or how you can obtain a glorious victory
far removed from the actual fighting—
JUST LIKE A REAL GENERAL!
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jk's WAR! Books.
1. From the Jaws of Victory, by Charles Fair—The best of the military disaster books, this one used that form of historical writing to make an anti-war statement against Lyndon Johnson and the Vietnam War. Fair argues that though in sophisticated, university-trained societies, people can assume the look and postures of intelligent and capable professionals, this is often mere window dressing, and the social skills of politics typically have more to do with elevating people to power than any competence they may possess for skillfully exercising that power. When nations make sufficient numbers of mistakes in this regard, crowning fools because they're more likeable than mean old smartypansies, they decline and fall—as the United States WOULD BE doing right now if the rest of the world had not so conveniently fallen even further than we have. Ultimately Fair points out that incompetence in war, while often the just hand dealt to the arrogantly warlike, frequently results in outcomes only a little more disastrous to nations than those suffered from military brilliance. The good news about books like this is that even though they are immensely entertaining and make a hell of a convincing argument about the evils and stupidity of war, you don't have to waste your time reading it because let's face it—you're not going to inconvenience yourself by actively opposing your nation's exercise of its military power, are you? Of course not. So just wave your little flag and have another beer and settle in to watch that new CNN reality show—"War of the Week".
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2. To Lose a Battle: France 1940, by Alistair Horne—This is, on the surface, a relatively straight-forward history of the way France toppled to Germany in WWII. It argues, as other books taking their lead from this one have argued, that France's road to defeat actually began in the jaws (and horrors) of victory in WWI. The world suffered from a severe lack of imagination after WWI—dulled as it was by shellshock and booze—it could not imagine that a much worse catastrophe could happen to it, and very soon. The world was dead wrong of course, and millions died attesting to that error. The way France suffered from its version of this dim thinking is the subject of this book. However, what makes this book different and really quite an interesting read for those who are willing to suffer through the details to obtain understanding, is that Horne demonstrates how miserably France performed in light of the many chances it had to obtain a victory against the madly risk-taking Germans. However, the Germans had beautifully cold-read their enemies, and played their hand expertly and in a coordinated fashion that befuddled the disorganized, and dysfunctional French leadership. While the French grew bored waiting for the attack that never came, the Germans worried constantly about every possible detail, convinced they SHOULD win, but never convinced they automatically would do so. Thus they flung themselves like passionate artists at the French weakpoints, terrified the pigments would dry up at any moment and the opportunities to paint the masterpiece would evaporate as well. A really good read about much more than WAR! (if it's possible to be about something other than that).
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3. Iron Men with Wooden Wings, by Lou Cameron—OK, this book actually has NO business (well, no place anyway) in a list of good books about WAR! At least not in the form it pretends to take—history. It's really just some great stories about brave, drunken lunatics who climbed into highly-combustible kites, went WAY up in the air and fired machine-guns at each other, hoping to send the other fellow swirling down to his death. They kept score of their kills. The more enemy planes you killed (the enemy people didn't REALLY matter), the better you were. If you got enough kills, you got to be an Ace! The more kills the fellow had who you killed, the better YOU were as well. Knights in the air and all that. Bloody Red Baron for real. But the truth is the Red Baron was just a young man, physically battered and psychologically brutalized by the war, who went out, as so many other young men did in WWI, and died (coughing up his bullet-shredded lungs)—for his country. Then people pissed on his grave. On the other side of things, American Frank Luke was such a terrifying and briefly unstoppable maniac (he specialized in the hi-risk art of balloon-busting) that the Germans wanted to bury him with a stake in his heart after shooting him down and finally cornering him and killing him at dusk in a graveyard gunfight. At least, those are the stories. Whether they're true or not is not the issue—this book, pulp fiction combined with some facts and dimly-lit legends, demonstrates (once again) the popular power of martial myth to celebrate the West's (and the Western's) favorite hero—the individual.
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4. Bhagavad Gita, by some Indian guy a long time ago—Yep, this is actually a book about war, not peace. In fact, it's a book about justifying killing others as your duty, or obligation to the state, and to the gods. Krishna is the god who convinces Arjuna that it's perfectly OK to kill your fellow man—even your own brothers!—in the name of duty and honor. All acts turn the Wheel of Dharma, says Krishna, and no spirit can truly be destroyed. So no killing actually ever takes place. Thus, kill (or turn the Wheel, whose natural function is to tear away the husks of personality from the kernel of spirit) joyfully and in deference to the will of the gods, who would not suffer you to slaughter your fellow beings if it were not a good thing for you to be doing. I guess this must be what B43 means by "faith-based initiative".
