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The Pictures of War You Aren’t Supposed to See
War is brutal and impersonal. It mocks the
fantasy of individual heroism and the absurdity of utopian goals like
democracy. In an instant, industrial warfare can kill dozens, even
hundreds of people, who never see their attackers. The power of these
industrial weapons is indiscriminate and staggering. They can take down
apartment blocks in seconds, burying and crushing everyone inside. They
can demolish villages and send tanks, planes and ships up in fiery
blasts. The wounds, for those who survive, result in terrible burns,
blindness, amputation and lifelong pain and trauma. No one returns the
same from such warfare. And once these weapons are employed all talk of
human rights is a farce. 
In Peter van Agtmael's "2nd Tour Hope I don't Die" and Lori Grinker's "Afterwar: Veterans From a World in Conflict," two haunting books of war photographs, we see pictures of war which are almost always hidden from public view. These pictures are shadows, for only those who go to and suffer from war can fully confront the visceral horror of it, but they are at least an attempt to unmask war's savagery.
"Over ninety percent of this soldier's body was burned when a roadside bomb hit his vehicle, igniting the fuel tank and burning two other soldiers to death," reads the caption in Agtmael's book next to a photograph of the bloodied body of a soldier in an operating room. "His camouflage uniform dangled over the bed, ripped open by the medics who had treated him on the helicopter. Clumps of his skin had peeled away, and what was left of it was translucent. He was in and out of consciousness, his eyes stabbing open for a few seconds. As he was lifted from the stretcher to the ER bed, he screamed ‘Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy,' then ‘Put me to sleep, please put me to sleep.' There was another photographer in the ER, and he leaned his camera over the heads of the medical staff to get an overhead shot. The soldier yelled, ‘Get that fucking camera out of my face.' Those were his last words. I visited his grave one winter afternoon six months later," Agtmael writes, "and the scene of his death is never far from my thoughts."
"There were three of us inside, and the jeep caught fire," Israeli soldier Yossi Arditi, quoted in Grinker's book, says of the moment when a Molotov cocktail exploded in his vehicle. "The fuel tank was full and it was about to explode, my skin was hanging from my arms and face-but I didn't lose my head. I knew nobody could get inside to help me, that my only way out was through the fire to the doors. I wanted to take my gun, but I couldn't touch it because my hands were burning." [To see long excerpts from "Afterwar" and to read an introduction written by Chris Hedges, click here.]
Arditi spent six months in the hospital. He had surgery every two or three months, about 20 operations, over the next three years.
Filmic and most photographic images of war are shorn of the heart-pounding fear, awful stench, deafening noise and exhaustion of the battlefield. Such images turn confusion and chaos, the chief element of combat, into an artful war narrative. They turn war into porn. Soldiers and Marines, especially those who have never seen war, buy cases of beer and watch movies like "Platoon," movies meant to denounce war, and as they do so revel in the despicable power of the weapons shown. The reality of violence is different. Everything formed by violence is senseless and useless. It exists without a future. It leaves behind nothing but death, grief and destruction.
Chronicles of war, such as these two books, that eschew images and scenes of combat begin to capture war's reality. War's effects are what the state and the press, the handmaiden of the war makers, work hard to keep hidden. If we really saw war, what war does to young minds and bodies, it would be harder to embrace the myth of war. If we had to stand over the mangled corpses of the eight schoolchildren killed in Afghanistan a week ago and listen to the wails of their parents we would not be able to repeat clichés about liberating the women of Afghanistan or bringing freedom to the Afghan people. This is why war is carefully sanitized. This is why we are given war's perverse and dark thrill but are spared from seeing war's consequences. The mythic visions of war keep it heroic and entertaining. And the press is as guilty as Hollywood. During the start of the Iraq war, television reports gave us the visceral thrill of force and hid from us the effects of bullets, tank rounds, iron fragmentation bombs and artillery rounds. We tasted a bit of war's exhilaration, but were protected from seeing what war actually does.
