War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (23 page)

But the front lines, where Iranian units were butchered en masse as they tried to sweep in human waves across the mud flats, held little glory. And many who survived the war, which began in 1980 and ended in 1988, returned changed and unsettled by the senseless carnage.

The town's leading cleric, Mohammed Masha Yekhi, had called on young people to choose life rather than suicide. He said he would not allow those who committed suicide a Muslim burial.

I sat one morning with two war veterans on the porch of a dilapidated villa overlooking the Caspian. The men, who fished and used their boats to take people water skiing, were slumped in wicker chairs drinking cups of sweet tea.

The two men told me that they had easy access to the drugs, homemade beer, and grain alcohol that was sold on the beach. They smuggled out tins of caviar from the state-run packaging plant and traded it with Russian sailors, anchored offshore, for vodka. For a price they guided couples to secluded beaches, where women could swim in bathing suits and embrace their boyfriends, activities the clerics had forbidden. The money they earned was swallowed by their addiction.

“I will never be normal again,” said one of the men, who spent twenty-three months at the front. “I am nervous. I can't control my anger. If anything disturbs me, like a minor car accident, I explode.”

The second man, who was a lieutenant in the war, looked out
over the water and said in a monotone, “My battalion was ordered across the flats early one morning. Within a couple of hours 400 soldiers were dead and hundreds more wounded. It was a stupid, useless waste. When we got back they called us traitors.”

In the shade of a stone wall, just in front of the villa, with its collection of drooping cots and dirty shag carpets, a young man, dressed in a black shirt and pants, stared blankly at the water.

“He comes here every day,” one of the veterans said. “He just finished his army service, but he has no job and nowhere to go. He smokes hash and watches the surf.”

The men said they lived on the margins of existence, sometimes sleeping under grass-roofed huts. The pittance the men earned, the psychological burdens they bore, and their inability to afford a place to live had crushed them.

“All we have left is the Sea,” a former officer said, “and the sea is what keeps us here. But then one day even the sea isn't enough.”

As long as we think abstractly, as long as we find in patriotism and the exuberance of war our fulfillment, we will never understand those who do battle against us, or how we are perceived by them, or finally those who do battle for us and how we should respond to it all. We will never discover who we are. We will fail to confront the capacity we all have for violence. And we will court our own extermination. By accepting the facile cliché that the battle under way against terrorism is a battle against evil, by easily branding those who fight us as the barbarians, we, like them, refuse to acknowledge our own culpability. We ignore real injustices that have led many of those arrayed against us to their rage and despair.

Late one night, unable to sleep during the war in El Salvador, I picked up Shakespeare's
Macbeth
. It was not a calculated decision. I had come that day from a village where about a dozen people had been murdered by the death squads, their thumbs tied behind their backs with wire and their throats slit.

I had read the play before, but in my other life as a student. A thirst for power at the cost of human life was no longer an abstraction to me. It was part of my universe.

I came upon Macduff's wife's speech made when the murderers, sent by Macbeth, arrive to kill her and her small children: “Whither should I fly?” she asks,

I have done no harm. But I remember now
I am in this earthly world—where to do harm
Is often laudable, to do good sometime
Accounted dangerous folly.
¹⁵

Those words seized me like furies and cried out for the dead I had seen lined up that day in a dusty market square, the dead I have seen since, the dead, including the two thousand children who were killed in Sarajevo. The words cried out for those whom I would see later in unmarked mass graves in Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq, the Sudan, Algeria, El Salvador, the dead who are my own, who carried notebooks, cameras, and a vanquished idealism and sad addiction into war and never returned. Of course resistance is usually folly, of course power exercised with ruthlessness will win, of course force easily snuffs out gentle people, the compassionate, and the decent. A repentant Lear, who was unable to love because of his thirst for power and selfadulation acknowledges this in the final moments of the play.

Shakespeare celebrates, at his best, this magnificence of failure.
When we view our lives honestly from the inside we are all failures, all sinners, all in need of forgiveness. Shakespeare lays bare the myths that blind and deform our souls. He understands that the world of the flesh and the world of the spirit are indivisible, that they coexist in a paradox, ever present.

Shakespeare reminds us that though we may not do what we want, we are responsible for our lives. It does not matter what has been made of us; what matters is what we ourselves make of what has been done to us.

I returned from the Balkans to America in the fall of 1998, to a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard, after fifteen years abroad mostly reporting wars. I no longer had the emotional and physical resilience of youth. The curator of the Nieman program, Bill Kovach, suggested that I see James O. Freedman, the former president of Dartmouth, for advice on how to spend the year. Freedman recommended the classics and urged me to take Greek or Latin.

I had studied Greek in seminary so I opted for Latin. Of course, there is nothing sacred, or necessarily redeeming, about ancient texts. The German and Italian fascists used and misused classical literature, especially Virgil's
Aeneid
, in their propaganda. The Greeks and Romans embraced magic, slavery, the subjugation of women, racial triumphalism, animal sacrifice, and infanticide. The Roman emperors staged elaborate reenactments of battles in and outside the arena that saw hundreds and at times thousands of prisoners and slaves maimed and killed for sport. At lunchtime, in between shows, they publicly executed prisoners. Any democratic participation was the prerogative of male citizens and was snuffed out for long periods by tyrants and near-constant warfare.

But the classics offer a continuum with Western literature,
architecture, art, and political systems. Our country's past, our political and social philosophy, and our intellectual achievements and spiritual struggles cannot be connected without great holes in the fabric, and failures of understanding, if we are not conversant in the classics.

