[Peace-discuss] Real war

[C. G. Estabrook]

[David Green calls attention to this important article on what we're responsible 
for.  --CGE]

"...in footage from a PBS Frontline report ... Captain Dan Kearney speaks to an 
Afghan elder, Haji Zalwar Khan, in the Korengal Valley in July 2008 ... 'You 
people shoot at least one house a day.  Last night you shot a house in 
Kandalay,' says Khan. In response, Kearney offers a visibly skeptical smile and 
predictable excuses. 'You people are like lightning when you strike a house, you 
kill everything inside,' Khan continues.  Later, when Frontline correspondent 
Elizabeth Rubin is able to talk to him alone, the elder tells her that the 
conflict will end when the Americans depart. 'When they leave there will be no 
fighting,' he assures her. 'The insurgents exist to fight the Americans.'"

	Published on Tuesday, July 13, 2010 by TomDispatch.com
	Death on Your Doorstep: American War vs. Real War
	What Sebastian Junger and Restrepo Won’t Tell You About War
	by Nick Turse

I've never heard a shot fired in anger.  But I might know a little bit more 
about war than Sebastian Junger.

Previously best known as the author of The Perfect Storm, Junger, a New 
York-based reporter who has covered African wars and the Kosovo killing fields, 
and Tim Hetherington, an acclaimed film-maker and photographer with extensive 
experience in conflict zones, heard many such shots, fired by Americans and 
Afghans, as they made their new documentary film Restrepo -- about an isolated 
combat outpost named after a beloved medic killed in a firefight. There, they 
chronicled the lives of U.S. soldiers from Battle Company, 2nd Battalion, 503rd 
Infantry Regiment of the 173rd Airborne Brigade, during a tour of duty in 
eastern Afghanistan's Korengal Valley.

The film has been almost universally praised by mainstream reviewers and was 
awarded the Grand Jury Prize at this year's Sundance Film Festival.  A New York 
Times "critics' pick," Restrepo moved the newspaper's A.O. Scott to end his 
glowing review by telling readers: "As the war in Afghanistan returns to the 
front pages and the national debate, we owe the men in ‘Restrepo,' at the very 
least, 90 minutes or so of our attention."  In the Los Angeles Times, reviewer 
Betsy Sharkey concluded in similar fashion: "What ‘Restrepo' does so 
dramatically, so convincingly, is make the abstract concrete, giving the 
soldiers on the front lines faces and voices."

Along with Hetherington, Junger, who has also recently experienced great success 
with his companion book War, shot about 150 hours of footage in the Korengal 
Valley in 2007 and 2008 during a combined 10 trips to the country.  "This is 
war, full stop," reads website prose above their directors' statement about the 
film.

It isn't.

Junger and Hetherington may know something about Afghanistan, a good deal about 
combat, and even more about modern American troops, but there's precious little 
evidence in Restrepo that -- despite the title of Junger's book -- they know the 
true face of war.

War on Your Doorstep

Earlier this year, Junger reviewed a new Vietnam War novel, veteran Karl 
Marlantes's Matterhorn, for the New York Times Book Review.  In a glowing 
front-page appraisal, he wrote, "Combat is not really what ‘Matterhorn' is 
about; it is about war. And in Marlantes's hands, war is a confusing and rich 
world where some men die heroically, others die because of bureaucratic 
stupidity, and a few are deliberately killed by platoon-mates bearing a grudge." 
  Analyzing Junger's misreading of Matterhorn helps to unlock his misconceptions 
about war and explains the problems that dog his otherwise 
cinematically-pleasing, and in some ways useful, film.

Millions of Vietnamese were killed and wounded over the course of what the 
Vietnamese call the "American War" in Southeast Asia.  About two million of 
those dead were Vietnamese civilians.  They were blown to pieces by artillery, 
blasted by bombs, and massacred in hamlets and villages like My Lai, Son Thang, 
Thanh Phong, and Le Bac, in huge swaths of the Mekong Delta, and in little 
unnamed enclaves like one in Quang Nam Province.  Matterhorn touches on none of 
this.  Marlantes focuses tightly on a small unit of Americans in a remote 
location surrounded by armed enemy troops -- an episode that, while pitch 
perfect in depiction, represents only a sliver of a fraction of the conflict 
that was the Vietnam War.

