http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/05/09/can_an_american_soldier_ever_die_in_vain_shakespeare_lincoln_war
Can an
American Soldier Ever Die in Vain?
What
Shakespeare, Lincoln, and
"Lone Survivor" teach us about the danger
of refusing to
confront futility in war.
BY
ELIZABETH SAMET MAY 9, 2014
I first
read Shakespeare's Richard II in college, where I also watched my first war:
Operation Desert Storm. The play depicts a battle between the language of power
and the violent thing itself. Violence wins. A king armed only with the poetic
symbols of authority is murdered; a usurper, backed by a flesh-and-blood army
of thousands is crowned. King Richard, who is fond of swearing by his scepter,
is defeated by his cousin Bolingbroke, who knows how to swing a sword.
The Gulf
War was about power too: stunning, swift, and (technologically)
"smart" -- all of it telecast live. The efficiency of this 100-hour
ground war ("the largest logistical move in history," according to
the general who directed the effort) seemed to catch out even its protesters,
who initially rallied under the slogan "No Blood for Oil," yet soon
dispersed. Once the war was over, a sense of invincibility eclipsed a reckoning
with the inevitable, enduring costs of unleashing force: continued war in the
air over a no-fly zone, ongoing internal violence in Iraq, crippling sanctions,
and the lingering illness of many U.S. veterans -- all obscured in the
afterglow of American might.
That
American might, a prelude to the shock and awe that would again rain down on
Iraq in 2003, also helped obscure in national memory the politically unavailing
devastation of the Vietnam War. In 1975, the ignominious fall of Saigon left
Americans with a graphic symbol of what happens when violence becomes unhinged
from strategic outcomes. The event offered the United States a potent symbol of
futility, a disillusioning end to what until 2010 was the longest war in U.S.
history. Perhaps it also made Americans nostalgic for a world in which
sacrifice led to victory and in which victory looked sufficiently different
from defeat. The Gulf War, less than two decades later, restored a seeming,
longed-for clarity.
I've just
finished reading Richard II yet again, this time with students of my own:
first-year cadets (plebes) at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, where
the preparation of future Army officers carries on as the embers of recent wars
slowly smolder out and where the grand political drama of American
exceptionalism is enacted daily in the hopes and fears of 18-year-olds learning
how to articulate their earnest commitment to national service. My students not
infrequently describe themselves as members of the post-9/11 generation, a
label that signals their solidarity in uniform even as it distinguishes them
from their civilian peers and even as the nature of their future occupation
grows increasingly mysterious, albeit no less vital, absent the certainty once
offered in the form of deployments to Iraq or Afghanistan.
One day in
class, a plebe paused at a moment in the play when a conspirator who fears that
he has gone too far in open criticism of Richard -- "Most degenerate
king!" -- suddenly begins to speak in code, couching further observations
about the kingdom's criminal mismanagement and the prospect of armed
insurrection in the extended metaphor of a ship sailing into a "fearful
tempest." A second conspirator, picking up the hint, likewise laments the
impending shipwreck until a third assures his cryptic friends that they can
speak freely about the army massing across the English Channel under Bolingbroke's
command.
"What's
he talking about?" my observant student asked when he encountered the bit
about the storm-tossed ship. It wasn't a passage I had planned to spend much
time analyzing, but it turned out to be the perfect illustration of a point
absolutely essential to the enterprise of understanding Shakespeare: namely,
that the images and metaphors he uses, difficult and oblique though they might
seem, are inseparable from his meaning.
The passage
also has broader resonance, for whenever people describe violence with
abstraction or indirection, in Shakespeare's time or our own, there's a reason.
The conspirators' motives are particular, but their language offers a fine
example of the stratagems people employ when they are trying to talk around
ugly and dangerous things.
In 2014, we
are contemplating the end of the costly, inconclusive wars in which the United
States has been embroiled for a dozen years; Iraq and Afghanistan have proved
interminable and inconvenient -- embarrassing to all save perhaps their most fervent
original designers. Debates about force and the language through which it is
described -- issues of violent means and elusive ends -- are as pressing now as
they have ever been. Yet we seem unable to talk about them frankly or to
recognize, as my student did, when and why people resort to linguistic
subterfuge.
The
language most often used today to talk about war is suffused with a
sentimentality that seems to belong more properly to some faraway age.
