The Lesson Of War We Don't Learn
Each one is more horrible than the last--and yet, each time, we fall into line. What could persuade us to say no?
I returned from vacation to a family crisis, hence the lateness of this newsletter and the lack of a podcast today. But that podcast is in the works! Keep your ears peeled for 40 minutes with feminist Katha Pollitt, a longtime columnist at The Nation, who sat with me to discuss abortion. And if today’s column appeals, please:
This week’s twentieth anniversary of the United States attacking Iraq has launched a torrent of punditry, which is remarkable only because those capable of reflecting on wars—particularly failed, destructive ones that came to no good—rarely fought in them. I remember the night before the United States began to bombard Baghdad and thinking not about weapons of mass destruction but the destruction about to be wreaked on thousands of Iraqis and Americans alike.
I thought about the money that would be spent on armaments, not people. And I thought about the vast numbers of young people whose lives would be ruined. It’s a horrible irony that those who answer the call for patriotic sacrifice are, in a sense, the best among us, and how tragic it is that instead of sending them to serve peacefully, we send them to war. Instead of asking them to sacrifice for others, we ask for their lives. Or maybe we take a part of their lives: a body part, a brain short-circuited forever, the years during which they might have become doctors, parents, or excellent plumbers.
Time and time again, soldiers return from war and explain how terrible it was. They describe the needless destruction, the death of their illusions, and the grim, ugly realities that take over. They tell us in word and deed that they can never be made whole.
And then we do it all over again.
Perhaps it is no accident that this year—two decades since the United States attacked Iraq and as a brutal war rages in Ukraine—there are powerful, new renditions of the war that launched our violent twentieth century, World War I. Observers have drawn comparisons between the Russo-Ukrainian War and the so-called War to End All Wars: the fierce, indiscriminate bombardments that target civilians; the flattening of cities; the trenches structuring a front that, with the exception of the northeast, has mostly remained the same; and lately, the horrifying loss of life as Russian generals fling walls of human beings at the Ukrainian lines.
The first story I recommend is the latest film version of Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), directed by Edward Berger and distributed by Netflix. Like the novel, the movie features a young German student, Paul Baumer, who becomes caught up in a patriotic furor fueled by old men. In Baumer’s case, a schoolmaster exhorts the students to volunteer en masse, sending them off to a conflict that has already developed into a horrific and hopeless standoff with no psychological preparation for the violence they will be asked to cope with.
There are two particularly searing messages the movie delivers. The first is at the very beginning before we meet Paul and his friends. We see dead soldiers being stripped of their uniforms and sent back to factories where working women launder out the blood and mud and repair the holes and tears. The movie then cuts to the induction center, where the students will enlist and be handed these recycled garments. Paul even notices that someone else’s name is sewn into his uniform and tells the official that there must be a mistake: no, the clerk assures him, it must be a uniform returned because it was too small.
Here, the audience is alerted to something that Paul can’t know yet: that in war, all officials lie, and human beings don’t wear uniforms—they fill them, empty them, and fill them again.
Perhaps the other most riveting moment in the film is that after every imaginable horror has befallen Paul and his comrades, they are used in a reckless offensive against the French lines. Paul and his starving comrades take a line of French trenches, gobbling down a lunch hastily abandoned by their retreating enemy when suddenly they feel the ground shaking uncontrollably. It’s a sound and a feeling they don’t know, and when they emerge from the dugout, they learn why. It is a counteroffensive propelled by something they have never seen before: tanks. As many of them are crushed under the treads, veteran soldiers who have endured unimaginable horrors shriek in terror, realizing there is a next level of fear they had never dreamed of.
Hence another lesson that the audience already knows: in every war, there is evidence of the war to come.
The other fiction I would recommend, although I remain critical of it for reasons I cite below, is Alice Winn’s new novel, In Memorium (2023), which features gay public school boys who become officers in the British Army early in the war. The action toggles between the trenches and the school, based on Marlborough, which Winn attended. There, the boys left behind wait to hear news of the fate of friends and brothers—and prepare to join them.
The novel focuses on the romantically-involved Henry Gaunt and Sidney Ellwood: Gaunt volunteers first because a young woman hands him a white feather, and Ellwood eventually volunteers to be with Gaunt. Many adventures and misadventures ensue, and Winn punctuates the story with casualty lists and snippets in the school paper. This plays a dual role: it lets us know the fate of various characters—killed, died of wounds, wounded, and taken prisoner—but it also allows the impact of the war on a single institution to sink in for the reader.
