The Wars Less Known

Yossarian tensed with alert astonishment when he heard Colonel Korn's concluding words. "What's that?" he exclaimed. "What have you and Colonel Cathcart got to do with my country? You're not the same." "How can you separate us?" Colonel Korn inquired with ironical tranquility. "That's right," Colonel Cathcart cried emphatically. "You're either for us or against us. There's no two ways about it." "I'm afraid he's got you," added Colonel Korn. "You're either for us or against your country. It's as simple as that."

—Joseph Heller, Catch-22

The world we live in—its divisions and conflicts, its widening gap between rich and poor, its seemingly inexplicable outbursts of violence—is shaped far less by what we celebrate and mythologize than by the painful events we try to forget.

—Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost

The wars of the United States have been showered with prose suggesting that they burst open not bodies, but history. War gives birth to new beginnings, the story goes, even moving the course of human events in positive, if also tragic, ways. Given this belief in war's grandeur and its tectonic role, what followed September 11, 2001, had to be declared another good war. And because most of its victims were homefront civilians, it was called a war like no other. But while the hijackers who heinously killed so many that day may have created a new kind of violent spectacle, they were not the authors of one of the human era's uniquely horrific events. For, I wearily note, we have been here before, and we have been led to forget. Today's war without end began long ago, and it has produced both the corpses of battle and economic and physical casualties in other arenas. Because you may not read this dark tale of two kinds of violence unless there is some small light to be had, the ending will suggest the sources of hope to which I cling.

* * *

I will begin with the unrecognized long war at home, and with an airplane flight I took just after New Year's Day 2002. As it turned out, I was assigned a place on the aisle in a large jet, with young men headed to the Marine's Parris Island training camp in every other seat around me. I was not surprised that it seemed to be the first flight for many, given the military's still heavy recruitment from the struggling classes. So there were some hysterical blurts of laughter, nervous comments, and macho posturing. One especially anxious young man, a boy really, retrieved his Bible and started to pray, but soon began retching violently into an airsickness bag. I asked his seatmate if this was fear of flying, and he said, "I guess, ma'am, he's just sick about the plane and the boot camp all mixed together."

This boy-man had likely heard stories about the rituals of humiliation and physical trials that he would have to undergo at Parris Island. Though he knew that these promised to make a man of him, he could fear beatings and other, more elaborate physical hazing, and the psychological tortures of having his face smeared with lipstick and his neck strung with dead fish, mostly at the hands of his fellow soldiers. He would have signed on nonetheless because his recruiter and other devices of the annual two-billion-dollar budget devoted to military labor marketing had also promised he would enter the ranks of the super-citizen, the true patriot. And because it made military life look like a job-training program or a Dungeons and Dragons game as much or more than preparation for killing or being killed, that advertising promised safety. Oddly, this is something the military may in fact deliver. That is because the war they go to might be like most of the sixty-six acknowledged U.S. foreign interventions...