'War makes mortal enemies of people whove never met
A novelist and former soldier explains how the mix of boredom and fear turns soldiers into storytellers
Brian Van Reet
Friday 19 May 2017 06.59 EDT
If “hurry up and wait” is the army’s unofficial motto, “storyteller” has to be one of the soldier’s many unofficial occupations. War, as they say, comes in long stretches of tedium punctuated by moments of intense terror; so, with plenty of time to kill and anxious boredom to ease, soldiers do what tense and idle people throughout the ages have always done. They talk. They tell each other stories. War stories, sure, but soldiers will shoot the breeze about anything, from the winner of a hypothetical fight between a crocodile and a gorilla, to the nuances of geopolitics, to loved ones back home. Given how war foreshortens mortality, the fear of death – and its corollary, the want of sex – are common topics of conversation even when the focus is ostensibly elsewhere. In any case, the subjunctive mood dominates. What if, what if, what if?
For obvious reasons, soldiers also talk a lot about the enemy. Much of that is hateful, vengeful and loaded with dehumanising bluster. But few people are so completely shallow all the time and, contrary to portrayals of soldiers and veterans as either selfless action heroes or pathetic victims of circumstance, the defining quality of a person at war can be his or her degree of thoughtfulness. I won’t say this was my defining quality when I was 22 years old and feeling trapped in Baghdad, but neither was I entirely lacking it. There were others like me, too, and we hung out together when we were off duty, smoking the hookah in dusty barracks rooms, watching bootlegged DVDs, locked in discussions about … all of the above, including our thoughts on the nature of the enemy.
One reason we engaged in so much speculation was that the enemy, by necessity, had to be imagined. With rare exceptions, we never even saw the people who tried to kill us. The way it usually happened was that mortars fell like bolts of lightning from a clear sky, or the road simply erupted beneath our tanks, as if the land itself wanted to shrug us off. It’s a strange feeling to survive an ambush like that and realise, moments or hours later, that someone has just tried to take your life without knowing a thing about it. The uniform you wear is almost infinitely more tied to your survival than any of your innate traits. Strength, knowledge and skill are marginal. You see very quickly that the difference between life and death is mostly, but not all, luck.
That’s the default state of war – lethal chaos – which makes mortal enemies of people who’ve never met, who’ll probably never meet, who may not even see each other while they’re fighting, except maybe as a glimpse, a splotch of desert camo, a muzzle flash, a luminous humanoid blob in infrared vision. Mechanised combat is that impersonal. Our drill sergeant used to tell us, by way of warning: “The tank just kills, it doesn’t care who”; and I can say from experience that the tank operator’s overriding emotion under fire is some combination of excitement and fear, not hatred of the enemy. The hate comes before, after, or not at all.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/may/19/war-makes-mortal-enemies-of-people-who-have-never-met
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