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How Not to Tell a True War Story
‘HOW TO Tell a True War Story'' is the title of one of Tim O'Brien's master works of fiction. Telling war stories that are true has been one of the great challenges to the human imagination, from Homer to Hemingway. False war stories not only dehumanize victims and perpetrators alike, but, with glib valorization, can grease the rails of future wars. Last week, a new way to tell a false war story surfaced, and commanders themselves were the ones to decry it. The ubiquitous use of PowerPoint slides in military briefings about Afghanistan and Iraq has been tagged as a problem. Breaking down battle reports into bullets and bites, as Brigadier General H.R. McMaster told The New York Times, "can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control.''
It's worse than that. Anyone who has ever sat through a PowerPoint presentation has seen how the speaker surrenders initiative to the machine, and how the prepared breakdown of information inhibits actual thinking. Because the speaker is not thinking, neither is the audience. The mere short-hand display of ideas requires no engagement, so the speaker drones and the audience sleeps. But it's worse than that, too. The degradation of rhetoric throughout contemporary culture, epitomized by PowerPoint, means that essential capacities for thought and communication are being lost. The sound-bite reduces experience to episodes shorn of context, when understanding what matters requires a honed feel precisely for the connection between episodes.
Here is an example from E.M. Forster, whose concern was with the shape of a story: the queen died, and then the king died. That set of events, related chronologically, tells us only so much. It could be rendered as bullet points. But if, instead, the report is: the queen died, and then the king died of grief, we have moved into an entirely different realm of understanding, where attention has shifted from discrete events to the connection between them. Causality is what matters. The moral imagination is defined by awareness of how choice leads to consequence, which leads to a new and graver choice, which in turn leads to a larger and more fateful consequence. The culture of sound bites and bullets knows nothing of such spacious narrative form. This is not an aesthetic problem, but an ethical one. Only the capacity to attend to the causal connection between events separates brutes from persons. When it comes to war, the loss of that capacity is dangerous.
The US military's problem did not begin with screen technologies, laptops, and clickers. It began with the bureaucratic leveling of decision making that occurred during World War II, symbolized and abetted by the vast anonymity of the Pentagon. The war stories told there since 1945 have consistently been false. Why? Because in the cipher-creating Pentagon, individual moral agency has counted for less than blind institutional momentum. Battle order was replaced as the defining martial social structure by the organizational chart, the warrior ethos by the functionary's. Endlessly circulated interoffice envelopes replaced the officer's personally drafted action report, much as those envelopes, with their figure-eight fasteners, would eventually be replaced by e-mail. The face-to-face interaction of humans, debating urgent questions and criticizing the in-flow of intelligence, was replaced by the bite-size thought structure of electronic communications that inevitably delete complexity.
The downplaying of individual initiative in favor of group-think led to a diffusion of moral responsibility and the emergence of an impersonal dynamic over which no human authority could be effectively exercised. How else to account for the insane accumulation of nuclear weapons, or the consistently uncriticized ease with which this faceless military establishment took the nation into its sequence of unnecessary wars (Korea, Vietnam, Central America, Grenada, Panama, Somalia, Kosovo, Iraq I and II, Afghanistan)?
The PowerPoint imagination, with the speaker causing death-by-droning, is perfectly suited to the new technology of the drone as an actual weapon. The inflicting of hurt by an impersonal assassination machine, remotely managed with no risk to the hurt-inflictor, who is blind to the connection between "prompt global strike'' and its village-level consequences throughout the far distant war zone - such is the climax of the false war story of which we Americans are master tellers.
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25 Comments so far
Show AllO'brien is an excellent writer.
I usually don't read fiction, but he has things to say.
"It's all true, even if it never happened."
The military is the opposite.
I read Tim Obrien's first book "If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box me up and Carry Me Home", which was a cool and funny book. Tim Obrien, from what I understand, was a Viet Nam vet himself in real life, although he probably does fictionalize a lot of what he experienced over there.