The
language most often used today to talk about war is suffused with a
sentimentality that seems to belong more properly to some faraway age. It isn't
Shakespearean metaphor, yet it is a code of distortion, misdirection, and
concealment. This may strike readers as a strange assertion to make about an
era frequently celebrated for its knowingness and ironic detachment. Yet even
after the revolutions in modern consciousness ostensibly occasioned by conflict
in the 20th century, a pernicious American sentimentality about nation and war
has triumphed, typified by demonstrative expressions of, and appeals to, a kind
of emotion that short-circuits reason.
It is a
language of the heart that works to insulate us from the decisions we have made
and paradoxically distances us from those whose military service we seek to
recognize. We see it in the empty profusion of yellow ribbons and lapel-pin
flags. We hear it in the organized celebrations of American heroes and
patriotic values: celebrity public service announcements, beer commercials
about military homecomings, the more jingoistic variants of country music, and
the National Football League's "Salute to Service" campaign. All
these observances noisily claim to honor and celebrate, in the words of the NFL,
"the service and sacrifice of our nation's troops." We have become
exhibitionists of sentiment: The more public and theatrical our emotional
displays, the better we seem to feel.
* * *
Yet
sentimentality does more than shape the way we commemorate wars. It has real-world
implications because it informs all those cultural and sociological attitudes
in the shadow of which wartime and postwar policies are made, and because it
prevents a more productive and enduring sympathy that, in cooperation with
reason, might guide our actions and help us become more acute readers of war's
many ambiguities.
Our
predicament calls to mind the 18th-century debate over the danger of confusing
the exercise of pity with sympathetic action. Philosopher Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, for example, differentiated true compassion from the emotion we might
feel at the theater: "a sterile pity which feeds on a few tears" and
never produces "the slightest act of humanity." British writer and
philanthropist Hannah More warned against "mistaking sentiment," which
she defined as "the virtue of ideas," for principle, "the virtue
of action." Scottish novelist Henry Mackenzie, meanwhile, observed that
"refined sentimentalists … are contented with talking of virtues which
they never practice" and "pay in words what they owe in
actions."
Today's
sentimentality about war suffuses political rhetoric, irrespective of party;
Republicans and Democrats are equally adept at its tunings. President Barack
Obama's 2014 State of the Union address offers one recent example. The address
concluded with an appeal to American ideals "and the burdens we bear to
advance them." "No one," the president insisted, "knows
this better than those who serve in uniform." And then Obama called
attention to Sgt. 1st Class Cory Remsburg, an Army Ranger grievously wounded in
Kandahar, Afghanistan, who was seated in the gallery next to the first lady.
The
president was careful to note that he first met Remsburg on Omaha Beach during
the 65th-anniversary celebration of D-Day. This allusion to an uncontroversial
war set the stage for the speech's emotional peroration, in which Remsburg
became a symbol of something almost entirely disconnected from his own costly
service:
My fellow
Americans, men and women like Cory remind us that America has never come easy.
Our freedom, our democracy, has never been easy. Sometimes we stumble; we make
mistakes; we get frustrated or discouraged. But for more than 200 years, we
have put those things aside and placed our collective shoulder to the wheel of
progress -- to create and build and expand the possibilities of individual
achievement; to free other nations from tyranny and fear; to promote justice,
and fairness, and equality under the law, so that the words set to paper by our
founders are made real for every citizen.
Everyone
rose in unison, and some members of Congress wept as Obama extolled the
sergeant's sacrifice. In this, antagonistic leaders could evince a solidarity
they had not shown since they united in sending Remsburg to war in the first
place. Submerged in the celebration of a "new generation of heroes"
were all those nagging questions about the use of force that ought to have
dominated debate in the first place. Lawmakers seemed to be seeking absolution
for their earlier uncritical enthusiasm by joining together in a tearful
expression of feeling.
That's the
slipperiness of sentimentality.
Celebration
of the humanity of the individual -- calling attention to what is true about
Remsburg's suffering, endurance, and commitment -- is a vital national act. But
once a soldier becomes a symbol, an abstraction available for political ends,
we deny him or her the humanity we strive to celebrate.
Sentimentality
distances and fetishizes its object; it is the natural ally of jingoism.