Winn did a ton of research for the book and pushes the narrative forward with a grim, visceral sense of realism: mud, stench, rotting bodies, and soldiers sliding around in the entrails of comrades sliced open with artillery let you know it is really World War I. She also recreates an elite, male, homosocial world with admirable skill.
But here’s my criticism: she so commits herself to this latter task that she overlooks the importance of the story she has told: that in the name of raising a proud, patriotic upper class willing to sacrifice itself for God and Country, these public schools raised a generation of men so profoundly obedient that it never occurs to them to say no to the hair-brained generals and politicians who sent them to fight this war in the first place.
I was a little startled when I realized this because no one likes a good, homosocial World War I novel as much as I do: yet Winn appears to fall into the trap that her fictional subjects did. She appears not to realize that the glittering beauty of the English public school system also created a leadership system—cloaked in empty language about honor, manliness, and duty—that made all kinds of horrors possible, beginning with colonialism and reaching a crescendo in the years between 1914 and 1918. She appears to have no critique of it. Thus, the paradox of the novel is that the tragedy of a dedicated generation operates in contradistinction to an uncomfortable, unspoken truth: elite British men died in droves, leading working-class conscripts— because they didn’t know how to do anything else.
Everything had changed—but they hadn’t. And although the war changes them in many ways, Winn never persuaded me that these damaged, devastated men developed any principles to replace the shoddy, nineteenth-century worldview that sent them to the slaughter in the first place.
But does that make them any different from us?
This is our challenge moving forward from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan: what would it really mean to learn from these wars? To look at the waves of poorly armed, poorly trained, and poorly fed Russian conscripts being tossed heedlessly at Ukrainian lines and truly take in the horror, not of this particular war, but of all wars?
What would it mean to say “Never again”—and mean it?
Short takes:
Sometimes I wonder what veterans think when they read the punditry on the Forever War in Iraq, 20 years old this week: many are living with missing body parts, lost peace of mind, and homelessness. Meanwhile, political scientist Tom Nichols at The Atlantic, who never served a day in the military, is all: “Oh, I was all for the war, but I’ve changed my mind.” Why? Not because this war destroyed thousands of lives but because the Bush administration’s argument was morally weak, and Nichols underestimated their capacity to fail. A sample: “In 2003, I was far too confident in the ability of my own government to run a war of regime change, which managed to turn a quick operational victory into one of the greatest geopolitical disasters in American history. Knowing what I now know, I would not have advocated for setting the wheels of war in motion.” If I had given a part of my life, body, or a loved one to that war, I would burn his house down. (March 20, 2023)
Do you know what else that war did? Created the conservative populist insurgency that altered the Republican party forever, brought us Donald Trump, and fueled an isolationist rebellion in the GOP greater than any since the America First movement of the 1930s. If you want to know what that part of our political universe was thinking about today, check out Ryan Girdusky’s polemic in the National Populist Newsletter. “While Bush deserves a lot of blame, he didn’t act alone. He had cheerleaders in the mainstream media, not just those on the right like Bill Kristol. He had MSNBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN begging for war. Chuck Schumer, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden were all in his corner,” Girdusky writes. “The uni-party started this war. The same uni-party remains in power today.” (March 20, 2023)
At Truth and Consequences, Michael A. Cohen takes on the argument that the problem with the war in Iraq was that it distracted the United States from prosecuting a successful war against the Taliban in Afghanistan. But as Cohen points out, the United States did defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan—quickly and resoundingly. It was what happened after that was a colossal cock-up. “Rather than allow President Karzai to seek political reconciliation with the Taliban or reintegrate Taliban fighters into Afghan society and politics,” Cohen writes, “the U.S. prevented him from pursuing such a course of action.” Why? Because U.S. strategists continued to insist that the Taliban and al Qaeda were the same. They empowered aspirational warlords, abetted corruption, and created enemies of the Afghan people—who turned to the Taliban to save them. (March 20, 2023)
That is truly shocking, LInda. Tourism? Baghdad? Wow.
My partner feels as you do about war movies. I firs read "All Quiet" when I was 10 or 11, and it made an enormous impact on me, so I was interested--but it was very grim.
I'm with you all the way (except my reluctance to watch war movies, even anti-war movies like All's Quiet on the Western Front). The last anti-war demonstrations I went to were against the Iraq War. They didn't help. But now I'm watching CNN a day or two ago and all the coverage is about how much better life in Iraq is now that we Americans have gotten rid of "the worst dictator in history" and brought western values to the country. Even Richard Dunn, who was in Baghdad when the bombs first hit, waxed ecstatically about how much things had changed. And the proof? That it's become a popular destination for American tourists who now feel safe and are being welcomed with open arms by the Iraqis. What can I say?