guy Davenport in The Geography of the Imagination(1981) concludes that the epic's theme is "taming the animal in man." After a day of defeats the Greeks are hungry for revenge. Diomedes and Odysseus, wearing animal identifications (of a lion, weasel, and boar), undertake a night reconnaissance. They capture a Trojan, promise him safety, obtain valuable intelligence, and then kill him. He has told them of a troop of Thracians, newly arrived, who have brought their magnificent horses. To bolster their egos bruised in the previous day's fighting, Diomedes and Odysseus set out to steal the horses. They find the Thracians asleep, without sentries. Instead of stealing the horses quietly, they set to work killing the sleeping Thracians, twelve of them, including their king. As they gallop away on the prize horses, a Thracian wakes to the sight of his murdered friends and king, their throats cut, their bodies a bloody tumble. Appalled, he screams. (Through the centuries how frequently has the same cry been uttered!) The sight of their comrades killed in their sleep floods the Thracians. The revenge the Greeks sought with them they now shall seek. Like the Greeks they now are caught up in what the translator of the Iliad, Robert Fagles, calls the "grinding jaws of war." Purpose, honor, the human capacity to make moral and ethical choices—all consumed.

But, unlike the marine's explosion of raw language, the Iliadaims with literary devices to tame the beast of war. Davenport does not tell us how, but we may fill in those blanks. The great epic, for example, unlike most war writing, gives us both sides, the Greek and Trojan. As a result we view the actions of each in an irony provided by knowledge of the other. War, then, is not seen as the combatants see it. Reinforcing this enlarged perspective is the figure of Hector, a Trojan, certainly the most honorable character in the epic. It is remarkable, then, that the...