It's not surprising that this view of war appealed to Junger.  In Restrepo, it's 
his vision of war, too.

Restrepo's repeated tight shots on the faces of earnest young American soldiers 
are the perfect metaphor for what's lacking in the film and what makes it almost 
useless for telling us anything of note about the real war in Afghanistan.  Only 
during wide shots in Restrepo do we catch fleeting glimpses of that real war.

In the opening scenes, shot from an armored vehicle (before an improvised 
explosive device halts a U.S. Army convoy), we catch sight of Afghan families in 
a village.  When the camera pans across the Korengal Valley, we see simple homes 
on the hillsides.  When men from Battle Company head to a house they targeted 
for an air strike and see dead locals and wounded children, when we see grainy 
footage of a farm family or watch a young lieutenant, a foreigner in a foreign 
land, intimidating and interrogating an even younger goat herder (whose hands he 
deems to be too clean to really belong to a goat herder) -- here is the real 
war.  And here are the people Junger and Hetherington should have embedded with 
if they wanted to learn -- and wanted to teach us -- what American war is really 
all about.

Few Americans born after the Civil War know much about war.  Real war.  War that 
seeks you out.  War that arrives on your doorstep -- not once in a blue moon, 
but once a month or a week or a day.  The ever-present fear that just when 
you're at the furthest point in your fields, just when you're most exposed, most 
alone, most vulnerable, it will come roaring into your world.

Those Americans who have gone to war since the 1870s -- soldiers or civilians -- 
have been mostly combat tourists, even those who spent many tours under arms or 
with pen (or computer) in hand reporting from war zones.  The troops among them, 
even the draftees or not-so-volunteers of past wars, always had a choice -- be 
it fleeing the country or going to prison.  They never had to contemplate living 
out a significant part of their life in a basement bomb shelter or worry about 
scrambling out of it before a foreign soldier tossed in a grenade.  They never 
had to go through the daily dance with doom, the sense of fear and powerlessness 
that comes when foreign troops and foreign technology hold the power of life and 
death over your village, your home, each and every day.

The ordinary people whom U.S. troops have exposed to decades of war and 
occupation, death and destruction, uncertainty, fear, and suffering -- in places 
like Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Iraq, and Afghanistan -- have had no such choice. 
  They had no place else to go and no way to get there, unless as exiles and 
refugees in their own land or neighboring ones.  They have instead been forced 
to live with the ever-present uncertainty that comes from having culturally 
strange, oddly attired, heavily armed American teenagers roaming their country, 
killing their countrymen, invading their homes, arresting their sons, and 
shouting incomprehensible commands laced with the word "fuck" or derivations 
thereof.

Since World War I, it's been civilians who have most often born the 
disproportionate brunt of modern warfare.  It's been ordinary people who have 
lived with war day after day.  In Restrepo such people -- Afghan elders seeking 
information on someone the Americans detained, villagers seeking compensation 
for an injured cow the Americans butchered into fresh steaks, and a man who 
angrily asks the Americans and their translator to point out the Taliban among 
civilians killed by a U.S. air strike -- are just supporting characters or extras.

"[W]e did not interview Afghans," Junger and Hetherington write in their 
directors' statement.  These are, however, precisely the people who know the 
most about war.  And somehow I can't believe Junger doesn't intuitively know 
this.  Surely it stands to reason that Afghan civilians in the Korengal Valley 
and elsewhere -- some of whom have lived through the Soviet occupation, the 
bloody civil war of the early 1990s that saw the Taliban take power, and now 
almost a decade of American and allied foreign occupation -- have a better 
understanding of war than any of Junger's corn-fed twenty-somethings who are 
combat tourists for about a year at a time (even if they serve multiple tours of 
duty).

War in the Dark

This critical local knowledge, all but missing from Restrepo, is driven home in 
footage from a PBS Frontline report in which one of Restrepo's "stars," Captain 
Dan Kearney, speaks to an Afghan elder, Haji Zalwar Khan, in the Korengal Valley 
in July 2008.  It's around the time Restrepo ends, just as Kearney is about to 
hand-off his command to another American officer-cum-war-tourist.

