The Narcotic of War (WARNING: Graphic Content)

WARNING: The following article contains sensitive content and may be disturbing to some readers

War forms its own culture. The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction. War exposes the capacity for evil that lurks not far below the surface of the human being. The chance to exist for an intense and overpowering moment, even if it means certain oblivion, seemed worth it in the midst of war, and very stupid once the war ended.

War gives meaning to sterile lives, it also promotes killers and racists. Organized killing is done best by a disciplined, professional army. But war also empowers those with a predilection for murder.

Petty gangsters, reviled in pre-war Sarajevo, were transformed overnight at the start of the conflict into war heroes. What they did was no different. They still pillaged, looted, tortured, raped, and killed; only they did it to the Serbs, and with an ideological veneer. Slobodan Milosevic went one further. He opened up the country´s prisons and armed his criminal class to fight Bosnia, just as Wolodymr Selenskj did in Ukraine.

Once we sign on for war’s crusade, once we see ourselves on the side of the „good guys,“ once we embrace a theological or ideological belief system that defines itself as the embodiment of goodness and light, it is only a matter of how we will carry out murder. The eruption of conflict instantly reduces the headache and trivia of daily life. The communal march against an enemy generates a warm, unfamiliar bond with our neighbors, our community, our nation, wiping out unsettling undercurrents of alienation and dislocation. War, in times of malaise and desperation, is potent distraction.

The enemy of the moment always represents absolute evil. False Patriotism often a thinly veiled form of collective self–worship, celebrates our goodness, our ideals, our mercy, and bemoans the perfidiousness of those who hate us. Never mind the murder and repression done in our name by bloody surrogates.

But war is a god, as the ancient Greeks and Romans knew, and its worship demands human sacrifice. We urge young men to war, making the slaughter they are asked to carry out a rite of passage. And this rite has changed little over the centuries, centuries in which there has almost continuously been a war raging somewhere on the planet. In the last 10,000 years there have been just 250 years in which no warlike action has rolled over the earth.

The soldier, neglected and even shunned during peacetime, is suddenly held up as the exemplar of the highest ideals of a society, the savior of the state.

War exposes a side of human nature that is usually masked by the unacknowledged coercion and social constrains that glue us together. Our cultivated conventions and little lie of civility lull us into a refined and idealistic view of ourselves.

But modern industrial warfare is leading us, with each technological advance, a step closer to our own annihilation, as we are currently experiencing. We are strapping explosives around our waists, as if we had a suicide pact. This flirtation with weapons of mass destruction is a flirtation with our own obliteration.

While we venerate and mourn our own dead we are curiously indifferent about those we kill. Thus, killing is done in our own name, killing that concerns us little, while those who kill our own are seen as having crawled out of the deepest recesses of the earth, lacking our own humanity and goodness. Our dead. Their dead. They are not the same. Our dead matter, theirs do not. Many Israelis defend the killing of Palestinian children whose only crime was to throw rocks at armored patrols, while many Palestinians applaud the murder of Israeli children by suicide bombers. Armed movements seek divide sanction and the messianic certitude of absolute truth. Patriotism provides the blessing. Soldiers want at least the consolation of purpose, the exposure of war crimes carried out by those fighting on our behalf are dangerous to such beliefs. Dissidents who challenge the goodness of our cause, who question the gods of war, who pull back the curtains to expose the lie are usually silenced or ignored.

We speak of those we fight only in the abstract; we strip them of their human qualities, with the help of linguistic corruption.

The goals of such nationalist rhetoric are to invoke pity for one´s own. The goal is to show the community that what they hold sacred is under threat. The enemy, we are told, seeks to destroy, the very identity of the group or state. Nationalist songs, epic poems, twisted accounts of history take the place of scholarship and art.

The principle of the movement is whoever is not included is excluded, whoever is not with me is against me, according to the motto of the bible, so the world loses all the nuances and pluralistic aspects that have become too confusing for the masses.

War differentiates between mythic reality and sensory reality in wartime. In sensory reality we see events for what they are. Most of those who are thrust into combat soon find it impossible to maintain the mythic perception of war. They would not survive if they did. Wars that lose their mythic stature for the public, such as Korea or Vietnam, are doomed to failure, for war is exposed for what is, organized murder. In mythic war we imbue events with meanings they do not have. We see defeats as signposts on the road to ultimate victory. We demonize the enemy so that our opponent is no longer human. We view ourselves, our people, as the embodiment of absolute goodness. Our enemies invert our view of the world to justify their own cruelty. In most mythic wars this is the case. Each side reduces the other to, objects, eventually in the form of corpses. When we allow mythic reality to rule, as it almost always does in war, then there is only one solution, force. In mythic war we fight absolutes. We must vanquish darkness. It is imperative and inevitable for civilization, for the free world, that good triumph.

Most national myths, at their core, are racist. They are fed by ignorance. Those individuals who understand other cultures, speak other languages, and find richness in diversity are shunted aside. Science, history, and psychology are often twisted to serve myth. And, many intellectuals are willing to champion and defend absurd theories for nationalist ends. By finding our identity and meaning in separateness the myth serves another important function: It makes communication with our opponent impossible. We often become as deaf and dumb as those we condemn.

The Contras in Nicaragua carried out, with funding from Washington, some of the most egregious human rights violations in Central America, yet were lauded as „freedom fighters.“

Jonas Savimbi, the rebel leader the United States backed in Angola´s civil war, murdered and tortured with a barbarity that far outstripped the Taliban. The rebellion Savimbi began in 1975 resulted in more than 500,000 dead. President Ronald Reagan called Savimbi the Abraham Lincoln of Angola, although he littered the country with land mines, once bombed a Red Cross-run factory making artificial legs for victims of those mines, and pummeled a rival´s wife and children to death. The mayhem and bloodletting we backed in Angola were copied in many parts of Africa, including Zaire and Liberia.

The myth of war sells and legitimizes the drug of war. Once we begin to take war´s heady narcotic, it creates an addiction that slowly lowers us to the moral depravity like all addicts.

„We believed we were there for a high moral purpose“ wrote Philip Caputo in his book on Vietnam, Rumor of War. „But somehow our idealism was lost, our morals corrupted, and the purpose forgotten.”

Once war, and especially the total war that marked both the ancient and the modern way of battle, erupts, all is sacrificed before it. The myth of war is essential to justify the horrible sacrifice required in war, the destruction and the death of innocents. It can be formed only by denying the reality of war, by turning the lies, the manipulation, the inhumanness of war into the heroic ideal.

Men fight wars for the most ridiculous of reasons. There was no reason for the war in Bosnia. The warring sides invented national myths and histories designed to mask the fact that Croats, Muslims and Serbs are nearly indistinguishable. It was absurd nuances that propelled the war, invented historical wrongs, which, as in the Middle East, stretched back to dubious accounts of ancient history. Israeli settlers on the West Bank, for example, argue that Palestinian towns, towns that have been Muslim since the seventh century, belong to them because it says so in the Bible, a reminder that this sophistry extends beyond the Balkans.

To speak of the Israeli war of independence with many Israelis, in which stateless European Jews established a country in a land that had been primarily Muslim since the seventh century, is to shout into a vast black hole. There is an emotional barrier, a desire not to tarnish the creation myth, which makes it difficult for many Israeli Jews, including some of the most progressive, to acknowledge the profound injustice the creation of the state of Israel meant for Palestinians. Americans struggle with these myths as well, only grudgingly conceding that many of the founding fathers were slave owners and much of the nation acquired after a genocidal campaign against Native Americans.