"Tim Obrien, from what I understand, was a Viet Nam vet himself in real life"
But never saw combat. He sat safely behind the lines where its easier to think of satire and comedy. And thats not a critique of Mr. O'Brian, just an observation.
You have no idea what you're talking about. O'Brien did absolutely see combat, as anyone who's read him knows. He writes from experience, while your comments seems to arise from an affection for ignorance.
Carroll dummy, not O'Brian!
Yes, he stated clearly in "The Things We Carried," that he fictionalized the truth.
A foolish article by a man that does not understand the reasons for discipline or "groupthink" as he calls it. Nor does he understand anything about war, thats obvious.
And if you hear someone telling a "war" story in a bar which is little different than this "war" story of an article, I will guarantee you that person was never closer to enemy fire than a stray ball on a golf course.
I guess what we're supposed to conclude is that you alone have seen combat. You know nothing about Carroll, yet you can confidently claim he knows nothing of war and is a fool. Your own "experience" seems to have conferred upon you an arrogance that feels perfectly safe in making unsubstantiated claims about others.
Did anybody read this article? Or did people respond in the way you have because only you know the meaning of war? This is an excellent article, dealing with real problems in modern 'communication', and has little to do with 'combat', per se.
All that comes from the military is lies. There is little else to discuss because it is such old news.
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Don't forget that the current imperialism is the outgrowth of advanced capitalism.
The best war story is General Smedley Butler's great book, "War Is A Racket". That's where you will learn what our military is really used for. It's a great story but it could break your heart.
Hoa binh
In the middle 1950s "Battle Cry, "The Naked and the Dead", and "Sayonara" were books I thought were about War. Each was turned into a priapic movie.
But- then chance exposed my young mind to a diary of a survivor of Andersonville, Prison, a columnist who worked on the Toledo =Blade=. And these many years later, when I can, I go to the site of Andersonville prison, operated by the National Park Service, to pay my propers and to do research in their archive rooms.
Trylon
There is more to getting a nation to enjoy fighting war after war with no regards for the consequences and lessons that should have been learned from previous wars than just lying and hyping a story. After Vietnam, it became clear that the public wasn't brainwashed enough so they worked on ways to make people amorally believe that invading other nations was a right thing. Another relationship to Vietnam and Iraq is the difference in defense spending. When Ford was president, he was unable to pass defense spending bills because Congress at that time had a spine to stop him and the American public was just anti-war enough to put fear in Congress about the consequences. Enter Ronald Reagan and the dissipation of the anti-war sentiment in the 80s and 90s along with building up people's anger against USSR which effectively made it easier for Ronald Reagan to spend on defense like a drunken sailor. My hunch is that eventually, the war complex found ways to further brainwash not only those serving but also the citizenry into believing that we gotta always "be ready" as in keep fighting endlessly under the notion that "terror will strike at any moment". What's more, some of the younger soldiers would believe that all this military spending buildup from Reagan's time and Bush I's short Iraq war would make our fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan different and short compared to Vietnam. Even former Vietnam vets like myself have had a tougher time trying to convince these young soldiers entering a war zone with less education and less training that it's not worth the risk. I could tell them the true story and some of them would amorally say "Yeah so what? It's different this time and we're bigger and better than before. We have better gadgets and God's blessing to fight those terrorists !" War after war, the pattern is clear. People learn less from being told the truth and more from experiencing the truth which amounts to learning the hard way.
Yeah, you are correct. Military spending is having a negative effect on the welfare of the country and its people. But, few get it.
When this nation finally goes belly up, and people can't afford health insurance, gas, nutritious food for their families, or dissent housing or education, people may get the relationship between military spending and a livable society.
I believe we are on the edge of an economic collapse of biblical proportions because of this nations military spending. I believe within two years, we will see this happen.
It may send us into another Dark Age.