"You people shoot at least one house a day.  Last night you shot a house in 
Kandalay," says Khan.  In response, Kearney offers a visibly skeptical smile and 
predictable excuses.

"You people are like lightning when you strike a house, you kill everything 
inside," Khan continues.  Later, when Frontline correspondent Elizabeth Rubin is 
able to talk to him alone, the elder tells her that the conflict will end when 
the Americans depart.  "When they leave there will be no fighting," he assures 
her. "The insurgents exist to fight the Americans."

Perhaps it's only natural that Junger is focused (or perhaps the more 
appropriate word would be fixated) not on Afghans wounded or killed in their own 
homes, or even guerillas seeking to expel the foreign occupiers from the valley, 
but on the young volunteers fighting the U.S. war there.  They are a tiny, 
self-selected minority of Americans whom the government has called upon again 
and again to serve in its long-festering post-9/11 occupations.  And presumably 
for reasons ranging from patriotism to a lack of other prospects, these mostly 
baby-faced young men -- there are no female troops in the unit -- volunteered to 
kill on someone else's orders for yet others' reasons.  Such people are not 
uninteresting.

For an American audience, they, and their suffering, provide the easiest entree 
into the Afghan war zone.  They also offer the easiest access for Junger and 
Hetherington.  The young troops naturally elicit sympathy because they are 
besieged in the Korengal Valley and suffer hardships.  (Albeit normally not 
hardships approaching the severity of those Afghans experience.)  In addition, 
of course, Junger speaks their language, hails from their country, and 
understands their cultural references.  He gets them.

Even in an American context, what he doesn't get, the soldiers he can't 
understand, are those who made up the working-class force that the U.S. fielded 
in Vietnam.  That military was not a would-be warrior elite for whom 
"expeditionary" soldiering was just another job choice.  It was instead a 
mélange of earnest volunteers, not unlike the men in Restrepo, along with large 
numbers of draftees and draft-induced enlistees most of whom weren't actively 
seeking the life of foreign occupiers and weren't particularly interested in 
endlessly garrisoning far-off lands where locals sought to kill them.

In his review of Marlantes's Matterhorn, Junger confesses:

"For a reporter who has covered the military in its current incarnation, the 
events recounted in this book are so brutal and costly that they seem to belong 
not just to another time but to an­other country. Soldiers openly contemplate 
killing their commanders. They die by the dozen on useless missions designed 
primarily to help the careers of those above them. The wounded are unhooked from 
IV bags and left to die because others, required for battle, are growing woozy 
from dehydration and have been ordered to drink the precious fluid. Almost every 
page contains some example of military callousness or incompetence that would be 
virtually inconceivable today, and I found myself wondering whether the book was 
intended as an indictment of war in general or a demonstration of just how far 
this nation has come in the last 40 years."

As the American War in Vietnam staggered to a close, U.S. troops were in an open 
state of rebellion.  Fraggings -- attacks on commanders (often by fragmentation 
grenade) -- were rising, so was the escape into drug use.  Troops bucked orders, 
mutinied, and regularly undertook "search and evade" missions, holing up in safe 
spots while calling in false coordinates.

AWOLs and desertions went through the roof.  During World War II, Marine Corps 
desertion rates peaked at 8.8 per 1,000 in 1943.  In 1972, the last full year of 
U.S. combat in Vietnam, the Marines had a desertion rate of 65.3 per 1,000.  And 
precious few Marines were even in Vietnam at that point.  AWOL rates were also 
staggering -- 166.4 per 1,000 for the much more numerous Army and 170 per 1,000 
for the Marines.  In a widely-read 1971 Armed Forces Journal article, retired 
Colonel Robert D. Heinl, Jr., wrote, "By every conceivable indicator, our army 
that now remains in Vietnam is in a state of approaching collapse, with 
individual units avoiding or having refused combat, murdering their officers and 
noncommissioned officers, drug-ridden, and dispirited where not near-mutinous."

It didn't take rocket-scientists to figure out that you couldn't conduct 
long-term, wheel-spinning occupations in distant lands with a military like 
that.  And so the long-occupation-friendly all-volunteer force that Junger has 
come to know was born.  That he has such a hard time understanding the 
citizen-soldier response to the American lost cause in Vietnam essentially 
ensures that the civilian story of war, especially that of alien civilians in a 
distant land, would evade his understanding.  This is what makes the relative 
isolation of the unit he deals with in Restrepo so useful, even comfortable for 
him as he assesses a very American version of what war is all about.