In peacetime this collective amnesia is challenged by a few intrepid scholars. Indeed, some of the best scholarly work on the 1948 war and what it meant for the Palestinians has come from Israeli historians, but their voices are muted or silenced in times of crisis. America is no different. They embrace gross and overtly racist notions of Islam that paint all Muslims as having a tendency, to violence, anger, anti-modernism, and close-mindedness. As they are also doing the same with the Russians right now. Questions of the nationalist line, or an attempt to address historical injustices committed by them against their foes, is branded unpatriotic, and intellectual treason.

The competing nationalist propaganda in Yugoslavia created a conflict in the country best equipped of all the Eastern European states to integrate with the West after the collapse of communism. Because there was no real reason to fight, there was an urgent need to swiftly turn a senseless fratricide, one organized by the CIA by criminals and third-rate political leaders for power and wealth, into an orgy of killing, torture and mass execution. This indiscriminate murder, these campaigns of ethnic cleansing, were used to create facts, as it were. The slaughter was carried out to give to these wars the justification they lacked when they began, to fuel mutual hatred and paranoia, as well as to enrich the militias and paramilitary groups that stole and looted from their victims. Ethnic warfare is a business, and the Mercedes and mansions of the warlords in Belgrade proved it. The cast of warlords in the former Yugoslavia was made up of the dregs of Yugoslav society. These thieves, embezzlers, petty thugs, and even professional killers swiftly became war heroes. They were, at least, colorful, with Captain Dragan, a Serbian soldier of fortune who was allegedly an ex-convict, from Australia; the fascist demagogue Vojislav Seselj; and Zeljko Raznjatovic, known as Arkan, who had a criminal record in several Western European countries. The Croats had their own collection of gangsters, including Branimir Glavas, who stormed into Serbian villages with his militias and executed Serbian civilians and the Croatian policemen who had tried to keep the nationalist´s mobs from killing them. The gangsters who took over Sarajevo at the start of the war to battle the Serbs were no different. Loot and power were always their primary objectives.

There never has been, or ever can be, a “good” or worthwhile war. There is nothing redeeming about any war, including the supposed good wars, where millions of brainless people all agreed that they had to be fought. The Allied incendiary bombs that spread fires through Dresden and Tokyo left some 150,000 people dead. Talk not of the good war to those in Hiroshima or Nagasaki. We are naive to ignore these and countless other events, to ennoble indiscriminate slaughter and industrial killing on so vast a scale.

Modern war is directed primarily against civilians. For Example, look at Kosova, Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Congo, Rwanda, Vietnam, or World War 2, just to name a few. And nuclear terrorism is the “logical“ outcome of modern industrialized warfare.

The myth of war rarely endures for those who experience combat. War is messy, confusing, sullied by raw brutality and an elephantine fear that grabs us like a massive bouncer who comes up from behind. Soldiers in the moments before real battle weep, vomit, and write last letters home, although these are done more as a precaution than from belief. All are nearly paralyzed with fright. There is a morbid silence that grips a battlefield in the final moments before the shooting starts, one that sets the back of the head pounding in pain, wipes away all appetite, and makes your fingers tremble as you ready yourself to go forward against logic. You do not think of home or family, for to do so is to be overcome by a wave of nostalgia and emotion that can impair your ability to survive. One thinks, so far as it is possible, of cleaning weapons, of readying for the business of killing. No one ever charges into battle for God and country.

Excerpt from the Book War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning from Chris Hedges published in 2002:

„Just remember,“ a Marine Corps lieutenant colonel told me as he strapped his pistol belt under his arm before we crossed into Kuwait, „that none of these boys is fighting for home, for the flag, for all that crap the politicians feed the public. They are fighting for each other, just for each other.“

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The imagined heroism, the vision of a dash to rescue a wounded comrade, the clear lines we thought were drawn in battle, the images we have of our own reaction under gunfire, usually wilt in combat. This is a sober and unsettling realization. We may not be who we thought we would be. One of the most difficult realizations of war is how deeply we betray ourselves, how far we are from the image of gallantry and courage we desire, how instinctual and primordial fear is. We do not mediate on action. Our movements are usually motivated by a numbing and overpowering desire for safety. And yet there are heroes, those who somehow rise above it all, maybe only once, to expose themselves to risk to save their comrades. Afterwards they are usually embarrassed about what they did, unable to explain it, reticent to talk. Many are not sure they could do it again.

We are humiliated in combat. The lofty words that inspire people to war. Duty, honor, glory, swiftly become repugnant and hollow. They are replaced by the hard, specific images of war, by the prosaic names of villages and roads. The abstract and false rhetoric of patriotism is obliterated, exposed as the empty handmaiden of myth. Fear brings us all back down to earth.

Once in a conflict, we are moved from the abstract to the real from the mythic to the sensory. When this move takes place, we have nothing to do with a world not at war. When we return home, we view the society around us from the end of a very long tunnel. There they still believe. In combat such belief is shattered, replaced not with a better understanding, but with a disconcerting confusion and a taste of war´s potent and addictive narcotic. Combatant live only for their herd, those hapless soldiers who are bound into their unit to ward off death. There is no world outside the unit. It alone endows worth and meaning. Soldiers will rather die than betray this bond. And there is, as many combat veterans will tell you, a kind of love for this.

Lurking beneath the surface of every society, is the passionate yearning for a nationalist cause that exalts us, the kind that war alone of individual consciousness. We abandon responsibility for a shared, unquestioned communal enterprise, however morally dubious.

There is little that logic or fact or truth can do to alter the experience. Moreover, once this crusade is embraced by the nation, the myth predetermines how the world is perceived. It is only after the myth implodes, often as suddenly as it descended, that one can again question the motives and the actions of the state. Once the lights are flicked on again there is a midsummer Night’s Dream quality to the war experience, as if no one can quite remember what happened.

The nationalist is by definition an ignoramus. Nationalism is the line of least resistance, the easy way. The nationalist is untroubled, he knows or thinks he knows what his values are, his, that´s to say national, that´s to say the values of the nations he belongs to, ethical and political; he is not interested in others, they are of no concern of his, hell, it´s other people in his own image, as nationalists.

Every society, ethnic group or religious group nurtures certain myths, often centered around the creation of the nation or the movement itself. These myths lie unseen beneath the surface, waiting for the moment to rise ascendant, to define and glorify followers or members in time of crisis. National myths are largely benign in times of peace. They are stoked by the entertainment industry, in school lessons, stories, and quasi-historical ballads, preached in mosques, or championed in absurd historical dramas that are always wildly popular during war. They do not pose a major challenge to real historical study or a studied tolerance of others in peacetime. But national myths ignite a collective amnesia in war. They give past generations a nobility and greatness they never possessed. Almost every group, and especially every nation, has such myths. These myths are the kindling nationalists use to light a conflict.

A soldier who is able to see the humanity of the enemy makes a troubled and ineffective killer. To achieve to corporate action, self-awareness and especially self-criticism must be obliterated. We must be transformed into agents of a divinely inspired will, as defined by the state, just as the we fight must be transformed into the personification of unmitigated evil. There is little room for individuality in war.

The effectiveness of the myths peddled in war is powerful.

