Download issue (PDF) - Nieman Foundation - Harvard University

Words & Reflections
A War Correspondent Tries to Make Sense of What He’s Seen
‘Why, he wanted to know, do human beings fight wars?’
War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning
Chris Hedges
Public Affairs. 212 Pages. $23.
By Nancy Bernhard
Chris Hedges spent 15 years covering
El Salvador, the Middle East including
the Gulf War, and the Balkans, witnessing
more war than many generals do.
When he took a breather as a Nieman
Fellow in 1998-99, he read Latin classics
and tried to make sense of what he
had seen, including why he’d chosen
to spend so much of his life witnessing
horror. Why, he wanted to know, do
human beings fight wars? The book he
has written in answer, “War Is a Force
That Gives Us Meaning,” is presented
as “a call for repentance.”
Despite its personal genesis, the
book is not a memoir. Most of its evidence
consists of Hedges’ recollections,
but he shapes the chapters around
broad, universal categories such as
nationalism, memory and the seduction
of battle. He ranges across time
and space, jumping from Kuwait to
World War I, to Bosnia and ancient
Rome, within a few pages. His excellence
as a journalist is both his strength
and weakness here. He tells evocative
stories, but draws no conclusions. The
book raises a multitude of worthwhile
questions, but misses both the systematic
analysis of the best history books
and the introspective persistence of
the finest memoirs. Rather, it provides
a window into the understandably
troubled mind of an outstanding war
correspondent.
Very briefly in his opening and closing
chapters, Hedges offers a view of
war as a narcotic whose properties
provide the antidote to modern boredom
and placidity. In what will surely
be a widely quoted sentence, he offers,
“The rush of battle is a potent and often
lethal addiction, for war is a drug, one
I ingested for many years.” War gives
people something important to do: It
places them on the knife-edge between
love and death or, as Freud defined the
fundamental struggle and meaning of
life, between Eros and Thanatos.
This is a worthy and provocative
perspective, yet it is clearly that of an
educated Westerner. The “shallowness,”
“vapidness” and “trivia” that
Hedges claims dominate our lives and
“increasingly our airwaves” is experienced
by those of us who live in privileged
and industrialized nations. He
writes about the “attraction” of war,
but this can only refer to feelings of
those who independently choose to be
part of war, such as correspondents.
Nowhere does Hedges distinguish between
why people start and fight wars
and why correspondents feel drawn to
witness and write about them. They all
might partake of the adrenaline rush of
survival and moral clarity, but there are
crucial differences between the leaders
who start wars, the citizens whose
homelands erupt in violence, and those
who rush to bear witness. The average
Bosnian soldier, or Palestinian teenager,
or Salvadoran militiaman might
understand that war offered a chance
for glory, but not because there was
nothing on cable. No pacifist, Hedges
believes that armed action is sometimes
just, as chemotherapy is sometimes
required to arrest cancer, but he
finds few causes that are both heroic
and violent.
Instead, he concludes, human beings
have a base tendency to express
themselves through violent force.
People go to war because of an intrinsic
human urge to subsume our consciousness
in a grand shared enterprise
that exalts a national “us” above
an unworthier “them.” He writes that
the nationalist myths needed to legitimize
slaughter are usually racist and
opportunistic, and women subscribe
just as willingly as men do. And, he
asserts, the press bears responsibility
for spreading and reinforcing these
narratives. The one instance Hedges
cites when a people shook off such a
tale of superiority was the American
experience in Vietnam. Momentarily,
we escaped our triumphal nationalism
and drank a draught of humility. But
then Ronald Reagan’s brand of patriotism
and the Persian Gulf War made
bloodlust fashionable again in the
United States, with the press once again
the primary culprit in spreading the
fervor.
Hedges’ violent view of human nature
has long roots and important re-
Nieman Reports / Winter 2002 95