God Ain't There On The Battlefield

The definitions of good and bad are askew on the battlefield. Neither exists over there. There are only good cause and good moves or bad timing and bad days. The words good and bad defy definitions in a time of war. Today, some things can be good for the victor and some, bad for the loser. Tomorrow, the victor scores less.

The battlefield is a place where morality does not exist – cannot exist.

God doesn’t visit there, either.

The myth of war is fraud. And for soldiers, the experience on the battlefield is so ludicrous as to absolutely require the strongest of obscenities.

No one wins in a war.

Does saying someone died for a good cause mean anything? Is the fact that they died saving fellow soldiers or saving the lives of civilians a good thing? When enemies are killed, or when civilians die at the crossfire, what of it? And when they are ordered by their superiors to hide the sordid truth because war crimes are punishable, who can say that that is wrong?

There is, however, moral courage.

When a soldier debunks the myth of war as fraud and calls a battle an enterprise of death and immorality, he condemns himself and his fellow soldiers as killers. Thus, the morally courageous becomes an outcast. Does the outcast become a patriotic soldier, then?

In the war memoir “The Sutras of Abu Ghraib” by Army Reservist Aidan Delgado that appeared in print in 2007, the author describes the attempts of his commanders to suppress the truth about Abu Ghraib, making it appear that Abu Ghraib is just a rumor. His captain said, “We don’t need to air our dirty laundry in public. If you have photos that you’re not supposed to have, get rid of them. Don’t talk about this to anyone, don’t write about it to anyone back home.”

The Winter Soldier investigation just outside Washington D.C in March 2008 was a scene of hard-core U.S. Iraqi veterans shaking at the podium, some in tears. Jon Michael Turner described the horrific incident on April 28, 2008 when he shot an Iraqi boy in front of his father. His commanding officer congratulated him for “the kill.” To a stunned audience, Turner presented a photo of the boy’s skull, and said, “I am sorry for the hate and destruction I have inflicted on innocent people.”

“Collateral Damage: America’s War Against Iraqi Civilians” by Chris Hedges and Laila Al-Arian is based on hundreds of hours of taped interviews with Iraqi combat veterans. This pioneering work on the catastrophe in Iraq includes the largest number of eyewitness accounts from U.S. military personnel on record.

A soldier only knows disillusionment. When he turns against the military principle that truth is seditious, and when he starts to seek forgiveness and musters moral courage, his only one hope is to stop denying the truth.

Then, and only then, can he start to heal.