Sentimentality
distances and fetishizes its object; it is the natural ally of jingoism. So
long as we indulge it, we remain incapable of debating the merits of war
without being charged with diminishing those who fought it.
Just a few
weeks prior to Obama's address, the fall of Fallujah had prompted comparisons
to Vietnam. The battle for the Iraqi city in 2004 held great significance for
those who won it, and the raising of a black insurgent flag -- like the
hoisting of a pirate's skull-and-crossbones on a ship or of enemy colors above
a desert fort in a 1930s Hollywood movie -- seemed another emblem of futility.
Some of the Marines who watched it unfurl began to wonder whether the lives of
their fellow Marines, as one veteran put it in the New York Times, "were
sacrificed for nothing."
"It
was irresponsible," another said, "to send us over there with no plan
and now to just give it all away."
This is not
what Americans expect to find at the end of their war stories. Indeed, if
sentimentality tends to elicit the emotions without binding the will, an
equally dangerous consequence of an overreliance on the heart is the compulsion
to transform even the most ambiguous tragedies into inspirational
"good-news" stories.
* * *
Without a
strong head to resist the temptations of sentimentality, a writer might find
herself facing the predicament of Ivy Spang, the hapless protagonist of Edith
Wharton's 1919 "Writing a War Story." When war breaks out, Spang
forgets her ambitions to be a poet and goes to Paris to work in an
Anglo-American hospital. There she is asked "to contribute a rattling war
story" to a morale-boosting monthly being prepared for circulation among
the wounded. "A good rousing story, Miss Spang," exhorts the editor,
"a dash of sentiment, of course, but nothing to depress or discourage.… A
tragedy with a happy ending -- that's about the idea." After several false
starts, Spang serendipitously discovers a true war story, originally
transcribed from a soldier's unvarnished account by her former governess, who
had also worked for a time in a military hospital.
The
published story's first impartial reader, a soldier and novelist who happens to
be among the war-wounded patients at the hospital in Paris where Spang works,
admonishes its author: "You've got hold of an awfully good subject … but you've
rather mauled it, haven't you?" In adding "a dash of sentiment,"
Spang had ruined the material she had been given. She had acquiesced to an
editor's demand to shape the story of war into a sentimental absurdity by
giving it a happy ending.
The kind of
war story we crave today is much the same as Spang's: We search for a
redemptive ending to every tragedy. After more than 12 years of engagement,
grasping wherever and however we can at a cleansing goodness that might close
the book on two wars that launched so many more questions than they answered,
we find no solace in the inconclusive, and we remain uneasy contemplating our
own capacity for a violence that has not served a climactic, universally
agreed-upon end.
Witness,
for example, the recent media coverage surrounding the opening of the film Lone
Survivor, based on the book by former Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell. In a January
interview, CNN's Jake Tapper suggested that there was an air of
"hopelessness" about the film -- that the deaths of Luttrell's comrades
in Afghanistan during an operation gone wrong "seemed senseless."
Luttrell responded angrily, wondering what film Tapper had seen: "We spend
our whole lives training to defend this country, and then we were sent over
there by this country, so you're telling me that because we were over there
doing what we were told by our country that it was senseless and my guys, what,
they died for nothing?"
Cable,
Twitter, and the blogosphere exploded with vitriol against Tapper for his
failure to appreciate a true American hero. Only a few columnists subsequently
weighed in about the need for a debate over whether Americans have in fact died
for some enduring change in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Dying for
something gives shape to a life, salvaging it from the oblivion of destruction
and shifting focus away from the merits of the cause. Calling a death
"senseless," as Tapper proposed, on a mission gone wrong condemns
that life to the relentless circularity of betrayal and doubt. Suggesting that
a death in battle was in vain -- "Lives were wasted" in Fallujah, a
former Marine told the Times, "and now everyone back home sees that"
-- also starkly exposes what the World War I poet Wilfred Owen described as the
"old Lie" about the unadulterated sweetness of dying for one's country.
The
imposition of happy endings on war's tragedies may momentarily assuage the
heart. And who could fail to understand the intensity of Luttrell's desire to
seek a balm for grief, guilt, and the constellation of emotions besieging the
lone survivor of a battle? Yet the perpetuation of the "old Lie" also
insults the head. Writer and Vietnam veteran Tim O'Brien's injunction, in which
the echo of Owen can be heard, is pertinent: "A true war story is never
moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper
human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If
a story seems moral, do not believe it."