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5. The Bible (particularly the book of Joshua), by various authors claiming to be writing the word of God—but the whole damned Bible is nothing but WAR!, justifications for WAR!, exultations of WAR!, pleadings for a moment of peace to break up the monotony of WAR!, explanations for why the moment of peace lasted less than that and we once again have WAR!, acceptance and joyful expectation of Armageddon, where WAR! shall be finally and truly perfected and sanctified. Like God says—"I like WAR! dudes, kill, kill, kill!!!"
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jk's WAR! Movies.
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1. The Thin Red Line—This movie will confuse people looking about for the traditional heroes and enemies of war movies, especially WWII movies. There ARE truly heroic acts done by brave men in this story, but always in the face of an unrelenting demand that only they CAN do the act. In other words, they do brave things not because they have anything to prove in that regard, but because they are the only person at the place and time who has the courage and the skill and the will to perform a necessary act. Sometimes, that combination of characteristics and consequences kills them. Sometimes, it helps them, and others, survive—not infrequently by helping other others not to. Those narrative ideas tie together a series of battles which get bloodier and more ferocious and yet which also get more and more pathetic, as neither side's men really want to fight but are driven onward by their commanders to "take that hill" or defend it. Some people have questioned the tone of the film, which suggests to them that US soldiers in the Pacific in WWII were just a bunch of whiny cowards. The notion that the Christlike hero of the story has only occasional interests in maintaining a regular presence with his unit seems particularly offensive to these people, yet one sees a similar character in James Jones' previous tragic tale of WWII soldiering—"From Here to Eternity", where the "best soldier" is not necessarily the one who blindly (or cruelly) follows orders and regulations. Jones never imagines that military duty demands any transcendent or inhuman obligation from his soldiers, but at the same time these reluctant heroes naturally move to the sound of the guns when they hear them nearby. They are not afraid of a fight, and indeed enjoy it better than the next man when they are engaged in combat, but they simply don't see the point in going out of one's way to fight, especially when the beauty of life and love seems to naturally resist the impulse to kill those who also could live and love. Yet they fight. That in fact reflects the American view of war, the way we'd like to see ourselves, a genuinely peace-loving people always reluctantly killing our enemies, who have (after all) left us no choice, and so we might as well do the job well and efficiently and maybe better than anyone else. However, beyond all this, the director here is reminding us right from the start that nature is all about WAR!, that life itself is at war with itself, and nothing living can avoid this fact or sustain itself without active devotion to the demands of WAR!. Thus, in the end, the hero is forced to make what seems to us a terrible choice, but in fact it is absolutely consistent with the natural tendency of a predator, one who is not merely in step with the rhythms of violent nature, but who is the very manifestation of that most fundamental quality.
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2. The Americanization of Emily—Here again we see a discussion (many discussions in fact, one complaint heard about this film is that it has too many words and ideas—"too many notes") about the meaning of heroism. And the movie makes an argument that people sustain their will to slaughter each other by making heroes out of the dead, many of whom of course were simply moving frantically with whatever other herd members were close by when the planned catastrophe stuck them down. So, we don't necessarily celebrate their will to perform brave acts, but their will to obey our collective commands that they march off and die for us. In this movie the supposed virtue of that view of things is shot down in flames in one great scene where the movie's anti-hero (a self-professed coward and damned proud of it) preaches a fact-of-death sermon to a mother who is so devoted to sustaining the heroic myth of her fallen loved ones that she imagines they're still alive. In what might seem a brutal fashion, the cowardly truth-teller (James Garner playing a somewhat serious version of Maverick) explains that war won't ever end until we stop making heroes out of the dead, stop making shrines to them, stop pretending that they're anything other than victims of the stupidity of their own leaders—who are often the very people who after the war come out blathering about the hatefulness of war and the virtues of peace. The movie turns on an interesting choice the coward must make, which seems over and over again the choice war (but not necessarily WAR!) presents—to honor duty to die or the duty to oneself and loved ones to live. Ironically, the coward finds that to sustain his own view of the world, where fake heroism is rejected in place of truthful cowardice, he'll have to become a fake hero. Underlying this main theme is the "Americanization" bit, where Julie Andrews slowly disrobes her prudish and snobbish English outfit to reveal her better, American, self, perfectly ready to dump her outdated and dangerous affection for truth and honor in place of good old American showbiz!—but for love's sake of course. Finally, this movie was written by Paddy Chayefsky, one of the great screen writers of the 20th century. His characters often seem much brighter and more articulate than any real "average" people you know, but that's OK, because it is after all a movie and in movies we can dream of what could be in a better world, just like the people who heroize the dead.