The wounded, the crippled and the dead are, in this great charade, swiftly carted off stage. They are war's refuse. We do not see them. We do not hear them. They are doomed, like wandering spirits, to float around the edges of our consciousness, ignored, even reviled. The message they tell is too painful for us to hear. We prefer to celebrate ourselves and our nation by imbibing the myth of glory, honor, patriotism and heroism, words that in combat become empty and meaningless. And those whom fate has decreed must face war's effects often turn and flee.
Saul Alfaro, who lost his legs in the war in El Salvador, speaks in Grinker's book about the first and final visit from his girlfriend as he lay in an army hospital bed.
"She had been my girlfriend in the military and we had planned to be married," he says. "But when she saw me in the hospital-I don't know exactly what happened, but later they told me when she saw me she began to cry. Afterwards, she ran away and never came back."
The public manifestations of gratitude are reserved for veterans who dutifully read from the script handed to them by the state. The veterans trotted out for viewing are those who are compliant and palatable, those we can stand to look at without horror, those who are willing to go along with the lie that war is about patriotism and is the highest good. "Thank you for your service," we are supposed to say. They are used to perpetuate the myth. We are used to honor it.
Gary Zuspann, who lives in a special enclosed environment in his parent's home in Waco, Texas, suffering from Gulf War syndrome, speaks in Grinker's book of feeling like "a prisoner of war" even after the war had ended.
"Basically they put me on the curb and said, okay, fend for yourself," he says in the book. "I was living in a fantasy world where I thought our government cared about us and they take care of their own. I believed it was in my contract, that if you're maimed or wounded during your service in war, you should be taken care of. Now I'm angry."
I went back to Sarajevo after covering the 1990s war for The New York Times and found hundreds of cripples trapped in rooms in apartment blocks with no elevators and no wheelchairs. Most were young men, many without limbs, being cared for by their elderly parents, the glorious war heroes left to rot.
Despair and suicide grip survivors. More Vietnam veterans committed suicide after the war than were killed during it. The inhuman qualities drilled into soldiers and Marines in wartime defeat them in peacetime. This is what Homer taught us in "The Iliad," the great book on war, and "The Odyssey," the great book on the long journey to recovery by professional killers. Many never readjust. They cannot connect again with wives, children, parents or friends, retreating into personal hells of self-destructive anguish and rage.
"They program you to have no emotion-like if somebody sitting next to you gets killed you just have to carry on doing your job and shut up," Steve Annabell, a British veteran of the Falklands War, says to Grinker. "When you leave the service, when you come back from a situation like that, there's no button they can press to switch your emotions back on. So you walk around like a zombie. They don't deprogram you. If you become a problem they just sweep you under the carpet."
"To get you to join up they do all these advertisements-they show people skiing down mountains and doing great things-but they don't show you getting shot at and people with their legs blown off or burning to death," he says. "They don't show you what really happens. It's just bullshit. And they never prepare you for it. They can give you all the training in the world, but it's never the same as the real thing."
Those with whom veterans have most in common when the war is over are often those they fought.
"Nobody comes back from war the same," says Horacio Javier Benitez, who fought the British in the Falklands and is quoted in Grinker's book. "The person, Horacio, who was sent to war, doesn't exist anymore. It's hard to be enthusiastic about normal life; too much seems inconsequential. You contend with craziness and depression."
"Many who served in the Malvinas," he says, using the Argentine name of the islands, "committed suicide, many of my friends."
"I miss my family," reads a wall graffito captured in one of Agtmael's photographs. "Please God forgive the lives I took and let my family be happy if I don't go home again."
Next to the plea someone had drawn an arrow toward the words and written in thick, black marker "Fag!!!"
Look beyond the nationalist cant used to justify war. Look beyond the seduction of the weapons and the pornography of violence. Look beyond Barack Obama's ridiculous rhetoric about finishing the job or fighting terror. Focus on the evil of war. War begins by calling for the annihilation of the others but ends ultimately in self-annihilation. It corrupts souls and mutilates bodies. It destroys homes and villages and murders children on their way to school. It grinds into the dirt all that is tender and beautiful and sacred. It empowers human deformities-warlords, Shiite death squads, Sunni insurgents, the Taliban, al-Qaida and our own killers-who can speak only in the despicable language of force. War is a scourge. It is a plague. It is industrial murder. And before you support war, especially the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, look into the hollow eyes of the men, women and children who know it.