In a
climate in which the pressures to sentimentalize are so strong and in which
victory and defeat are so difficult to measure, it seems a moral imperative to
discover another way to read and write about a war in order to avoid falling
into this hazard.
Futility
might be found at tactical, operational, or strategic levels. During wars,
especially long wars, replete with confusion and fluidity, with fleeting,
costly gains and losses, archetypal moments such as the raising of a flag --
over Iwo Jima or Fallujah -- offer a discrete tableau amid an otherwise
indecipherable jumble. It isn't easy to determine whether a war is futile.
Perhaps it never has been. Are all lost wars futile? Are all victories worth
their price? Might Pyrrhic victories be described as futile too?
Wait long
enough, of course, and many of history's victories are reversed.
* * *
As a
postwar malaise seems to settle like silt all around me in 2014, everything
I've been reading -- from Shakespeare to Lincoln, from Studs Terkel's The Good
War to David Mitchell's Black Swan Green to Tobias Wolff's Vietnam memoir In
Pharaoh's Army -- feels crowded with the ghosts of 20th-, 19th-, 18th-, even
14th-century wars that have been commemorated, misremembered, and forgotten.
This literature is shot through with evidence of the dangers of
sentimentalizing war and refusing to accept responsibility for the damage it
does regardless of the justness of the cause.
This
monitory chorus includes the contributors to Terkel's oral history, such as an
army nurse who recalls the shocked look on the faces of well-to-do Pasadena
matrons in 1946 at the sight of disfigured soldiers from the local hospital
being taken for walks on the city streets: "It's like the war hadn't come
to Pasadena until we came there." Or the Marine E.B. Sledge, author of the
World War II memoir With the Old Breed, who describes his war as a "matter
of simple survival" and "totally savage." "We were in it to
get it over with," Sledge recounted to Terkel, evincing none of the need
for redemption so obviously felt by Luttrell.
"Wasted
lives on a muddy slope.… What in the hell was glorious about it?"
"Wasted
lives on a muddy slope.… What in the hell was glorious about it?"
Mitchell's
bildungsroman, meanwhile, charts a year in the life of Jason Taylor, a keenly
intelligent and imaginative 13-year-old boy in England whose adolescent crises
take place against the backdrop of the 1982 Falklands War. Jason reads the
Daily Mail, while his older sister reads the Guardian. In the headlines from
these papers, we find contrasting strains of language: "The Daily Mail's
full of how Great British guts and Great British leadership won the war,"
while the Guardian's "got all sorts of stuff not in the Daily Mail,"
including stories about woefully untrained Argentine conscripts and their
general ignorance about the islands they were sent to secure. Jason, who keeps
a scrapbook about the war, believes, "People'll remember everything about
the Falklands till the end of the world." Soon, however, Jason, his
village, and the nation move on, while the Daily Mail turns its attention to
"whether Cliff Richard the singer's having sex with Sue Barker the tennis
player, or whether they're just friends." All that will endure, Jason's
sister tells him, are the land mines.
Among the
American writers who wrestle with but never feel the need to diminish the truth
about war's impact, Wolff stands out. In Pharaoh's Army offers a portrait of My
Tho, a Vietnamese provincial town that the recently departed "French had
made … so they could imagine themselves in France" and that the U.S. Army
declared off-limits to most of its personnel. "I was glad the American
troops were kept out," Wolff explains. "Without even meaning to they
would have turned the people into prostitutes, pimps, pedicab drivers, and
thieves, and the town itself into a nest of burger stands and laundries. Within
months it would have been unrecognizable; such was the power of American
dollars and American appetites."
Yet the
most forceful of all the writers I've been spending time with is Abraham
Lincoln, who refused in his second inaugural to absolve anyone -- North or
South -- of responsibility for the "mighty scourge" of the Civil War.
Even earlier than that, in 1838, Lincoln knew that "passion has helped us,
but can do so no more." In an address to the Young Men's Lyceum in
Springfield, Illinois, he insisted that passion "will in future be our
enemy. Reason -- cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason -- must furnish all
the materials for our future support and defense."
