War is Hell
July 4th, 2008Recently my twin brother (and Ed-itor) Ed turned me on to an excellent book called “What Every Person Should Know About War”, by Chris Hedges. Hedges is a long-time foreign correspondent for the New York Times, and his goal was to write an unglamorous, no-nonsense, meticulously researched book on the facts of war. (He’s covered many wars in the past, and was even captured for a week in Iraq.) The book is quite short at 120 pages (I’m not including the extensive notes), terse, and has “very few adjectives”. If you’re looking for the latest spy thriller, this is probably not the book for you.
But if you’re hungry for plenty of real, down-to-Earth statistics about war (and other related topics), it’s probably up your alley. There’s no real narrative to the book, other than the chapter organization; the entire book is in a simple question-and-answer format. It’s more like reading a FAQ than a book, which seems to give the book just the neutral no-nonsense tone Hedges was looking for. Given its length and how utilitarian most of the language is, the book probably won’t take you longer than a few hours to read anyway. Thus, even if you have a passing interest in the material, it might be worth your while.
Despite its low-key presentation, many eye-popping facts line the book’s pages. This book is not for the faint of heart. Many of the facts in Hedges’ book are about death, injury, psychiatric disorders, and various other difficult topics. If topics like these bother you, you may want to stop here or start skimming ahead if/when things the subject matter starts to get unpleasant for you.
With that out of the way, allow me to give you a little more of my background. First, my late father served in the Navy (he didn’t die in the service, though). He served in the Navy because he viewed it as safer than the other services. That fact was also borne out by Hedges’ book: infantry roles are by far the most dangerous. My dad volunteered so that he wouldn’t be drafted into something worse for far longer, so he was never too into the job. Ironically, after he got out of the service he vowed to never work on weapons systems, an astonishing feat given that he worked for a defense contractor for the rest of his life.
His Navy experience was before I was born, so it wasn’t very “real” to me. The only thing I knew is that my dad could tie a killer knot. (Tying knots is an important naval skill, obviously.) He used to tie a hangman’s knot on our tetherball pole out back. The tetherball rope or even the tetherball itself would always break before the knot came out. Considering the nylon ropes we used were pretty thick and lasted for months, that’s no mean feat.
The closest I ever got to the military was wrestling in high school. We had an ex-military assistant coach, if I remember correctly; I know he used to wear army shirts all the time, anyway. Many of the same tenets you learn on the wrestling mat are the same as in boot camp, and I always had short, high-and-tight haircuts after I left wrestling. Also like boot camp, there’s a real sense of camaraderie that develops on your team as you go through such extreme experiences as cutting weight and running suicides. And since wrestling is a team sport but you’re on your own every match, letting down your teammates is a huge deal (like with a real unit). I’ve even heard that the military gives preferential treatment to wrestlers, but I couldn’t find a source for that.
Thus, though neither I nor my dad were much of military men, I probably at least have a little idea about military culture, values, and training. With that in mind, I’d like to reflect on some of the more striking statistics in “What Every Person Should Know About War”. I’ll cover the highlights in mostly the same order as the book, with an eye towards their extensively-researched data (this is a data blog, after all).
The second question listed in the book is striking enough: “Has the world ever been at peace?” “Of the past 3,400 years, humans have been entirely at peace for 268 of them, or just 8 percent of recorded history,” a pretty striking answer to be sure. The rest of the book follows in the same style, and on topics no less important.
Another interesting statistic is that “between 65 and 85 percent of the American public will support a military action when it begins”, but by the end of the Korean and Vietnam wars, support was closer to 30 percent. That just goes to show that people are always much more gung-ho before a war, when the death and destruction aren’t fresh in people’s minds. Furthermore, those same supporters are extremely bad at estimating how wars will turn out, as otherwise many of them probably never would’ve offered their support in the first place. To be fair, World War II and the Gulf War had at least 77 percent support the entire time. So there may be such a thing as a “just war”, but we should be far more selective about going to war than we’ve been in the past.
Another powerful fact from the book is that many more civilians than soldiers die in wars, and this ratio is getting much worse as wars increasingly move into cities. I wonder how that fact might change people’s support for war, knowing that the bullets they’re paying for have a much greater chance of hitting a non-combatant than in the past.
With gruesome stats like these, why would people enlist to begin with? Surprisingly, the most common reasons given are education funding and job training. (1/3 of people cite each of these as a reason.) Granted, I doubt there’s a box you can check called “I like killing people”, but apparently this is also a reason why a minority of people sign up.
Of course, not everyone wants to enlist. Here’s a list of a few of the crazy things people have commonly done to dodge the draft in Vietnam: inhaling enough dust to give them an asthma attack, chopping off a thumb joint (!), staring at the sun to partially blind themselves, pricking their arms to fake heroin needle scars, and literally shooting themselves in the foot. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather endure the jeers and claim that I was gay or a conscientious objector or anything else before I’d shoot myself in the foot or chop off my thumb joint. Thankfully they’ve never had a draft in my lifetime, so I don’t have to worry about resorting to such extreme measures. If I had to enlist, I figure I’d just do what my dad did and go for a more low-key job, where my technical skills would be more useful to the army anyway.
And hey, some people actually prefer military life. “Black soldiers are twice as likely as whites to perceive racial discrimination in the military, though a majority of black soldiers say race relations are better in the military than in civilian life.” Blacks are also more likely to see the military as a career and much less likely to be jailed than their black civilian counterparts. Who knew the military was so egalitarian?