Man often comes to doubt his own perceptions. He hides these doubts, like a troubled believer, sure that no one feels them. He feels guilty. The myths have determined not only how he should speak but how he should think. The doubts he carries, the scenes he sees that do not conform to the myth are hazy, difficult to express, unsettling. And as the atrocities mount, as civil liberties are stripped away, he struggles uncomfortably with the jargon and cliches. He has trouble expressing his discomfort because the collective shout has made it hard for him to give words to his thoughts. This self-doubt is aided by the monstrosity of war.

In wartime an attack on a village where women and children are killed, an attack that does not conform to the myth peddled by our side, is hard to fathom and articulate. We live in wartime with a permanent discomfort, for in wartime we see things so grotesque and fantastic that they seem beyond human comprehension. War turns human reality into a bizarre carnival that does not seem part of our experience. It knocks us off balance.

This sense that we cannot trust what we see in wartime spread throughout the society. The lies about the past, the eradication of cultural, historical, and religious monuments that have been part of a landscape for centuries, all serve to shift the ground under which the population is standing. Citizens lose their grip. Whole worlds vanish or change in ways they cannot fully comprehend.

There is no shortage of villages in Russia or Germany or Poland where all memory of the Jewish community is gone because the physical culture has been destroyed. And, when mixed with the strange nightmarish quality of war, it is hard to be completely sure of your own memories.

On June 28, 1914, Gavrilo Principe shot and killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria on a Sarajevo street, an act that set off World War 1. But what that makes him in Bosnia depends on which lesson plan you pick up. „A hero and a poet,“ says a textbook handed to high school students in the Serb-controlled region of this divided country. An „assassin trained and instructed by the Serbs to commit this act of terrorism,“ says a text written for Croatian students. „A nationalist whose deed sparked anti-Serbian rioting that was only stopped by the police from all three ethnic groups,“ reads the Muslim version of the event.

In communist Yugoslavia, Principe was a hero. But with the partition of Bosnia along ethnic lines, huge swathes of history are reinterpreted. The Muslim books, for example, portray the Ottoman Empires’ rule over Bosnia, which lasted 500 years, as a golden age of enlightenment; the Serbs and Croats condemn it as an age of „brutal occupation.“

The Myth of War entices us with the allure of heroism. But the images of war handed to us, even when they are graphic, leave out the one essential element of war, fear. There is, until the actual moment of conformation, no cost to imagining glory. The visual and audio effects of films, the battlefield descriptions in books, make the experience appear real. In fact, the experience is sterile. We are safe. We do not sell rotting flesh, hear the cries of agony, or see before us blood entrails seeping out of bodies. We view, from a distance, the rush, the excitement, but feel none of the awful gut-wrenching anxiety and humiliation that come with mortal danger. It takes the experience of fear and the chaos of battle, the deafening and disturbing noise, to wake us up, to make us realize that we are not who we imagined we were, that war as displayed by the entertainment industry might, in most cases, as well be ballet. Soldiers in war try to recreate the fiction of war, especially when a camera is around to record the attempted heroics. The result is usually pathetic.

The prospect of war is exciting. Many young men, schooled in the notion that war is the ultimate definition of manhood, that only in war will they be tested and proven, that they can discover their worth as human beings in battle, willingly join the great enterprise. The admiration of the crowd, the high-blown rhetoric, the chance to achieve the glory of the previous generation, the ideal of nobility beckon us forward. And people, ironically, enjoy righteous indignation and an object which to unleash their anger. War usually starts with collective euphoria.

It is all the more startling that such fantasy is believed, given the impersonal slaughter of modern industrial warfare.

High explosives were fired from huge distances in the Gulf War that reduced battalions of Iraqis to scattered corpses. Iraqi soldiers were nothing more on the screens of sophisticated artillery pieces than little dots scurrying around like ants, that is, until they were blasted away. Bombers dumped tons of iron fragmentation bombs on them. Our tanks, which could outdistance their Soviet-built counterparts, blew Iraq armored units to a standstill. Helicopters hovered above units like the angel of death in the sky. Here there was no pillage, no warlords, no collapse of unit discipline, but the cold and brutal efficiency of industrial warfare waged by well-trained and highly organized professional killers.

Men in modern warfare are in service to technology. Many combat veterans never actually see the people they are firing at nor those firing at them, and this is true even in lower intensity insurgencies. But, soldiers who kill innocents pay a tremendous personal emotional and spiritual price. But within the universe of total war, equipped with weapons that can kill hundreds or thousands of people in seconds, soldiers only have time to reflect later. By then the soldiers often have been discarded, left as broken men in a civilian society that does not understand them and does not want to understand them. Once violence on this scale is unleashed it usually continues to plague societies.

Excerpt from the Book War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning from Chris Hedges published in 2002:

I knew a Muslim soldier, a father, who fought on the front lines around Sarajevo. His unit, in one of the rare attempts to take back a few streets controlled by the Serbs, pushed across Serb lines. They did not get very far. The fighting was intense. As he moved down the street he heard a door swing open. He fired a burst from his AK-47 assault rifle. A twelve-year-old girl dropped dead. He saw in the body of the unknown girl lying prostrate in front of him the image of his own twelve-year-old daughter. He broke down. He had to be helped back to the city. He was lost for the rest of the war, shuttered inside his apartment, nervous, morose, and broken.

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This experience is far more typical of warfare than the Rambo heroics we are fed by the state and the entertainment industry. The cost of killing is all the more bitter because of the deep disillusionment that war usually brings. It takes little in wartime to turn ordinary men into killers. Most give themselves willingly to the seduction of unlimited power to destroy and all feel the heavy weight of peer pressure. Few, once in battle, can find the strength to resist, but the poison that is war does not free us from the ethics of responsibility.

The German veteran of World War 1 Erich Maria Remarque, in All Quiet on the Western Front, wrote of the narcotic of war that quickly transformed men into beasts. He knew the ecstatic high of violence and the debilitating mental and physical destruction that comes with prolonged exposure to war´s addiction.

„We run on,“ he wrote, „overwhelmed by this wave that bears us along, that fills us with ferocity, turns us into thugs, into murderers, into God knows what devils; this wave that multiples our strength with fear and madness and greed of life, seeking and fighting for nothing but our deliverance.“

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In the Reserve Police Battalion 101 in Poland during World War 2, the battalion was ordered to shoot 1,800 Jews in the Polish village of Jozefow in a day long action. The men in the unit had to round up the Jews, march them into the forest, and one by one order them to lie down in a row. The victims, including women, infants, children, and the elderly, were shot dead at close range.

The battalion was ordered to do the killing on the morning of July 12, 1942. They were offered the option to refuse, an option only about a dozen men took, although more asked to be relieved once the killing began. Those who did not want to continue, were disgusted rather than plagued by conscience. When the men retuned to the barracks they „were depressed, angered, embittered and shaken.“ They drank heavily. They were told not to talk about the event, „but they needed no encouragement in that direction.“

In the massacres that followed, the killings by the battalion became less personal. The executioners drank now, as executioners did in Bosnia and Kosova, before their work. Having killed once, the men did not experience such a traumatic shock the second time. It no longer became hard to find volunteers, and the killing escalated. In a massacre that became known as the „Harvest Festival“ some 500 men killed 30,500 Jewish inhabitants of the work camps Trawniki, Poniatowa, and Majdanek in a matter of days. The men in the battalion, aged thirty-seven to forty-two, were not elite troops. They were not highly trained nor had they been specially picked for the job. They were of middle- or lower-class origin. And their behavior, given the savagery of modern warfare, has been widely replicated. There are no shortages of former soldiers and militiamen all around the Globe, who have done the same. There are always people willing to commit unspeakable human atrocity in exchange for a little power and privilege.

