War and humanity

We're winding down the discussion of Paul Fussell's "The Great War and Modern Memory" over on the DMN book club blog. If you haven't followed Dr. Allums' commentary on the book, by all means check it out -- you don't have to have read the book to appreciate the lessons Dr. Allums draws from it about war and the human condition.

One of the commentators found this old interview with Paul Fussell on the Internet. The interviewer, former Natl Endowment for the Humanities chairman Sheldon Hackney, notes that Fussell published "The Great War" as the Vietnam War was winding down. Fussell discloses that his book was as much about Vietnam as Ypres and Passchendaele. This excerpt reminded me of our discussion about eugenics and humanity:

Hackney: I wondered about that. In history books, those wars run in a different sequence -- World War I, World War II, and then the Vietnam War. You lived it inside out. You were thinking about Vietnam when you were writing about World War I.

Fussell: As a former soldier, what struck me is the absolutely heartless way that war was being pursued by the Americans, partly I think because of the race problem. The Vietnamese to us were not merely communists, they were nasty little yellow people without souls. It didn't matter how we blew them up or how we bombed them or how we burned their villages and so on. I was very struck by that. And one thing I was trying to do in The Great War and Modern Memory was to awaken a sort of civilian sympathy for the people who suffer on the ground in wartime, and that's really an act that I've been performing, oh, ever since 1945, I suppose.

More from that 1996 interview:

Hackney: You write in one of your essays -- your essay "My War" in The Boy Scout Handbook and Other Observations, which is a wonderful collection -- you say toward the end of that essay, "Those who fought know a secret about themselves, and it is not very nice."

Fussell: They have experienced secretly and privately their natural human impulse toward sadism and brutality. As I say in this new book of mine, not merely did I learn to kill with a noose of piano wire put around somebody's neck from behind, but I learned to enjoy the prospect of killing that way. It's those things that you learn about yourself that you never forget. You learn that you have much wider dimensions than you had imagined before you had to fight a war. That's salutary. It's well to know exactly who you are so you can conduct the rest of your life properly.

And this:

Hackney: Why would you say that war is ironic rather than heroic?

Fussell: It's ironic because everybody believes that life is pleasurable, and they should. They have a right to believe that, especially if they're brought up under a Constitution that talks about the pursuit of happiness. To have public life shot through with that kind of optimism and complacency is the grounds for horrible, instructive irony when those generalities prove not true. War tends to prove them not true. War is about survival and it's about mass killing and it's about killing or being killed -- that is, in the infantry -- and it is extremely unpleasant. One realizes that a terrible mistake has been made somewhere, either by the optimistic eighteenth century or by mechanistic twentieth century. The two don't fit together somehow, and that creates, obviously, irony.

Hackney: Is it also true that you find language so inadequate to describe war, disproportionate?

Fussell: Right. And after every war, there's an immense overhaul of language, which in the Western world has created really the cultural and artistic phenomenon of what we call modernism; that is, a paring down of everything to minimal size, including language and ideas of grandeur, and ideas of a possibility of the state making everybody happy, and things like that. That modernism is really a form of skepticism or minimalism. You cut out everything that has deceived you and throw it away, and that leaves you with things like the Eames chair and Picasso and numerous other outcrops of modernism.

Couple of things. The other day I was talking to my dad about his worries over Mike, his son-in-law, who will soon begin military service in Iraq. I told my dad that I didn't worry so much about Mike not coming home, or coming home wounded, as I worried about how having to fight in a war, and maybe even kill or maim, would change his gentle soul (he is a firefighter by vocation, and is used to saving lives). My dad said to me that when he was in the US Coast Guard in the 1950s, he was part of a crew that killed a man; shots fired at the boat the criminal had commandeered to flee hit the gas tank, and blew the boat sky-high. The Coast Guardsmen had done nothing wrong, but, said my dad, he had nightmares about the dead man for years. My dad, who's a tough guy, said that you never get over having killed someone, even if you did so for morally defensible reasons. And that's what we both worry about the most for our beloved Mike.

Secondly, I wonder what will be the "immense overhaul of language" that will result from the Iraq War. Already I think it will be impossible (thank God) for any American politician to use words like "democracy" and "freedom" with reference to American military intervention overseas. Go back and read Bush's Second Inaugural in light of subsequent events, and try to remember what it was like to believe such grandiose moralism. Come to think of it, I think the reason I reacted with such piss-and-vinegar to the Mitt Romney family campaign video was a knee-jerk disgust over the idea of a politician manipulating the concept of family intimacy and solidarity to manufacture consent to his election. I know this happens all the time, but in my case, at least, I think there's a sense of how traumatic events of the past few years -- 9/11, the Catholic sex abuse scandal, the Iraq War -- have made me deeply suspicious of the way people in authority use language to persuade and to distract.

Let me put the question to the room: How do you think the Iraq War experience will change the American language?