War Stories

A ques­tion of some con­cern among my friends when we were grow­ing up in the fifties and six­ties was how old you had to be to go to war. Estimates var­ied from six­teen or sev­en­teen to the unthink­ably dis­tant ages of nine­teen or even twenty years of age. Our grand­fa­thers had gone to war before we were born, and so had most of our fathers, and we under­stood that there was some unstated upper limit, so that if you got to be very old — that is, prob­a­bly thirty years old — and there hadn’t been a war, you might not have to go when they finally did have a war. For we knew at the age of ten or eleven that war would come because they always had wars, and boys when they grew up always had to go to war. The cer­tainty of going to war lent a melan­choly aspect to the future that lay before us. In school we were told the offi­cial ver­sion of Canadian val­our in the trenches, and heard, not for the last time, the claim that Canadians make the best shock troops. Stories of com­bat in war we learned from American comic books, not from our par­ents or grand­par­ents, for by that time sto­ries of war were no longer being passed down, and tra­di­tions of sto­ry­telling had pretty well died out. As Walter Benjamin reminds us, “the men who returned from the bat­tle­fields of World War I had grown silent — not richer but poorer in com­mu­ni­ca­ble expe­ri­ence.” (Benjamin’s melan­choly can be detected in his nam­ing of that war the “first”: he was writ­ing in 1936.) War comics were com­pelling to read, but they were much grim­mer than the west­erns that pro­vided the matrix on which we enacted our games of killing and dying in back­yards after school. In fact, we never played war games when I was a child, whereas the medieval pat­tern­ing of the gun­fight at the OK Corral could be end­lessly elaborated. 

When they did have a war, as we had known they would, it turned out not to be “our war” but some­one else’s: we were exempted through some frag­ile arrange­ment whose source was unclear, one that might be with­drawn at any moment (for in this coun­try all wars begin as some­one else’s war). As we turned fif­teen and six­teen, the war, which was in Vietnam and was not called a war but a police action, remained pre­car­i­ously at a dis­tance. The young men who were sent to war were called advi­sors, not troops. And then every month or so dur­ing the year that I turned eigh­teen, another Buddhist monk would drench him­self in gaso­line and set him­self on fire with a Zippo lighter. They were protest­ing the esca­la­tion of the war and cor­rup­tion in the gov­ern­ment. As they burned to death on the TV news, their bod­ies tilted over to one side and bobbed up again like dharma dolls. When I turned twenty-one, American boys my age were dying in the war at the rate of about seven thou­sand a year. On the evening news my girl­friend and I watched a man on the street in Saigon fire a pis­tol into the skull of a man whose hands were tied behind his back: a pho­to­graph of this exe­cu­tion became an icon of the war, but the ter­ri­ble moment on the TV news came in the next few sec­onds, as the cam­era fol­lowed the col­lapse of the exe­cuted man onto the street, and the jet of blood stream­ing from the wound in his head spurted into the air and dwin­dled to a trickle.

My friends and I escaped the war in Vietnam, which grew into a slaugh­ter of vast pro­por­tions, but I don’t think any of us were cer­tain that we were really exempt from it until the final evac­u­a­tion in heli­copters from the roof of the American embassy. Some years later, the year that Elvis died, I turned thirty, and the only mem­ory I have of my birth­day cel­e­bra­tion was the knowl­edge that I was (prob­a­bly) too old now to have to go to war. 

Today the frag­ile arrange­ment that kept my friends and me out of the Vietnam war has been with­drawn, and the war that I won’t have to go to because I’m over thirty is now under­way in Afghanistan. This war too began as a dis­tant encounter, not a war but some kind of police action, a few deaths, a treach­er­ous enemy that no one could pin down or iden­tify (in Vietnam the enemy were “com­mu­nists”; today they are “ter­ror­ists”). Suicide monks have been replaced by sui­cide bombers. The war in Vietnam, like the war in Afghanistan, had been in sup­port of a cor­rupt “demo­c­ra­tic” gov­ern­ment. One of the last­ing effects of the Vietnam war was the vast expan­sion in heroin pro­duc­tion in the Golden Triangle and the con­se­quent bur­geon­ing of the North American drug mar­kets that were them­selves the result of the Opium Wars of the British Empire. (The his­tory of Empire and the his­tory of the drug trade go hand in hand: the British found the mar­ket for the pop­pies of India and Afghanistan by forc­ing China to open its doors to opium in the first great expan­sion of the drug mar­ket; later the French in Indonesia enlarged the mar­ket fur­ther.) A sim­i­lar expan­sion of the drug trade accom­pa­nied American incur­sions in South America in the sev­en­ties and eight­ies. And now, after a year of war, the poppy fields in Afghanistan are pro­duc­ing ninety-two per­cent of the world’s heroin. The final price of these wars is exacted in the streets of our cities. 

When I was sev­en­teen I sat up one night to watch a bunch of GIs in a World War II movie fight it out with a face­less enemy in the jun­gles of the Philippines. At some point it becomes clear that all of the GIS in the movie are going to die, which they do, one after the other, in the course of much bloody strug­gle, until no one remains but the sergeant with his machine gun. As the enemy advances out of a black murk, the sergeant picks up a shovel and digs a trench in the ground. Only when he jams a rifle bay­o­net down into the trench and props his hel­met on it do we real­ize that he has made his own grave. Then he begins fir­ing his machine gun from where he stands. The advanc­ing hordes sweep over the redoubt. The fir­ing of the machine gun con­tin­ues long after the death of the sergeant, and the cam­era con­tin­ues to roll. I became angry at that point, angry at the cam­era, which had lost its nar­ra­tive pur­chase now that “every­one” was dead. The movie was lying about its own point of view. I began to under­stand that all war sto­ries are lies, that the truth stays only with the dead, who can­not tell us the true sto­ries of war. “A gen­er­a­tion that had gone to school on horse-drawn street­cars,” wrote Walter Benjamin in 1936, “now stood under the open sky in a land­scape where noth­ing remained unchanged but the clouds and, beneath those clouds, in a force field of destruc­tive tor­rents and explo­sions, the tiny, frag­ile human body.”