The task of carrying out violence, of killing, leads to perversion. The seductiveness of violence, the fascination with the grotesque, the god-like empowerment over the other human lives and the drug of war combine, like the ecstasy of erotic love, to let our senses command our bodies. Killing unleashes within us dark undercurrents that see us desecrate and whip ourselves into greater orgies of destruction.

The dead, treated with respect in peacetime, are abused in wartime. They become pieces of performance art. Corpses were impaled in Bosnia on the sides of barn doors, decapitated, or draped like discarded clothing over fences. They were dumped into rivers, burned alive in homes, herded into warehouses and shot and mutilated, or left on road sides. Children could pass them on the street, gape at them and walk on.

Mutilation has been part of the military behavior since there were men in arms. If you kill your enemy his body becomes your trophy, your possession, and this has been a fundamental part of warfare since before the Philistines beheaded Saul. US Soldiers took the Native women, cut their breasts and genitals off, stretched them across the pommels of their saddles. During the Second World War, the Nazis removed the skin of the Jews to make handbags, lampshades etc. while the rest of the corpses were used as fertilizer or processed into soap burned to ashes or simply buried in mass graves. In the Vietnam War, many colonels carried around cut off ears of their enemies in bags as trophies. In Israel Jewish soldiers made tobacco pouches from female breasts which they cut off from Muslim women. In the civil war in El Salvador government soldiers sometimes carried photos of themselves squatted around the body of a rebel killed in a firefight. In Bosnia there was a local Croat warlord who rode around his village with the skull of the local imam for a hood ornament. To go one step further. In Liberia for example, it was not uncommon for local warlords and soldiers to eat the hearts of their enemies and of innocent children, believing that this would give them great power and strength. In Mexico, and in many other places it is also common in the War Culture to kill the enemy by cutting their hearts out of their chest and biting into them.

There are few anti-war movies or novels that successfully portray war, for amidst the horror is also the seduction of the machine of war, all powerful, all absorbing, most of the effective antiwar novels such as Elsa Morante’s History: A Novel focus on the efforts of war, on those who bear the brunt of war brutality. Morante, who spent a year hiding among remote farming villages south of Rome at the end of World War 2, set out to write a novel about those whom history ignores and forgets. Her world was that of victims. It is was a world not of heroics and glory but of rape, bombing raids, crime, cattle cars filled with human beings being taken to slaughter, soldiers dying of frostbite, and the fear of secret police and the military. In her world, no one had control.

Pity is often banished in war. And the desperate struggle of the weak to survive, so fundamental to what war is about, rarely seems able to achieve the centrality it deserves. The successful anti-war novels and films are those like, Elsa Morante´s, that eschew battle scenes and focus on the heartbreak of violence and slaughter. It no doubt helped that Elsa Morante was a woman, less able to identify with and be seduced by war and the allure of violence. But in most wars’ women, if not engaged in the fighting, stand on the sidelines to cheer their men onward. Few are immune.

There is in wartime a nearly universal preoccupation with sexual liaisons. There is a kind of breathless abandon in wartime, and those who in peacetime would lead conservative and sheltered lives give themselves over to wanton carnal relationships. Men, and especially soldiers, are preoccupied with little else. With power reduced to such a raw level and the currency of life and death cheap, eroticism races through all relationships. There is in these encounters a frenetic lust that seeks, on some level, to replicate or augment the drug of war. It is certainly not about love, indeed love itself in wartime is hard to sustain or establish.

Casual encounters are charged with raw, high-voltage sexual energy that smacks of the self-destructive lust of war itself. The erotic in war is like the rush of battle. It overwhelms the participants. Women who might not otherwise be hailed as beauties are endowed. Men endowed with little more than the power to kill are lionized and desired. Bodies, just as they lie scattered and immobile a few hundred yards away, become tools, objects to an end. The fleeting sexual encounters, intense, overpowering, and largely anonymous, deflate with tremendous speed and leave behind guilt, even disgust, and a void that expands into a swamp of loneliness. Stay long enough in war and real love, real tenderness and connection, becomes nearly impossible. Sex in war is another variant of the drug of war.

„if we are honest,“ the philosopher Glenn Gray wrote in The Warriors of Reflections on Men in Battle, “most of us who were civilians’ soldiers in recent wars will confess that we spent incomparably more time in the service of Eros during our military careers than ever before or again in our lives. When we were in uniform almost any girl who was faintly attractive had an erotic appeal for us. For their part, millions of women find a strong sexual attraction in the military uniform, particularly in time of war.“

The Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski in Another Day of Life, his book about the Angolan civil war, told of a twenty-year-old rebel soldier named Carlotta, a member of the popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), the insurgent group backed by the Soviet Union and Cuba. A legendary fighter, and Kapuscinski correctly pointed out that girls make much better child soldiers than boys because they are less prone to hysterics, she met Kapuscinski and his crew in a baggy commando uniform with an automatic slung on her shoulder. The men are besotted. They see her as endowed with „elusive charm“ and „great beauty.“

„Later when I developed the pictured of her, the only pictures of Carlotta that remained, I saw that she wasn’t so beautiful. Yet nobody said as much out loud, so as not to destroy our myth, our image of Carlotta from that October afternoon on Benguela.“

„She seemed beautiful. Why?“ he asked. „Because that was the kind of mood we were in, because we needed it, because we wanted it that way. We always create the beauty of woman, and that day we created Carlotta´s beauty. I can´t explain it any other way.“

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Those relationships that appear to extend beyond the erotic, however, are also hollow. Many liaisons in wartime look and feel like love, but they too have more to do with projection than reality. Soldiers fall in love with women across a vast cultural divide, although the linguistic barrier makes a communication difficult. Here too war perverts the relationship. For in the solider lies absolute power, protection, and possibly escape. The woman´s appeal lies in the gentleness that is absent in war. Each finds in the other attributes that war wipes out, tenderness or security. But few of these liaisons last once the conflict ends.

The young are drawn to those who wield violence and power.

The killers and warlords became the object of sexual fantasy. The paramilitary leader Zeljko Raznatovic, known as Arkan, was, according to Serbian opinion polls, one of the most desired men in the country.

Zeljko Raznatovic aka Arkan, the Butcher of Bosnia with his tiger cub in his hand and behind him his paramilitary unit called the „tigers“

War turned Belgrade, along with every other capital caught up in conflict, into Caligula´s Rome. There was a moral lassitude in the air, bred of hopelessness and apathy. The city´s best known gangsters, sometimes in the company of Slobodan Milosevic´s son Marko, who threatened bar patrons with automatic weapons, cruised the streets in BMW´s and Mercedes. They filled the nightclubs of Belgrade, dressed in their expensive black Italian suits and leather jackets.

War breaks down long-established prohibitions against violence, destruction, and murder. And with this often comes the crumbling of sexual, social, and political norms as the domination and brutality of the battlefield is carried into personal life. Rape, mutilation, abuse, and theft are the natural outcome of a world in which force rules, in which human beings are objects. The infection is pervasive. Society in wartime becomes atomized. It rewards personal survival skills and very often leaves those with decency and compassion trampled under the rush. The pride one feels in a life devoted to the nation or to an institution or a career or an ideal is often replaced by shame and guilt. Those who have lived upright, socially productive lives are punished for their gullibility in the new social order.