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Show AllFor those that have never read it,"The War Prayer", by Mark Twain: http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/making/warprayer.html
Thank you for the reference to Twain. In "On the Damned Human Race" Mark Twain had many good writings on imperialism, by the US in the Philippines and by King Leopold in the Congo in particular. Also on the white race, women and many other topics.
I was disappointed by the Twain reading in the Howard Zinn TV program. It abridged the story of the US massacre of the Moros to the point that it lost the the scene of the US soldiers shooting from a mountain above at 600 barely visible unarmed men women and children in a crater. The casual shooting at unarmed humans, huddled so far away you could not tell man, woman or baby, continued for a day and a half until every one of the Moros had been killed. Then came the celebrations and declarations of heroism for the soldiers at home.
These writings were suppressed in Twain's time. It is similar now with a dearth of war photos and journalism in the mainstream press. We are proud of our troops, but do we know for what?
Joe
"The War Prayer" really takes the steam out of the Christian zeal for war.
-from The Mysterious Stranger:
"Oh, it's true. I know your race. It is made up of sheep. It is governed by minorities, seldom or never by majorities. It suppresses its feelings and its beliefs and follows the handful that makes the most noise. Sometimes the noisy handful is right, sometimes wrong; but no matter, the crowd follows it. The vast majority of the race, whether savage or civilized, are secretly kind-hearted and shrink from inflicting pain, but in the presence of the aggressive and pitiless minority they don't dare to assert themselves. Think of it! One kind-hearted creature spies upon another, and sees to it that he loyally helps in iniquities which revolt both of them. Speaking as an expert, I know that ninety-nine out of a hundred of your race were strongly against the killing of witches when that foolishness was first agitated by a handful of pious lunatics in the long ago. And I know that even to-day, after ages of transmitted prejudice and silly teaching, only one person in twenty puts any real heart into the harrying of a witch. And yet apparently everybody hates witches and wants them killed. Some day a handful will rise up on the other side and make the most noise - perhaps even a single daring man with a big voice and a determined front will do it - and in a week all the sheep will wheel and follow him, and witch-hunting will come to a sudden end.|
"Monarchies, aristocracies, and religions are all based upon that large defect in your race - the individual's distrust of his neighbor, and his desire, for safety's or comfort's sake, to stand well in his neighbor's eye. These institutions will always remain, and always flourish, and always oppress you, affront you, and degrade you, because you will always be and remain slaves of minorities. There was never a country where the majority of the people were in their secret hearts loyal to any of these institutions."
I did not like to hear our race called sheep, and said I did not think they were.
"Still, it is true, lamb," said Satan. "Look at you in war - what mutton you are, and how ridiculous!"
"In war? How?"
"There has never been a just one, never an honorable one - on the part of the instigator of the war. I can see a million years ahead, and this rule will never change in so many as half a dozen instances. The loud little handful - as usual - will shout for the war. The pulpit will - warily and cautiously - object - at first; the great, big, dull bulk of the nation will rub its sleepy eyes and try to make out why there should be a war, and will say, earnestly and indignantly, "It is unjust and dishonorable, and here is no necessity for it." Then the handful will shout louder. A few fair men on the other side will argue and reason against the war with speech and pen, and at first will have a hearing and be applauded; but it will not last long; those others will outshout them, and presently the anti-war audiences will thin out and lose popularity. Before long you willsee this curious thing: the speakers stoned from the platform, and free speech strangled by hordes of furious men who in their secret hearts are still at one with those stoned speakers - as earlier - but do not dare to say so. And now the whole nation - pulpit and all - will take up the war-cry, and shout itself hoarse, and mob any honest man who ventures to open his mouth; and presently such mouths will cease to open. Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception."
"The Mysterious Stranger" is one of the most truthful and frightening stories in US literature. I know someone who had nightmares after reading it in Jr. High.
Joe
One thing you can say about modern warfare - the Americans are really, really good at it. Stupid, thoughtless, arrogant, but good at killing, and good at braying about it.
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It's all about power and greed.
God created man in his own image??
I don't think so.
What kind of creatures destroy their own kind so indiscriminately?