By 1969, it was apparent where the Vietnam War was going and, increasingly, 
soldiers balked at the prospect of being the last man to die for their country 
in a disastrous war.  While it turned out that about 15,000 Americans would die 
in Vietnam from 1969 to 1971 (almost as many as had died from 1965 to 1967), the 
troops were increasingly angry about it.

Body armor, drone warfare, ultra-rapid medevacs, and a host of other 
technological innovations, not to mention battling tiny numbers of relatively 
weak, ill-armed, and generally unpopular guerillas, has meant that Junger's new 
model military can fight its wars with minimal American casualties and, so far, 
less upset at home (or even perhaps in the field).  Today, the numbers of dead 
Americans like Juan S. Restrepo, the medic for whom the outpost in Junger's film 
was named, remain relatively few compared, at least, to Vietnam.  Just over 
1,100 U.S. troops have died in and around Afghanistan since 2001.

On the other hand, who knows how many Afghan civilians have died over that span, 
thanks to everything from insurgent IEDs, suicide attacks, and beheadings to 
U.S. air strikes, special operations forces' night raids, and road checkpoint 
shootings, not to speak of every other hardship the American war in Afghanistan 
has unleashed, exacerbated, or intensified?  Who knows their stories?  Who has 
documented their unending suffering?  Few have bothered.  Few, if any, have 
risked their own lives to chronicle day-to-day life for months on end in 
embattled Afghan villages.  Yet it's there, not in some isolated American 
outpost, that you would find the real story of war to film.  In the place of 
such a work, we have Restrepo.

Even an all-volunteer army will eventually collapse if pushed too far for too 
long.  Soldiers will eventually slip, if not explode, into revolt or at least 
will begin to evade orders, but the prospect looks unlikely any time soon for 
the U.S. military.  Unlike Afghan civilians, U.S. troops go home or at least 
leave the combat zone after their tours of duty.  And if most Americans don't 
necessarily give them much thought much of the time, they evidently have no 
problem paying them to make war, or engaging in effortless tributes to them, 
like rising at baseball games for a seventh-inning stretch salute.

In what passes for a poignant scene in Restrepo, Captain Kearney addresses his 
troops after a sister unit takes uncharacteristically heavy casualties.  He says 
that they can take a few moments to mourn, but then it's time to get back into 
the fight.  It's time for pay-back, time to make the enemy feel the way they're 
feeling.  He then gives his men time for prayer.

If Kearney ever called his troops together and set aside a moment for prayer in 
memory of the civilians they killed or wounded, Junger and Hetherington missed 
it, or chose not to include it.  Most likely, it never happened.  And most 
likely, Americans who see Restrepo won't find that odd at all.  Nor will they 
think it cold, insensitive, or prejudiced to privilege American lives over those 
of Afghans.  After all, according to Junger, "military callousness" has gone the 
way of America's Vietnam-vintage F-4 Phantom fighter-bomber.

If Americans care only sparingly for their paid, professional soldiers -- the 
ones A.O. Scott says deserve 90 minutes of our time -- they care even less about 
Afghan civilians.  That's why they don't understand war.  And that's why they'll 
think that the essence of war is what they're seeing as they sit in the dark and 
watch Restrepo.


© 2010 Nick Turse

Nick Turse is the associate editor of TomDispatch.com.  An award-winning 
journalist, his work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, and 
regularly at TomDispatch. He is the author of The Complex: How the Military 
Invades Our Everyday Lives.  His latest book, The Case for Withdrawal from 
Afghanistan (Verso), which brings together leading analysts from across the 
political spectrum, will be published in September.  His website is NickTurse.com.

[Note on further reading and viewing:  For an excellent article by Sebastian 
Junger that shows a much deeper understanding of the true nature of war, see his 
award-winning 1999 Vanity Fair piece, “The Forensics of War.”  For work by Tim 
Hetherington that does the same, see the 2007 documentary The Devil Came on 
Horseback, for which he was a cameraman.]