The wars in the Balkans saw the rise of rape camps, places where women were kept under guard and repeatedly abused by Serbian paramilitary forces. When this became boring, for perverse sex, like killing, must constantly entail the new and bizarre, the women were mutilated and killed, reportedly on video. Women were also held in very similar conditions in the so called „Dirty War“ in Argentina, and later murdered, were the women were used and then discarded like waste, their drugged bodies at times dumped from helicopters into the sea.

In the contact report 150 we get a similar insight into the realities of the cruelty and perversion of war, which in turn reflects the drug or intoxication of war.

One Hundred Fiftieth Contact
Saturday, 10th October 1981, 03:15 hrs.

Quetzal:

306. This kind of special torture, as the Iranian revolutionary guards and Khomeini’s henchmen call it, and which is legalized in such a form that the condemned women and girls, who are even children, are massacred alive, will not only take place in 1982, because it is already being used today, along with many other tortures.
307. But we have already spoken of this in detail, at least with regard to the executions of women and girls in pregnant states, etc.
308. In truth, however, the world should know which kind of horror is actually going on in Iran.
309. As one example among thousands, I can report on events that I myself have observed on my monitors and which have driven up naked horror in me.
310. In a dimly lit dwelling I saw how a girl of less than 11 years of age put to death in the cruelest wise.
311. Already physically developed as a woman, the child was stretched out on her hands and feet and tied to a hard couch, on which nine men raped her in the most brutal form.
312. While the last of the criminal and dehumanized creatures was still having his way with the girl, another suddenly drew a knife and hacked the child’s young breasts to pieces, while the rapist cried out lustfully and bathed lustfully in the spurting blood.
313. This, however, was only the prelude to the even more terrible end, for now the rest of the beastly creatures fell upon the child, with another knife penetrating the child’s vagina and slashing it open, jerking it up to the abdomen so that the intestines spilled out.
314. Another cut off the child’s ears, and yet another went on a rampage of murder and bloodlust with a knife against the girl’s thighs.
315. The hell of a truly gruesome bloodlust played itself out before finally one of the beastly men put his gun to the child’s temple and carried out the final execution.
316. From this you see that things are truly going on in Iran under the dirty alias of religion through which the rest of the unknowledgeable world could learn the horror.

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 In town after town in Bosnia and Kosova, warlords turned universes upside down. They preyed on the weak to fulfill their own carnal lusts and desires. They stole and raped, murdered and abused, and their immoral universe proved ascendant. In village after village in Bosnia, or the Congo, the killers and their militias ruled. They were once embraced as saviors, shielded by the myth of war, but they had become parasites.

These militias, without the discipline or military code of the professional solider, were frightening. They were populated with criminals, misfits, and children who drive around with car trunks full of weapons they did not know how to use. They killed and tortured according to whims and moods. They enjoyed turning humans into pawn, playing with their fear, holding them sometimes as „guests“ while they unleashed a lifetime of bitterness upon those around them.

(Once in a village in Kosova a local warlord from the Kosovar Liberation Army with enough weapons dangling off him to outfit three or four fighters. He began barking orders to his hapless followers and when they did not heed his demands started firing into the dirt. Blood began oozing out of one of his combat boots. Determined not to let his visitors see his self-inflicted wounds he clinched his teeth and limped away.)

In wartime nearly, everyone becomes an accomplice. The huge dislocation, the millions who lose times and property, are often compensated with the property of those that were forced out. Those who had their homes taken away from them in Srebrenica by the Bosnian Serbs were later given the homes of Serbs who fled the suburbs of Sarajevo. The moral destructiveness of ethnic cleansing, like the psychic wounds of war, thus reverberates throughout a society. Families who are stripped of all they own and then handed by the state apartments that were seized from others are complications, whether they like it or not, in the crimes of war.

In April 1992, when the conflict between the Bosnian Serbs and Muslims began, Milan Lukic returned from Serbia to his hometown. He gathered together a group of men, including his brother Milos, his cousin Sredoje, and a waiter, Mitar Vasiljevic. Lukic, who often went barefoot, called the group the Wolves. He set about robbing Muslim homes. The plunder quickly tuned to killing. On May 18, Lukic burst into Demo Zukic´s home and shot him and his wife, Bakha, in the back, according to neighbors who saw the shooting. He drove the terrified husband away in the family car, a red Volkswagen Passat. Zukic was never seen again. But the car became a harbinger of death.

The killings quickly became frenzied and common. On one occasion, Lukic used a rope to tie a man to his car and dragged him through the streets until he died. One at least two occasions, he herded large groups of Muslims into houses and set the building on fire. Zahra Turjacanin, her face and arms badly marred by the flames, escaped from one burning house on June 27, 1992 and raced screaming through the streets. Townspeople said she was the only survivor of seventy-one people inside.

Lukic and his followers raped young girls held captive at the Vilina Vlas spa outside Visegrad. Jasmina Ahmedspahic, a young woman, jumped to her death from a window of the spa after being raped for four days. Then Lukic began to drive his captives to the center of the bridge. Lukic and his men taunted their victims, who were made to stand on the walls of the bridge, before pushing them into the water and opening fire with automatic weapons. He stuffed pork in the mouths of his Muslim victims and began to beat them to death with metal rods. Bodies, bloated and disclosed from beatings and knife slashes, floated down the river, getting caught in the undergrowth along the banks. In one village, Slap, twelve miles downriver from Visegrad, the villagers said they buried 180 bodies that floated up on the banks. One man was found crucified on the back of a door. On another occasion they found a garbage bag filled with human heads.

Human beings become pawns, manipulated and moved around a board like chess pieces. Those struggling to survive in a morally bankrupt universe find that there are few restraints left. The perversion seeps into the behavior of those who came with noble sentiments to help. The U.N peacekeeping troops in Bosnia, just as aid workers in Africa did, used the money and power they wielded to frequent or even run prostitution rings.

The most notorious prostitution ring in Sarajevo during the war, one that catered to the peacekeepers, the foreign community, and the gangsters, all those with hard currency, was run by Ukrainian troops. They had also cornered the market on black market diesel, although they had the annoying habit of mixing it with water.

The reporters, diplomats, aid workers, and peacekeepers who travel into war zones, without the restraint of law and amid a sea of powerless people, often view themselves as entitled. They excuse immoral behavior because of the belief that the work they carry out is for a greater good, the rescue of those around them, which outweighs impropriety. They become giddy with the admiration and social status that come with being protected and privileged. Diplomats who entered Sarajevo restaurants would be applauded. they had servants, new jeeps, nice houses, and clout. And they had power unlike anything they experienced at home.

The conflict created a new elite, foreign class. It was a class that fed off of war´s lawlessness and perversion. Students who spoke English in Bosnia and later Kosovo were soon making in a week more money than their teachers made in a year. Many lost all desire to study. It was not worth it. They paraded the new clothes and sunglasses they could buy with their dollars. Some began to look down on those around them with the same arrogance of those they worked for.

To those who are hungry, who spend all day in cold, gutted homes with no running water, who sleep on the concrete floors of overcrowded schools set up as refugee centers, who wake up and spend hours hunting for food or standing in long lines outside aid distribution centers, a little more humiliation is not much to endure. Many longed to enter the easy world of the elite. They would pay any price.