SEND us into another Dark Age? I thought we already were choking & gasping beneath tar sands and manʻs other atrocities...
Sioux Rose
DCN/JW VEREZ: Excellent posts.
"unnecessary wars (Korea,"
What ? So we should of let N.Korea take that whole nation over, twice as many people starving and dieing in a police state that forbids exiting by use of sniper rifle .
Rest of the article was spot on, just had to catch the author cutting and pasting a list of US military conflicts
Oh and I'm waiting for some idiot to say Its somehow Americas fault N. Korea likes to scare it's neirbors by "testing " blastic missiles in their waters . Or do we need more Sunshine policy to keep that corrupt government afloat .
Look closely at the funding America gives North Korea. Leave North Korea alone completely and South Korea would actually win.
Well China keeps giving them money too.
I tend to be against any aid to governments who don't allow NGO's to personally distribute the aid.
Good point though
"unnecessary wars (Korea,"
What ? So we should of let N.Korea take that whole nation over, twice as many people starving and dieing in a police state that forbids exiting by use of sniper rifle .
Rest of the article was spot on, just had to catch the author cutting and pasting a list of US military conflicts
Oh and I'm waiting for some idiot to say Its somehow Americas fault N. Korea likes to scare it's neirbors by "testing " blastic missiles in their waters . Or do we need more Sunshine policy to keep that corrupt government afloat .
JWVerez -
As a draftee/veteran of the Vietnam era, I've had similar weird encounters with the all volunteer force of the post-9/11 Pentagon. At a panel discussion on withdrawal from Iraq at a local college a couple years ago, both of the uniformed returnees voiced the view that "it's different this time", and references to the Vietnam quagmire were simply irrelevant.
The Vietnamese never killed innocent American civilians on US soil, you see. This is self defense, fair payback, and good, long term deterrence against future domestic terror attacks by like minded evil doers we all know are lurking over there. You, the government, the media, and the politicians of both parties, all promised me this was a good, just war that keeps America safe. That is the only reason I ever signed up.
So don't you dare double cross me now that I've done my duty, and suddenly try calling it an imperialist occupation, all about oil, or a war of aggression.....
Since the soldiers who may see combat are no longer being drafted, soldiering is just another job. And a deal's a deal. End of discussion.
Bill from Saginaw
"So don't you dare double cross me now that I've done my duty, and suddenly try calling it an imperialist occupation, all about oil, or a war of aggression....."
You have my word on that. Having said that though, end these wars and preventing repeated failures such as Vietnam, Iraq, Af-Pak, etc... needs to be the goal and the authoritarian ideology must be defeated all the way down to the bone. From my experience, I can tell you that soldiers will need plenty of love and care from their family and/or friends if they are to recover and blend back into society. The greater their injuries, the more of it they will need and the longer the healing will take. The conservatives knew from Vietnam that drafting would make it obvious that the government and the corporate media, both of which they now occupy and control, will have to be held accountable whereas setting it up as all voluntary would shift the blame straight to the individual even though the conservatives now in control of government along with the pro-war media are actually responsible for brainwashing and misleading people into worshiping authoritarianism which would inevitable lead to more volunteers. This leads to having to solve a more complicated problem which will involve both long term reforms and short term changes.
“The world was divided into two parties which were trying to destroy each other because they both wanted the same thing, the liberation of the oppressed, the abolition of violence, and the establishment of lasting peace. On both sides there was strong sentiment against any peace that might not last forever – if eternal... peace was not to be had, both parties were committed to eternal war, and the insouciance with which the military balloons rained their blessings from prodigious heights on just and unjust alike reflected the inner spirit of this war to perfection. In other respects, however, it was being waged in the old way, with enormous but inadequate resources… …for in the meantime the intellectuals, visionaries, poets and dreamers had gradually lost interest in the war, and with only soldiers and technicians to count on, the military art made little progress.”
Hermann Hesse, If the War Goes On Another Two Years