Of course
it is the Civil War that spawned the ne plus ultra of sentimental American war
stories in the "Lost Cause" apologia, a spirited cultivation of the
idea that the industrialized North unleashed the uncivilized warfare of the
modern age against an opponent that was fighting according to the dictates of
old chivalry. D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation gave sensational visual
representation to this Southern narrative of the war. In the ultimate
perversion of affection, the archly sentimental film engineers viewers'
sympathies toward the Southern slaveholders whose principles they simultaneously
deplore. Its juxtaposition of villains and victims tempts hearts to triumph
over heads; that is the corrupt source of its corrupting power.
In an
interview on the occasion of its rerelease in 1930, when asked whether his film
was "true," Griffith replied:
Yes, I
think it's true.… A story of people that were fighting desperately against
great odds, great sacrifices. Suffering. Death. It was a great struggle, a
great story.… Did you read about Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg? Pitiful thing.
There were boys, like in many a battle. When the fathers dropped the guns,
these nothing but children picked them up and went on fighting, and they fought
to the bitter end. It's easy enough to tell that kind of a story.
It is much
harder to tell another kind of story, an unsentimental story. It is much harder
to speak of war in a pellucid, forthright mode. Doing so has become alien even
to our own wised-up age, entrenched as war has become in absolutism and what
remains a misguided faith in the cleansing, redemptive power of violence. It is
a faith expressed in then-President George W. Bush's remarks on the deck of the
USS Abraham Lincoln in 2003, when he described the Iraq war as embodying
"the highest calling of history" and the assembled sailors as bearing
the message of the prophet Isaiah "wherever" they went: "To the
captives, 'come out' -- and to those in darkness, 'be free.'"
* * *
"I'm
confused," one of the plebes confessed when we reached the third act of
Richard II and he discovered his sympathies shifting from the apparently
victimized Bolingbroke to the irresponsible and duplicitous King Richard. It is
Richard who knows before everyone, including Bolingbroke himself, that his
cousin cannot stop -- the momentum of war will not let him -- until he has
secured the crown for himself. "Up, cousin, up," King Richard tells
Bolingbroke, who has kneeled before him. "Your heart is up, I know, / Thus
high at least [pointing to his crown], although your knee be low."
To the
surprise of my student, it is Richard, the king of dreamy poetry, who now
displays by far the keenest, most unsentimental understanding of the actual
dynamics of force. As philosopher Simone Weil once noted, force blinds those,
like Bolingbroke, who imagine they can control it. In the collision between symbolic
and practical might, the latter wins, and King Richard intuits that all will
suffer for it.
England's
civil wars gave Shakespeare fodder for eight plays. When next he shows us
Bolingbroke, now the title character of Henry IV, Part I, the energetic usurper
is changed utterly: He rules a kingdom full of trenches, a land soaked with the
blood "of civil butchery." King Henry is cut by the double "edge
of war" that he first unleashed.
When
Fallujah fell in January, some heard echoes of Khe Sanh in Vietnam, won at
great human cost and then evacuated in 1968. Five years later, in 1973,
Frederick Weyand, commanding general of Military Assistance Command, Vietnam,
announced the deactivation of MACV: "Our mission has been accomplished. I
depart with a strong feeling of pride in what we have achieved and in what our
achievement represents." Weyand's rear-guard rhetorical action, reported
in American newspapers, sounds cynical given what we now know to be the outcome
of the Vietnam War -- until, that is, you have had the opportunity to listen to
enough officers, whose earnestness you do not doubt, when they come home from
Afghanistan. They are heavy with the death of fellow soldiers and
simultaneously fighting a sense of futility with an insistence about the
meaningful progress they have seen. How many courageous and honorable friends,
either on their way to Afghanistan or relieved at their good fortune in coming
home, have told me with a gallows-humor grin that no one wants to be the last
American to die there?
Now, as the
United States emerges from Afghanistan and Iraq, is the time to think about
these wars -- indeed, all wars -- with our heads. The language we use to talk
about matters of power and violence can influence the future use of American
force. To the degree that we allow the undeniable suffering and sacrifice
somehow to redeem all causes -- that we allow our guilt to obscure the
realities of devastating, indecisive wars -- we increase the likelihood of
finding ourselves in a similar predicament again.
In focusing
on a moment of linguistic indirection in Richard II, my student found the key
to unlocking an entire play. Reading closely in this way isn't a skill we tend
to take very seriously -- until we find that we cannot live without it.
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