Many of those who set out to write their memoirs, or speak about the war, do so with shame. They know war´s perversion. It corrupts nearly everyone. To be greeted by an indifferent public, by people who would rather not examine, in the end, their own darkness, make the effort Herculean. After each war some struggle to tell us how the ego and vanity of commanders leads to the waste of lives and needless death, how they too became tainted, but the witnesses are soon ignored. It is not a pleasant message.

The battlefield, with its ecstasy of destruction, its constant temptation of self-sacrifice, its evil bliss, is more about comradeship. The closeness of a unit, one enters into that fraternity once you have been together under fire, is possible only with the wolf of death banging at the door. The feeling is genuine, but without the threat of violence and death it cannot be sustained.

There are few individual relationships, the only possible way to form friendship in war. There are not the demands on us that there are in friendships. Veterans try to regain such feelings, but they fall short. The essential difference between comradeship and friendship it seems consists in a heightened awareness of the self in friendship and in the suppression of self-awareness in comradeship.

Comrades seek to lose their identities in the relationship. Friends do not.

On the contrary friends find themselves in each other and thereby gain greater self-knowledge and self-possession.

The struggle to remain friends, the struggle to explore the often-painful recesses of two hearts, to reach the deepest parts of another´s being, to integrate our own emotions and desires with the needs of the friend, are challenged by the collective rush of war. There are fewer demands if one joins the crowd and gives his emotions over to the communal crusade.

The violence of war is random. It does not make sense. And many of those who struggle with loss also struggle with the knowledge that the loss was futile and unnecessary. This leaves psychological wounds among survivors as well as veterans. Many of the soldiers who fought in Vietnam, Afghanistan or Iraq etc. must grapple with the realization that there was no higher purpose to the war, that the sacrifice was a waste. It is easier to believe the myth that makes such loss noble and necessary, despite the glaring contradictions.

Until the lie is discredited and history is revered, societies continue to speak in euphemisms. They use words to mask reality. It was the Argentine junta that gave us words like desaparecidos (disappeared person, almost always a euphemism for someone who had been secretly executed), chupado (sucked up, or kidnapped) and trasladar (transfer, a euphemism for take away to be killed). Terms like these blunt the campaign of terror. On the battlefield it is much the same. Soldiers get „waxed“ or „smoked“ rather than killed. Victims who are burned to death are „toasted.“

The Gulf War made war fashionable again. It was a cause the American nation willingly embraced. It gave the media manufactured heroes and a heady pride in their military superiority and technology. It made war fun. And the blame, as in many conflicts, lay not with the military but the press. Television reporters happily disseminated the spoon-fed images that served the propaganda effort of the military and the state. These images did little to convey the reality of war. Pool reporters, those guided around in groups by the military, wrote about „our boys“ eating packaged army food, practicing for chemical weapons attacks, and bathing out of buckets in the desert. It was war as spectacle, war as entertainment. The images and stories were designed to make the people feel good about their nation, about themselves. The Iraqi families and soldiers being blown to bits by huge iron fragmentation bombs just over the border in Iraq were faceless and nameless phantoms.

The notion that the press was used in the war is incorrect. The press wanted to be used. It saw itself as part of the war effort. Most reporters sent to cover a war don’t really want to go near the fighting. They do not tell this to their editors and indeed will moan and complain about restrictions. The handful who actually head out into the field have a bitter enmity with the hotel-room warriors. But even those who do go out are guilty of distortion. They do not only believe in the myth of war and feed recklessly off the drug but they also embrace the cause. They may do it with more skepticism, and certainly expose more lies and misconceptions, but they believe, they all believe. When you stop believing you stop going to war.

In every war it’s rare to find a reporter who did not take sides.

The moral choice is not between the moral and the immoral, but between the immoral and the less immoral.

We dismantle our moral universe to serve the cause of war. And once it is dismantled it is nearly impossible to put it back together. It is very hard for most people to see the justice of the other side, to admit that they too bear guilt. When we asked to choose between truth and contentment, most of us pick contentment.

We believe in the nobility and self-sacrifice demanded by war, especially when we are blinded by the narcotic of war. We discover in the communal struggle, the shared sense of meaning and purpose, a cause. War fills the spiritual void of the human.

Most soldiers do not miss war, they miss what it brought to them. They can never say that they were happy in the midst of the fighting, but they had a sense of purpose, of calling.

And this is a quality war shares with love, if we are, in love, we also are able to choose fealty and self-sacrifice over security.

Happiness is elusive and protean. And it is sterile when devoid of meaning. But meaning, when it is set in the vast arena of war with its high stakes, its adrenaline-driven rushes, its bold sweeps and drama, is heartless and self-destructive. The initial selflessness of war mirrors that of love, the chief emotion war destroys. And this is what war often looks and feels like, at its inception: love.

In the wake of a catastrophe, including the attacks of September 11, 2001, there was a desperate longing by all those affected to be in the physical presence of those they love. When heavy shell landed in Sarajevo, or an assassination took place in the streets of San Salvador, or a suicide bomber blew himself up in Jerusalem, mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, and children pawed through the onlookers seeking physical reunification with those they loved.  This love, like death, radiates outwards. These two fundamental human impulses crash like breakers into each other. And however much beyond reason, there is always a feeling that love is not powerless or impotent as we had believed a few seconds before. Love alone fuses happiness and meaning. Love alone can fight the impulse that lures us toward self-destruction.

The cost of war is often measured in the physical destruction of a country´s infrastructure, in the blasted buildings, factories, and bridges, in the number of dead. But probably worse is the psychological and spiritual toll. This cost takes generations to heal. It cripples and perverts’ whole societies, as Europe saw with the shattered veterans from World War 1. But even for those who know the cost of war, it still holds out the promise of eradicating the thorny problems of life.

In the beginning war looks and feels like love. But unlike love it gives nothing in return but an ever-deepening dependence, like all narcotics, on the road to self-destruction. It does not affirm but places upon us greater and greater demands. It destroys the outside world until it is hard to live outside war’s grip. It takes a higher and higher dose to achieve any thrill. Finally, one ingests war only to remain numb. The world outside war becomes, uncanny. The familiar becomes strongly unfamiliar. Many who have been in war find this when they return home. The world we once understood and longed to return to stands before us as alien, strange, and beyond our grasp.

In 1999 the British journalist Anthony Lyon published My War Gone By, I Miss It So, a book about his twin addictions to heroin and to the war in Bosnia. His account illuminates the self-destruction impulse that is fed by war and drugs as well as the highs that propel many into combat. For Lyon, like Michael Herr, war was the ultimate drug experience. It was the chance to taste extremes that would, he hoped, bring about a catharsis or obliteration. In times of peace, drugs are war´s pale substitute. But drugs, in the end, cannot compare with the awful power and rush and battle.

The twisted voyeurism and narcotic of war attacks many to the battlefields and held them there. There are those for whom violence is sexual. They carry their phallic weapons slung low at an angle toward the ground. Most of these fighters are militiamen, those who stay away from real combat, have little training or discipline, and primary terrorize the weak and defenseless. And they look part, often with tight black fatigues, wraparound sunglasses, and black jeeps or cars with tinted windows. For them war is about empowerment. They have turned places like the Congo into Hobbesian playgrounds. These warlords rise to power with gangs who prey on minorities and the weak. When they are done, they turn on those they were fighting to protect.