Shameful; Despicable; Inhumane (HUMANE! Hummm?)
Dare I call myself Human?
Embarrassingly sad but true.
Power and greed
Power and greed
Pretty fu*kin' sad...
wow. hedges is brilliant. there will come a time when we all look at his writings and realize the significance of what he offers.
Captjim, I think I can appreciate where you seem to be coming from. On my darker days, in fact, we may be in the same place. But here's what is, I think, the truth regarding our species: we all have a broad range of capacities, from the sacred to the profane, and at this point in our culture, every popular cultural resource seems to be promoting the profane. All of them, including many religious institutions.
DESPITE THAT, there are instances every now and then of human insight, kindness and grace. In a way, it is almost hard to believe that the human capacity for good surmounts all of the inhibitors.
There is work for those of us who see the policies of the status quo as a danger to the survival of the species. We need to make the evil palpable so that the inherent good in people can understand, react and work to create change.
Good art does that.
Good music does that.
Good literature does that.
Good journalists do that.
You get the idea. Chris Hedges is doing important, heroic work. He helps people to KNOW things. Understand what war and violence really is. Viscerally.
Hedges needs help. We all have a role to play. Especially those who already understand, we need you the most. Never give up.
Sioux Rose
IOWA: Thank you for an excellent, insightful post.
Well done Chris Hedges. I am always moved, intellectually and spiritually by your writing. Well done indeed.
Honestly, I can't bare to see any more images of the humans destroyed by the atrocity of war. My heart sinks at the suggestion and images already seen flash in my head. If all americans saw the reality of mangled and shredded bodies, maybe there would be more opposition to the carnage. It might even take the pleasure out of the video killing games, glorified war films, and the national war song.
Buck
Hear! Hear! One of the best books which exposes the American cinema's glorification of the U.S. war machine over the twentieth century is the aptly named The Hollywood War Machine: U.S. Militarism And Popular Culture by Carl Boggs and Tom Pollard.
What is also quite surprising, in relation to Chris Hedges's article, is how so very few military families express outrage at their government and the military for having lied to them when their loved ones return to this country in a body bag and/or maimed and crippled. Contrast that to the scene in the powerful documentary Sir! No Sir! when the male nurse comments on the fact of when he had taken care of returning Vietnam veterans in a hospital in Fort Lewis, Wa., [these were soldiers who were unable to bring a spoon of food to their mouths by themselves or defecate without assistance] not one of those soldiers had said that what they had gone through was worth it. For some reason it seems that today's generation is much more willing to swallow the propaganda that they are given as compared to the more rebellious generation of the 1960s.
Chris Hedges and Robert Fisk bring the material and emotional realities of our invasions to us. All of the military action is worlds away. We are not supposed to know much about it, but to live in a giddy, creepy bubble of a Willy Wonka chocolate factory.
And let's not leave out another great journalist, John Pilger!
Mr. Hedges quotes a soldier as saying: "Basically they put me on the curb and said, okay, fend for yourself," he says in the book. "I was living in a fantasy world where I thought our government cared about us and they take care of their own.
If a government cared, it would not send its people off to war.
True about Pilger. I would add the recent Moyers too. Thanks.
Joe
The Pentagon spends as much energy controlling the media narrative of our wars as they do battlefield strategy.
Put the pictures of war on television, all the most horrible images.
The wars would be over in record time.
THEY know this.
The presentation of our wars is as heavily scripted and produced as any other program on t.v.
So skilled are the propagandists for most Americans war has become just another reality show.
"for most Americans war has become just another reality show."
. . . which, as we know, means there is no reality in the show whatsoever.
>>The power of these industrial weapons is indiscriminate and staggering. They can take down apartment blocks in seconds, burying and crushing everyone inside. They can demolish villages and send tanks, planes and ships up in fiery blasts.<<
Yet we make video-games of war. But note without the schools full of children or family gatherings being blown to bits. That might dim the pleasures we get from mayhem.
Or (gulp) maybe not...
Gary
>>The Pentagon spends as much energy controlling the media narrative of our wars as they do battlefield strategy.
