Notes on war

After reading "With the Old Breed" I have come to appreciate something about war. It is a foreign experience. It places in stark relief the horrors of warfare, battle, fatigue, shelling, explosions, fear, sleeplessness, wet, hunger, dysentery, exposure, hate, sadness, resignation, sobbing, gunshots, luck, sheer luck, against a familiar world. The two placed together makes each all the more strange. And since war is the transient state its technology, machinery, and the full experience strikes one as an alien presence. Sledge points this out on Okinawa and is reminded of his grandmother's remark that a blight had settled upon the land during the Civil War. It's the same other-worldly and ultimately damaging presence of technique and knowledge in the service of annihilation. This is a sacred knowledge that is preserved in the hardened bodies of warriors who practice it in the theater of war. This knowledge has an ultimately defensive purpose. It is enlisted to secure the beliefs of a people. But warfare leaves an indelible mark on those people enlisted, drilled, and sent to war. Upon returning they find they cannot re-enter society so easily nor see the world the same again.

The point of warfare is to erase one's competitor completely. This has culminated in exploding the other to bits with bombs or shooting him fatally from afar. A body motivated to annihilate another must meet that body. This is done by so many telepresent technologies, which allow the person's motive to issue from a gun into a projectile aimed at the body to be annihilated.

Burke notes that an ideology takes up residence in a body and makes it dance in peculiar ways. The techniques of warfare quickly drilled into each soldier for that transient event are just this, ideology. The one rule of war is to kill. When this occurs the body dancing to its ideology becomes mute. With no place to hold purchase, no phenomenal accoutrement through which its rules become actions, its values become voices, the ideology fades into a mist of blood, a last breath and dances no more--dead body, dead ideology.

The goal of war is to end it as quickly and decisively as possible as a winner. In accomplishing this goal the machines of war churn up the landscape, redirect resources, and dump raw bodies onto the war effort. War is a catalyst for change. War is a catalyst for social organization. War necessitates rapid advancement of a society. This is labeled 'mobilization.' Unstuck from its pastoral time, this society becomes the machine for war. Vast wealth and riches pour into the war effort. Careers are diverted. Lives are ended. Families are ripped apart. Children are lost. Histories and futures get blown to smithereens. Some get rich. Others become poor. The tenuous bonds of a society are destroyed in war only to be restrung according to a plan designed from without by war planners. Lives are wasted as the profits of war justify the design.

War unleashes the demons that lie within us all. War lets loose the destructive fury inside each of us.