Then again, maybe there’s still some biases. 97 percent of armies worldwide (and 91 percent of the U.S.) are made up of men. An astonishing “78 percent of women and 38 percent of men reported sexual harassment”. Given that there are so few women in the military, that means there’s probably a bunch of military men out there sexually harassing women and men. The Marines have it the worst. A jaw-dropping 86 percent of female Marines reported sexual harassment and 9 percent reported being raped or attempted rape. (By the way, less than 7 percent of military women report any harassment by civilians.) Sheesh.
Guess it shouldn’t surprise me, then, that 70 percent of men in the Gulf War said that “not having the opposite sex around caused them ‘quite a bit’ of or ‘extreme’ stress”, which was the number one cause of stress cited overall. (Of course this was due in part to the modesty of Saudi women.) How to cope? Well, in Vietnam there were estimates that 35 to 75 percent of our troops smoked marijuana, though this has gone down a lot in recent years due to random drug tests.
Another way soldiers cope is by simply acclimating. Hodges’ book describes one soldier that learned to sleep through the demolition of numerous ammo dumps in Iraq, which he could feel as well as hear. I don’t think earplugs are gonna quite cut it in a situation like that. Reminds me of my friend Gary, who learned to accept constant panic attacks that felt like heart failure. He told me “you can get used to almost anything”. Maybe that’s true.
One thing you can’t get acclimated to, however, is weapons of mass destruction. Hodges’ book calmly describes cluster bombs that can cover 50,000 square meters (bigger than two football fields) and are “the tactical equivalent of short-range nuclear weapons”. No wonder people find unexploded cluster bombs years later, and that many countries have officially banned their use (though not the U.S.).
Even worse than that, though, are nuclear weapons themselves. Hodges’ book describes what should be done with “fatally irradiated soldiers”. Apparently such people can have as many as several weeks to live before their bodies give up. (Maybe that’s what happened in the movie “Crank”?) The recommendation given is to pump them full of as much medicine and painkillers as possible, allowing them to keep fighting as long as they can. I can’t even imagine how I would feel if I absolutely knew I only had weeks to live, totally doped up, sitting in a trench with an M16 in my hand. That sounds like the kind of thing movies are made out of, yet this is official policy. Wow.
Of course, the military has actually used (and continues to use) modified versions of video games like Doom, Battlezone, and Microsoft Flight Simulator to train soldiers. (Ironically, Microsoft Flight Simulator is one of the few non-violent flight simulators out there.) I can’t imagine that Battlezone, a video game made in 1980, ever looked much like a battlefield, but I guess that’s all they had to train with 30 years ago, so they had to make do.
All that training might not be enough, though. Apparently as a soldier you had a greater chance of becoming a “psychiatric casualty” than being killed in every major war of the 20th century. You’re more likely to lose your mind than your body, that is. Some reports have even suggested that more Vietnam vets committed suicide after the war than were killed in action, a proposition I find deeply unsettling.
More unsettling than that, though, is the use of torture in wartime. Apparently the most effective forms of torture are thought to be threatening loved ones, mock executions, and rape and other forms of sexual assault. (Waterboarding isn’t mentioned, though supposedly virtually everyone cracks under the technique in under 30 seconds.) Despite their effectiveness, however, information from torture is supposedly not credible. The idea is that, under duress, people will say anything to get you to stop.
Worst of all, of course, is death. No book on the reality of war would be complete without talking about it, and I would be remiss to leave such talk out of this post, even though the reality can be disturbing to read about. “What Every Person Should Know About War” claims very matter-of-factly that when you die, “…you will feel your consciousness swiftly wind down. It will not flip from on to off, like a light, but rather will gradually disappear, like a match burning out.” (According to those who were clinically dead and brought back to life, that is.) Life, it appears, comes in degrees. Soldiers’ last words are often calling out to their mothers, their wives, or their girlfriends. I have no idea if this is the same for civilians, but I wouldn’t be shocked if it were. (Unless you’re William Randolph Hearst, I guess.)
After the war, if you were raped or lost a spouse/child in the war, Hodges’ claims you will never recover fully from it. While I have never had either of these traumatic events happen to me and I don’t seek to trivialize them in any way, what I know from happiness studies says the opposite. Books like “The How of Happiness” and “Who’s Been Sleeping in Your Head” talk about trauma and how people deal with it. One theme they mention is that people are often much more resilient under stress than they think.
To me it seems like the most important factor in recovery is whether you’re a pessimist or an optimist. Studies often show that optimists frequently recover from such trauma faster, more thoroughly, and with less stress than pessimists. (The same is true for many illnesses as well.) The most I can relate here is from the death of my own father from brain cancer. It was a depressing and heartbreaking experience, but never one that I would say I could never fully recover from. While I haven’t forgotten about him, at some point I moved on and ceased to grieve. Maybe my own optimism helped in this, I don’t know.
I’m reminded of a passage in Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People”, where a man talks about counseling recently disabled kids. He mentions that many kids are traumatized and sad when they first find out they’re disabled, but that most are back to normal in a few days or weeks and are playing and acting like other kids. Thus, humans are a hardier species than some of us think. (Or is this just my optimistic bias showing through? You be the judge.)
And that’s about it. But despite talking a lot about the horrors of war, I’d like to end this post on an upbeat note. You might sum up the overall point of this post as this: war is hell and should never be entered into lightly, but a lot of us can take the heat if need be. As for me, I’ll stick to playing first person shooters. Doom was one of my favorite games, after all. If we ever have to face imps, revenants, and demons on the battlefield, they know who to call.
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July 7th, 2008 at 10:12 am
Battlezone ruled. Thanks for recalling such an old memory.
No problem, man. Glad you enjoyed!
- Dave