“All literature, all philosophical treatises, all the voices of antiquity,” Cicero wrote, “are full of examples for imitation, which would all lie unseen in darkness without the light of literature.”
¹⁶
Thucydides, knowing that Athens was doomed in the war with Sparta, consoled himself with the belief that his city's artistic and intellectual achievements would in the coming centuries overshadow raw Spartan militarism. Beauty and knowledge could, ultimately, triumph over power.

As my year at Harvard progressed, I devoured the classical authors but wasn't always as sure about taking on a dead language. One of my favorite professors, Kathleen Coleman, stopped me one morning and announced that I needed a purpose behind my slog through Latin. Once a week, she instructed, I would appear at her office prepared to do a translation of a poem by Catullus or passage from Virgil. I had never read Catullus, but came to love him.

Carrying my books, I retreated in the afternoons to the Smyth Classical Library within Widener Library, with its huge oak tables and sagging leather chairs. My fondest memories revolve around this sanctuary with its well-thumbed volumes, noisy heating system, and glass cases with dusty displays of items like Roman table legs. I was freed to step outside myself, to struggle with questions the cant of modern culture often allows us to ignore.

All idylls must end. Mine was shattered on March 24, 1999, when NATO began its bombing of Kosovo. I had come to
Cambridge from Kosovo. Kosovar Albanians I had known for three years were now missing or found dead along roadsides. I slept little. I was chained to the news reports. My translator in Kosova, Shukrije Gashi, a poet, vanished. (I returned to Kosovo that summer to find her family was searching for her in mass graves.) The horrors of Kosovo were abstractions to most people in Cambridge. I held a communion, in my final weeks at Harvard, with the long dead.

I had memorized a few poems by Catullus and parts of
The Aeneid
. I woke one morning well before dawn, haunted by a Catullus poem written to Calvus, whose lover Quintilia had died. Calvus had abandoned her, as I felt I had abandoned friends in Kosovo and an array of other conflicts. His grief was mingled with his guilt. In the end, these words give me a balm to my grief, a momentary solace, a little understanding:

If anything welcome or pleasing, Calvus, can be felt
by silent tombs in answer to our grief,
from that painful longing in which we renew old loves
and weep for friendships we once cast away,
Surely Quintilia does not lament her early death
as much as she rejoices in your love.
¹⁷

To survive as a human being is possible only through love. And, when Thanatos is ascendant, the instinct must be to reach out to those we love, to see in them all the divinity, pity, and pathos of the human. And to recognize love in the lives of others—even those with whom we are in conflict—love that is like our own. It does not mean we will avoid war or death. It does not mean that we as distinct individuals will survive. But love, in its mystery, has its own power. It alone gives us meaning
that endures. It alone allows us to embrace and cherish life. Love has power both to resist in our nature what we know we must resist, and to affirm what we know we must affirm. And love, as the poets remind us, is eternal.

1
.  Orwell, George,
1984
(San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1949), P. 35.

2
.  Homer,
The Odyssey
, translated by Stanley Lombardo (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000), p. 138.

3
.  Arendt, Hannah,
The Origins of Totalitarianism
(San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), pp. 380–381.

4
.  García Márquez, Gabriel,
Chronicle of a Death Foretold
(New York: Knopf, 1983).

1
.  LeShan, Lawrence,
The Psychology of War
(New York: Helios, 1992), Chapter Two.

2
.  Weil, Simone,
‘The Iliad' or ‘The Poem of Force,'
(Wallingford, PA: Pendle Hill Pamphlet, 1993), p. 11.

3
.  Shakespeare, William,
Troilus and Cressida
–“Dramatis Personae,” (Boston: Riverside Shakespeare, Houghton Mifflin, 1974), p. 448.

4
.  Ibid., Act V, sc. ii, p. 486.

5
.  Caputo, Philip,
Rumor of War
(New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1977), p. 345.

6
.  Shakespeare, William,
Troilus and Cressida
, (Boston: Riverside Shakespeare, Houghton Mifflin, 1974), Act I, sc. i, p. 450.

7
.  Mowat, Farley,
And No Birds Sang
(Toronto: Seal, 1987), p. 195.

8
.  Shakespeare, William,
Troilus and Cressida
, (Boston: Riverside Shakespeare, Houghton Mifflin, 1974), Act V, sc. viii, p. 490.

9
.  Weil, Simone,
‘The Iliad' or ‘The Poem of Force'
(Wallingford, PA: Pendle Hill Pamphlet, 1993), p. 36.

10
.  
London Observer
, November 18, 1822, quoted in Samuel Hynes,
The Soldiers' Tale
(New York: Penguin, 1997), p. 17.

11
.  Myrivilis, Stratis,
Life in the Tomb
(London: Quartet Books, 1987), p. 137.

12
.  Freud, Sigmund,
Civilization and Its Discontents
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), p. 72.

13
.  Orwell, George,
Homage to Catalonia
, quoted by F. Dyson,
Weapons and Hope
(New York: Harper & Row, 1984), p. 129.

14
.  Lasch, Christopher,
The Culture of Narcissism
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), pp. 7,15.

15
.  See Shakespeare's
Henry IV, Part One, Henry IV, Part Two
, and
Henry V
.

1
.  Kiš, Danilo,
On Nationalism
, in the Appendix to Mark Thompson's
A Paper House
(London: Vintage, 1992), p. 339.

2
.  Todorov, Tzvetan,
Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps
(New York: Metropolitan /Owl Books, 1996), p. 228.

3
.  Levi, Primo,
The Drowned and the Saved (I Sommersi e i Salvati)
(London: Abacus, 1991), quoted by Todorov, Tzvetan,
Facing the Extreme
(New York: Metropolitan/Owl Books, 1996), p. 238.

4
.  Duras, Marguerite,
The War: A Memoir (New
York: Pantheon, 1986), p. 48.