Put the pictures of war on television, all the most horrible images.<<
We did once and it ended a war. So the Pentagon is not about to let loose the media, instead it "embeds" them and we see soldiers shooting off their neat weapons at some unseen enemy and occasionally a fleeting glimpse of a brave wounded soldier being airlifted away from prying eyes.
Gary
Gdgoodman
Indeed. One wonders where are the David Halberstams and the Neil Sheehans and the Malcolm Brownes of today who will have the courage, as those three did during the Vietnam War, of telling the military that they do not work for them and that their job is to tell the American people the truth about war and how the influx of more U.S. soldiers is making the situation worse instead of better in places like Afghanistan and Iraq.
>>David Halberstams and the Neil Sheehans and the Malcolm Brownes of today...<<
On the Internet.
Gary
I wish that Obama was forced to read Chris Hedges' fine work. Maybe he would feel something, anything, and first and foremost get a conscience that simply would not allow him to carry on as he is. But I'm not sure Obama is human anymore. I don't know what he is. I'll say it again: Dubya was appalling, Obama is worse.
Hedges' writings are so important. I just wish that people other than the choir was reading.
I have taken to posting on conservative-leaning sites and eventually the opposition realises that they cannot refute the facts that I bring to the table. But my main aim is to give the casual reader a different world view. I know I am not going to change the writing of the completely brainwashed or of the paid trolls, but getting some truth where otherwise there is none is, I feel, a worthwhile use of my time. If enough of us did so and ignored the crude attacks, I believe there could be a positive outcome. Just one other person posting from the same point of view and knocking heads together is a real help.
Having said that, a Fox News site has "lost" quite a few of my simple, plain, factual comments - eg that Obama's executive order regarding Interpol applies only to five people working in a NY office and that Interpol has no operational activities in any country as all police work is carried out by the host country's law enforcement agencies. However, Google lists over 400 disinformation sites spouting downright garbage on the matter. My work is cut out. Any help would be gratefully received.
Parallax, you have an excellent idea. We need to make converts, and I believe that we can. The truth is on our side. Of course it is hard work, a majority of our fellow citizens seem to be brainwashed to a horrifying degree. But I think many retain some shred of critical thinking skills. We'll never know unless we attempt to communicate cross culture, so to speak. It is more transformational than only interacting with those who are the same as us.
Which websites are you working on, maybe more CD readers can cross over to work the crowd. It seems like itmight be more effective if we pick one website to start.
What do you think?
MSN "Politics and the Market" is one completely awash with nutjobs. FoxNews.com/opinion is another. Different user names, of course. You need to keep the discussion civil.
Good luck. CU there
Mr. Hedges, thank you for (your) summation: RIDICULOUS reneger's rhetoric (Walsh); health DEFORMITIES (mine); HOLLOW men (Eliot). A millenial epitaph, indeed!
Though i too , OneCaptnJim, find it hard to take all the shit going down, and am pretty sure humanity is in for some dark times, i am not the least bit concerned that Peace will eventually reign over terror. We just have no idea what that peace will be like. It may be the peace of oblivion. As the prophets say, "it's all Good".
Chris Hedges' writing is deeply moving both to the intellect and to the emotions.
The following line in his latest piece piqued my curiosity.
"More Vietnam veterans committed suicide after the war than were killed during it."
I'd like to ask Chris if this allegation can be documented, but I don't have his email address. If the statement is true and can be documented, it's a huge bombshell (please forgive the metaphor) that might actually shake up some of the zombie US politicians and citizens who haven't seen the reality of our wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan and central America.
Jim Shea
Jim
Chrisd Hedges is correct about this. The suicide rate among Viet Nam veterans was higher than any other war. The DOD can confirm this for you and the Veterans Hospitals also have the current count. Its been over 50,000 for years.
Sorry Jim Shea, these guys are and have been adept at "not seeing" anything that interferes with their swag - that's why we call them political animals (not human). Don't look to them for anything but verbal flatulence followed by BETRAYAL - see EFCA, Out of Iraq/Af-Pak, Health Care 'Reform' et al.
Way to go, Chris Hedges!! Excellent article! Americans need badly to see more such pictures depicting the horrors of war and its aftermath, and to be shaken up by it.