When the mask of war slips away and the rot and corruption is exposed, when the addiction turns sour and rank, when the myth is exposed as a fraud, we feel soiled and spent. It is then that we sink into despair, a despair that can lead us to welcome death. This despair is more common than many expect. In the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, almost a third of all Israeli casualties were due to psychiatric causes, and the war lasted only a few weeks. A World War 2 study determined that after sixty days of continuous combat, 98 percent of all surviving soldiers will have become psychiatric casualties. They found that a common trait among the 2 percent who were able to endure sustained combat was a predisposition toward „aggressive psychopathic personalities.“

During the war in El Salvador soldiers could serve in the army for three or four years or longer, virtually until they psychologically collapsed. In garrison towns commanders banned the sale of sedatives because of abuse by troops. In this war the emotionally maimed were common.

When we grasp war´s reality, a universe collapse. Many of those who suddenly perceive the raw brutally and lie of war crumble into heaps.

At the moment you kill someone at close range or by your own hand, you unconsciously absorb all the psychological and physical horrors of your victim. This is mentioned in the contact report 238 as follows:

Two Hundred and Thirty-eighth Contact
Saturday, 18th May 1991, 00:55 hrs.

Billy:

Good – I know from you that Begin was the offspring-product of adultery and that he was also a person who had not cared for laws and commands since his earliest youth, nor Shamir, Sharon, Ceausescu, Saddam Husain and many other governing criminals and mass murderers. Begin was an inciter of war and a killer who, as I know, once killed 242 Palestinians in a single day. At least that’s what the Quetzal told me.

Ptaah:

1067. Which also corresponds to the actual events.

Billy:

That is what I also assumed. But I actually wanted to talk about something else, namely the fact why Begin will go through all the horrors of all hells during his pre-death process and then finally succumb to madness. The reason for this is to be found in the fact that during his life this mass murderer absorbs all the horrors and pains of a physical and psychological nature and stores them in the memory banks, and thus everything that he has consciously or unconsciously inflicted on his victims. This storage takes place in unconscious form and is deposited impulsively in the planetary memory banks. The unconscious storage of these impulses is so strong that a determination of the wrongdoer arises from it, which has a direct effect on him. This means that this criminal and mass murderer makes the psychological and physical horrors of his victims, which he unconsciously absorbs, his own destiny for his death, although this does not extend to the next life of a new personality. This is the form of self-punishment of such fallible ones, if they cannot fully remove that part of the guilt in the fallible life, which leads to the normal process of removal of guilt in the following death-life of the total consciousness block through processing, but which does not result in the form of assistance to the former victims in their next lives and new personalities….

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War is necrophilia. And this necrophilia is central to soldiering, just as it is central to the makeup of suicide bombers and terrorists. The necrophilia is hidden under platitudes about duty or comradeship. It waits, especially in moments when we seem to have little to live for and no hope, or in moments when the intoxication of war is at its pitch, to be unleashed. When we spend long enough in war it comes to us as a kind of release, a fatal and seductive embrace that can consummate the long flirtation in war with our own destruction.  The ancient Greeks had a word for such a drive. They called it ekpyrosis, to be consumed by a ball of fire. They used the word to describe heroes. War throws us into a frenzy in which all human life, including our own, seems secondary. The atavism of war creates us in war´s image.

In Chucks Sudetic’s book Blood and Vengeance the former reporter for The New York Times writes of how he was eventually overpowered by the culture of death in wartime:

I once walked through a town littered with the purple and yellow bodies of men and women and a few children, some shot to death, some with their head torn off, and I felt nothing; I strolled around with a photographer, scratched notes, and lifted sheets covering the bodies of dead men to see if they had been castrated; I picked up a white flag from the ground near the twisted bodies of half a dozen men in civilian clothes who had been shot next to a wall, and then I carried the flag home and hung it above my desk. I once saw soldiers unload babies crushed to death in the back of a truck and immediately ran off to interview their mothers. I accidentally killed an eighteen year old man who raced in front of my car on a bike; his head was smashed; I held the door when they loaded him into the backseat of the automobile that carried him to the emergency room of Sarajevo’s main hospital; I expressed my condolences to his father; then I got a tow back to my hotel, went to my room and sent that day´s story to New York.

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War wipes out all delicacy and tenderness. And this is why those in war swing from rank sentimentality to perversion, with little in between. Stray puppies, street kids, cats, anything that can be an object of affection for soldiers are adopted and pampered even in the midst of killing, the beating and torture of prisoners, and the razing of villages. If the pets die they are buried with elaborate rituals and little grave markers. But it is not only love, although the soldiers insist it feels like love. These animals, as well as the young waifs who collect around military units, are total dependents. They pay homage to the absolute power above them or they die.

In the midst of slaughter, the only choice is often between hate and lust. Human beings become objects, objects to extinguish or to provide carnal gratification. The widespread casual and frenetic sex in wartime often crosses the line into perversion and violence. It exposes the vast moral void. When life becomes worth nothing, when one is not sure of survival, when a society is ruled by fear, there often seems only death or fleeting, carnal pleasure.

In war we may deform ourselves, our essence, by subverting passion, loyalty, and love to duty. In the rise to power we become smaller, power absorbs us and once power is attained we are often its pawn.

Fighters in Vietnam, Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, the Sudan, the Punjab, Iraq, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Kosovo etc. entered villages, tense, exhausted, wary of ambushes, with the fear and tension that comes from combat, and begin to shoot at random. Flames soon lick up from houses. Discipline, if there was any, disintegrates. Items are looted, civilians are battered with rifle butts, units fall apart, and the violence directed toward unarmed men, women, and children grows as it feeds on itself.

The eyes of the soldiers who carry this orgy of death are crazed. They speak only in guttural shouts. They are high on the power to spare lives or take them, the divine power to destroy. And they are indeed, for a moment, gods swatting down powerless human beings like flies. The lust for violence, the freedom to eradicate the world around them, even human lives, is seductive. And the line that divides us, who would like to see ourselves as civilized and compassionate, from such communal barbary is fairly thin. In wartime it often seems to matter little where one came from or how well schooled and moral one was before the war began. The frenzy of the crowd is over powering.

Bob Kerrey, a former United States senator who won the Medal of Honor for his military service in Vietnam, once led a combat mission that caused the deaths of thirteen to twenty unarmed civilians, most of them women and children. When this story was first revealed in the spring of 2001, there was, among an unknowing public, an expression of shock and an effort to explain such behavior. But the revelation was, rather than an anomaly, an example of how most wars are fought. It was a glimpse into the reality of war that many in the public, anxious not to see war’s sordid nature, worked hard to shut.

Kerrey, in a speech at the Virginia Military Institute soon after the incident was made public, said: „I have been haunted by it for thirty-two years.“

The raid, which took place in 1969, saw Kerry, then a twenty-five-year-old lieutenant who had arrived in Vietnam a month delayed, lead a group of six Navy Seals, the informal name for Sea Air Land units, behind enemy lines. They hoped to capture a Vietcong leader who was reported to be holding a meeting that night. The unit was ferried to the spot by boat. They encountered a thatched hut and killed those inside. There were, those in the unit said, women inside. They ran into more huts. More women and children were killed, although Kerrey says he and his men came under fire. „The thing that I will remember until the day I die is walking in and finding, I don’t know, 14 or so, I don’t even know what the number was, women and children who were dead,“ he told the New York times Magazine.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Kerrey said, „This is killing me. I’m tired of people describing me as a hero and holding this inside.“

The military histories, which tell little of war´s reality crowd out the wrenching tales by the emotionally named. Each generation again responds to war as innocents. Each generation discovers it won disillusionment, often after a terrible price. The myth of war and the drug of war wait to be tatted. The mythical heroes of the past loom over us. Those who can tell us the truth are silenced or prefer to forget. The state needs the myth, as much as it needs its soldiers and its machines of war, to survive.