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3. The Red Badge of Courage—"He wished that he, too, had a wound, a red badge of courage." This movie almost didn't get made, then almost didn't get released, then when it did get released it was just a remnant of its intended form. All that is one of those Hollywooden backstories involving politics and money which you can read about elsewhere if you're so inclined. What is left to us in John Huston's film version of Stephen Crane's great Civil War story of the same name is one of the simplest, starkest war movies ever made—and not merely is it this way because much of it is missing. The style is almost what one might call "early reality television"—intimately focusing on a small number of men engaged in a great enterprise, the scope of which is always obviously much greater than they can even begin to imagine, yet they do try to imagine it. Again, the subtext here is about the workings of Nature itself, and the calls of Nature not merely to eliminate from us what we don't want, but to call to us and to take into us from Nature what we DO want and need. And sometimes the answers to this natural call take us right to Death's door, in the guise of an opposing army of similarly-called humans, attempting to do to us what we're attempting to do to them (the Iron Rule instead of the Golden one). Whether we open that door and invoke that rule is the question the young hero asks himself and us. For the natural response is "hell no", or as the fellow said to one Civil War officer who attempted to halt his breakneck rout from the battlefield by asking him if he didn't love his country—"Hell yes, I love my country, and I'm trying to get back to it just as fast as I can." How and why does one bring himself to answer any differently, and here the answer is that true courage can not well up and expose itself to danger by following any herd instinct to move towards Death or away from it, but must instead be the product of a reflective and reasoned decision not to doom oneself by choosing Shakespeare's many deaths of the coward. But, in the end it is not so much what we do that matters, but what people think that we did, or more importantly what they think of what they think we did. Thus, it doesn't really matter how one gets wounded in battle, but only that one can show he has been available to be wounded, and can then show this red badge of courage to others and let them fill in any blanks concerning its signification with their imagination. Certainly the vast majority of the unwounded can only envy one who bears this badge. Yet, in the end, it is nothing but a dark ugly smear of one's own blood, given up as sacrifice to the gods of shame, as are the endless graves of the war dead.
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4. Three Kings—This 1999 look at the 1991 pillaging of Iraq (by Americans and Iraqis) should be seen by all Americans, as we get ready to do it all over again. The question of whether greed can transcend into something higher—whether the mere interest in obtaining some cheap oil (or some easily restolen gold) can be put aside to pay heed to cheaply given and easily broken promises, is the one being asked here. Over and over again the United States Imperial leadership has played off oppressed peoples against their inconvenient governments and against themselves. When B41 decided it would be prudent to avoid taking Baghdad—where some Americans might get hurt or something—he promised the Kurds in the north of the country and the Shiites in the south that the US would provide them aid and air cover should they mount rebellions against Saddam. The rebellions came. The promises were discarded by the United States as no longer useful to our interests. The rebellions were put down by Saddam while we turned around to make a bunch of money in the second gilded age. Ultimately, Saddam's presence and rule in Iraq seemed more suitable to us (as was the case in the 1980s) than his absence. And so we let "Hitler" off the hook for twelve years, and sacrificed yet another pile of poor stupid doofuses who believed we'd actually back them on a risky play. And that's what this movie is all about—risky plays, keeping or breaking promises, trying to understand why they hate us so god-damned much, and figuring out what you're really fighting for and who the real winners and losers are in any war. If you're confused about that, check this out:
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5. A Midnight Clear—I like this movie as much for the song it recalls (and for Sam Phillips' beautiful version of it at the end), as for the interesting story about a detail of geniuses sent off to scout an impending enemy push (a little thing called the Battle of the Bulge) in WWII. One of the interesting points this movie makes, as if such a point should need to be made, is that brilliant people die just as stupidly dead as anyone else. Their brains afford them no protection in modern war (unless they have brains enough to have become a staff officer, FAR removed from the battleline), which is nothing but a crapshoot to see what poor dumb bastard is standing in the wrong place at the absolutely perfect moment to get a bullet in the gut or a mortar shell in the ear. When the American scouts encounter Germans who only wish to get the hell out of the war as fast as possible (but who need to do it in such a way so that their families back home won't suffer retribution for their having simply surrendered), the geniuses go to work devising a plan. They are after all MUCH brighter than just about everyone else in the military—how can things go wrong? The fact that just being in the situation they are indicates shit has already gone terribly wrong does occur to them, but being optimistic Americans they figure there just might be a way for things to work out OK and to get SOME kind of righteous outcome from the mutual slaughter—and maybe Mickey and Judy can put on a fucking Christmas show in no-man's land too and everyone can sing that glorious song of old (called WAR!).
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©2003 by J. Karlin, all rights reserved