Maybe it would help to publish a photographic book wherein each photo of a mangled corpse or charred child is accompanied on the facing page by a smiling glossy of a war profiteering exec ... perhaps lounging poolside at his gated waterfront luxury home.
That's a great idea! I hope some publishers are reading this. If not, self-publish the book, and allocate 50% of the profits
to aid those who tragically lost their families through these ob$cene war$. I'll buy that book.
Thank you for writing this. I will buy both books, read them, and then donate them to a library. When the world needs international cooperation, all of our resources, and our best scientific and organizational talent to collectively save us from climate change, pandemics, food shortages, pollution and other global dangers, we waste our talent, resources, money and emotions killing one another in order to be able to use more oil, which we know we should stop using. This is tragedy, in the formal sense. We do things to destroy ourselves, knowing that we are destroying ourselves, but still unable to stop.
And we call ourselves "Civilized."
Mr Hedges is a tiny candle of light in a bleak, dark time.
I have just finished his Empire of Illusion and recommend it to all who visit here.
"And now every April I sit on my porch
and I watch the parade pass before me
I see my old comrades, how proudly they march
re-living the dreams of past glory.
The silly old men all twisted and torn
the forgotten heroes of a forgotten war
and the young people ask me what are they marching for
and I ask myself the same question.
And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda
Does anyone have the source of the statement that more Vietnam vets committed suicide than died in the war. I'm not challenging it. I just want to know where to look to get the details.
af
Bring it on!!! We love it. We are proud to be Americans. War profits are up. We get control of the great middle-eastern oil fields.
Powerful. Stunning. Provocative. How sad that our duly-elected decision makers will never read it.
Chris has pulled our attention once more to the images of an external conflict which is nothing more but the shadow of the real conflict hidden within humanity.
~when you see truth, truth is when you see.
The Best Day I Had In the Vietnam War...
was my first.
I flue helicopters for two tours. Don't ask me why. My first day I flue as a second pilot to the Air Craft Commander, we took fire while over a small hamlet of thatched huts being assaulted by an armored force of South Vietnamese Army. It was a strong hold of Viet Cong and the Viet Cong were occupying parts of the village.
Our left side door gunner returned fire to suppress the AK rounds, which appeared to float up towards our helicopter.
After the armored assault, we were requested to land on the out shirts of the village and medievac a woman and her baby. The baby was dead, shot through the chest by us.
How ironical that we killed a child of the people we were told we were defending.
The insanity and brutality only increased until the day I left.
"The baby was dead, shot through the chest by us."
The baby was murdered, shot through the chest by us.
DCH
Your story ironically is reminiscent of the My Lai massacre when U.S. helicopter pilot Lt. Hugh Thompson had his crew land their helicopter and had them train their guns on the Americans. He told his crew that if the American company fired upon any more Vietnamese that they were to then fire upon the Americans. Thompson and his crew rescued more than a dozen Vietnamese women and children from the clutches of the less than benevolent American army. Thompson and his crew were vilified a few years after that had taken place by a U.S. congressman from Georgia for daring to challenge what the American military had been doing on that infamous day. Hugh Thompson and his crew were one of the few heroes of that day for having said NO to the unjustifiable slaughter of those Vietnamese people. If only there were people in the military today with the courage and integrity of Thompson and his crew who would also say NO to American imperialism.
Wow. Amazing heroism.
Our military is murdering innocent people. Our military is full of war criminals. They are murderers.
Aren't we collectively guilty of war crimes, sense the leadership has yet to be tried for war crimes?
Where are the protests? Why is the same congress still in power?
To answer your first question, yes, we are all as guilty as the grunt who pulls the trigger to kill that handcuffed schoolboy, because we provide the funding, willingly or not. To your other questions, I don't know where the protests are. I think there is not just a feeling of apathy among the population but a feeling of futility. The same congress is in power because the real owners of the country select the politicians. All we do is vote for that which we perceive to be the lesser evil, ignoring the fact that evil is evil regardless. Me? I just keep hoping for "the asteroid".
I think that if we can understand the form our protest should take then we will see the mass protest we desire, but it will not be the protest we imagine.