23 September 2012

Week 39: 'He did something remarkable.'

Wonder spawned in: 2005/2007.
Wondered into being by: The people.
Wonderspan: 6 and 11 minutes. 
To experience this wonder at its best: Make sure you can hear the sound and click 'full screen'.

This Monday's way of loving is at times confusing and disturbing.  We are wondering at how people find a way to stand up for their own humanity in the face of war, from the point of view of those who fight in it and their families.

It is a set of issues that divides the nation - probably every nation.  To put it too simply, the purpose of the soldier, at best, is to protect life, and for this they gain the admiration and honour of others.  The way the soldier does they job, at worst, is by killing people -- bad people, good people, whomever they have been ordered to attack -- and for this the soldier is sometimes villified.  As General Michael Rose put it, '...no other group in society is required either to kill other human beings, or expressly sacrifice themselves for the nation.'

War can be worst of all for civilians, but war gets to soldiers too, who are typically wracked with fear and unknowing as they enter battle.  First-hand accounts often describe the intensity of the experience, in which all a soldier has ever known and cared about is compressed into every moment he or she remains gratefully alive and unharmed.  At the same time, often the same account will tell of horrific things the soldier has done to soldiers on the other side of battle, and to civilians.  And the horrors mutiply when war's chaos breaks free from the feeble rules that have been invented to contain it, as when US forces systematically tortured civilians at Abu Ghraib in Iraq and British soldiers severely beat a group of innocent Iraqi civilians, killing one.

In war, there is too much reality and, as T S Eliot said, humankind cannot bear very much of that.  We civilians have no frame of reference to make sense of it or, perhaps, there is ultimately no sense to make.  We tell ourselves a convenient story about the people who fight in war - the best story we can manage with the litle time we devote to it.  One easy way out is to make soldiers into 'our heroes', which is an epithet civilians throw around like cheap paint but soldiers themselves use rather more sparingly for extraordinary deeds of valour.  Or we hate the soldier for his violence; a civilian who met an injured Vietnam Vet waiting to cross a road, told him it had served him right, while Donovan's song, Universal Soldier, tells us its eponymous soldier 'really is to blame' for all of history's wars.

Along this fault line we the people seem to be divided, with strong feelings on all sides.

Certainly, there are soldiers who have been heroic, by anyone's standard, and others who have been barbaric.  There are soldiers, as well as sailors and airmen and -women, who have been both.  I've never been in war, but from what soldiers have said to me and written, it seems that they remain pretty ordinarily human most of the time.  They care about other people as well and as badly as the rest of us do.  They ponder the rights and wrongs of war as deeply and as superficially as the rest of us do.  Beneath the layers of their training, which is really a form of conditioning, they hate to kill people as much or as little as the rest of us would.  Whether they act well or badly, the truth of who they are as human beings is pressed out of them by the life-and-death moments of war.  And most soldiers would tell you that war changes who you are - it can make you stronger, although it also harms pretty much everyone who is ever involved in it.

I wanted www.waysofloving.com to include stories of how people have found ways to stand up for their humanity in the face of war, when they are themselves the instruments of war.  Today's entry, then, is based on two stories of soldiers doing exactly this, albeit in completely different - sometimes confusingly different - ways.  Both stories are touched by some propaganda in how others (not the soldiers) have presented them but it's still possible to look past this, I think, to the stories themselves.

First, a US Army officer and lifelong evangelical Christian, tells his story as an interrogator at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, when a meeting with a self-confessed violent jihadi led him to make a  courageous choice.  'I grew up hearing stories about the nobility of service...'
Two mothers tell the story of how their lads, on the same British Army patrol in Afghanistan, were caught in an ambush.  Sam, aged just 18, was shot in the head; Ben, 26, saved Sam's life while himself in fear of being killed as Taliban insurgents bore down upon their platoon.  The two women talk frankly about what their boys went through and what this has meant for their families.  'It was the last operation of their tour...'
Some people think some wars are justified, others think no war can ever be 'right'.  Whichever of these views may be yours, perhaps you'll nonetheless agree with Ken Lukowiak, who pointed out in his memoir of the Falklands War, A Soldier's Song, that if political leaders had to fight their own wars, they would rapidly find a way to talk about peace.

Extra...

Three more accounts from the Soldiers of Conscience documentary:
The Infantry is by far the most dangerous corps to be in in Afghanistan, with several times the average fatality rate for the Army as a whole.  The Infantry also takes the youngest recruits.  Rifleman Cyrus Thatcher was 19 when he was killed in an explosion in June 2009.  He wrote a letter to his family to be delivered in the event of his death, which was later printed in The Independent with his family's permission.  'Hello mum, this is going to be hard for you to read ...'
Lukowiak's A Soldier's Song is one of many superb first-hand accounts - written by someone who'd never written anything before.

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www.waysofloving.com

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