To say the least, killing is nearly always a sordid affair. Those who carry such memories do so with difficulty, even when the cause seems just. Moreover, those who are killed do not die the clean death we see on television or film, they die messy, disturbing deaths that often plague the killers. And the bodies of the newly slain retain a disquieting power. The rows of impersonal dead, stacked like firewood one next of the other, draped on roadsides, twisted into strange, often grimly humorous shapes, speak.

There is among many who fight in war a sense of shame, one that is made worse by the patriotic drivel used to justify the act of killing in war. Those who seek meaning in patriotism do not want to hear the truth of war, wary of bursting the bubble. The tension between those who were there and those who were not, the who refuse to let go of the myth and those that know it to be a lie feed into the dislocation and malaise after war. In the end, neither side cared to speak to the other. The shame and alienation of combat soldiers, coupled with the indifference to the truth of war by those who were not there, reduces many societies to silence. It seems better to forget.

„I, too, belong to this species,“ J. Glenn Gray wrote. „I’m ashamed not only of my own deeds, not only of my nation´s deeds, but of human deeds as well. I am ashamed to be a man.“

When Ernie Pyle, the American war correspondent in World War 2, was killed on the Pacific island of Torishima in 1945, a rough draft of a column was found on his body. He was preparing it for release upon the end of the war in Europe. He had done much to promote the myth of the warrior and the heroism of soldiering, but by the end he seemed too tired of it all. He wrote:

„But there are many of the living who have had burden into their brains forever the unnatural sight of cold dead men scattered over the hillsides an in the dishes along the high rows of hedge throughout the world. Dead men by mass production, in one country after another, month after month and year after year. Dead men in winter and dead men in summer. Dead men in such familiar promiscuity that they become monotonous. Dead men in such monstrous infinity that you come almost to hate them. These are the things that you at home need not even try to understand. To you at home they are columns of figures, or he is a near one who went away and just didn’t come back. You didn’t see him lying so grotesque and pasty beside the gravel road in France. We saw him, saw him by the multiple thousands. That’s the difference.“

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Discarded veterans are never a pretty sight. They are troubled and some physically maimed. The often feel betrayed, misunderstood and alone. It is hard to integrate again into peacetime society. Many are shunted aside, left to nature their resentment and pain. And in the end drugs take the place of battle and suicide takes the place of heroic death.

Viktor Frankl, in Man´s Search for Meaning, writes of the grim battle between love and Thanatos in Auschwitz. He recalls being on a work detail, freezing in the blast of the Polish winter, when he began to think about his wife, who had already been gassed, although de did not know this at the time.

A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth, that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human petty and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.

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Another Excerpt from the Book, War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning from Chris Hedges published in 2002:

There are few sanctuaries in war. But one is provided by couples in love. They are not able to staunch the slaughter. They are often powerless and can themselves often become victims. But it was them, seated around a wood stove, usually over a simple meal, that I found sanity and was reminded of what it means to be human. Love kept them grounded. It was to such couples that I retreated during the wars in Central America, the Middle East, and the Balkans. Love, when it is deep and sustained by two individuals, includes self-giving, often self-sacrifice, as well as desire. For the covenant of love is such that it recognizes itself in the other. It alone can save us. I did not sleep well in war. I could rarely recall my dreams, walking only to know that they had been harsh and violent. When I left the war zones, the nightmares descended in me like furies. I had horrible visions of war. I would dream of being in combat with my father or young son and unable to protect them. But I could sleep in the homes of such couples. Their love spread a protective blanket over us. It was able to blot out the war, although the lure of combat, the distant rattle of automatic weapons beckoned us back, and we always went.

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Because of this one of the most acute forms of suffering for human beings is loneliness. The isolated individual can never be adequately human. And many of war´s most fervent adherents are those atomized individuals who, before the war came, were profoundly alone and unloved. They found fulfillment in war, perhaps because it was the closest they came to love. If we do not acknowledge such an attraction, which is, in some ways, so akin to love, we can never combat it.

This article should not dissuade us from war but make us understand it. It is especially important that we, who wield such massive force across the globe, see within ourselves the seed of our own obligation. We must guard against the myth of war and the drug of war that can together, render us as blind and callous as some of those we battle.

The only solace comes from simple acts of kindness. They are the tiny, flickering candles in a cavern of darkness that sustain our common humanity. The only antidote to ward off self-destruction and the indiscriminate use of force is humility and, ultimately, compassion.

Love may not always triumph, but it keeps us human. It offers the only chance to escape from the contagion of war, it is the only antidote. And there are times when remaining human is the only victory possible.

As long as we don’t think for ourselves and make our own decisions through research etc. and break away from the beliefs that have been instilled in us from an early age by religion that completely befuddles us and dissolves all our own initiative. As long as we find satisfaction in the completely false and degenerated patriotism and enthusiasm of war, our fulfillment, we will never understand those who do battle against us, or how we are perceived by them, or finally those who supposedly do battle for us and how we should respond to it all. We will never discover who we are. We will fail to confront the capacity we all have for violence. And we will court our won extermination. By accepting the facile cliché that the battle under way against the so-called enemy or terrorism is a battle against evil, by easily branding those who fight us as the barbarians, we, like them, refuse to acknowledge our own culpability. We ignore real injustice that have led many of those arrayed against us to their rage and despair.

The Highest Form of Love is the Love of Creation and to survive as a human being is possible only through love. And to recognize love in the lives of others, even those with whom we are in conflict, love that is like our own. Because love is nothing other than Creation-energy that exists and breathes life in all of us. Love that allows us to embrace and cherish life. Love that guides us and holds us tightly in its arms instantly eliminates our fears, worries and doubts if we only make the effort to focus on it and have the courage and perseverance to listen to and follow our inner voice (Creation-energy). And exactly this love that makes life worth living is also in our „enemies.“  It is not that you have to like your so-called enemy,  his personality etc., but that you have to respect him as a human being, because at the end of the day the same love is also in him, but he does not know it yet and has not yet attained this realization which, as mentioned earlier, frees you from all your problems and takes you to heaven so to speak, which is nothing other than a state of consciousness. The same love, (Creation-energy) flows through everything that exists, every tree, every plant, every animal, there is nothing in existence that is not flowed through by it. So, you should not only show respect to your fellow human beings, but to the whole fauna and flora and everything that flies and crawls. Therefore, if you kill a person and it is not self-defense or not to save another life that is in mortal danger, or if you kill or injure an animal for pure pleasure or recklessly cause damage to a plant or tree, it is as if you kill, injure or cause damage to yourself.

Expert from Law of Love by Eduard Albert Meier: 

Love is the absolute certainty that one lives with and coexists with everything, thus, in everything which exists: In fauna and flora, in the fellow humans, in every material and spiritual life-form, no matter which kind, and in the existence of the entire universe and beyond.

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Berk Gümüs