(Excerpted with permission from Combat Veterans: Bringing It Home, by Bill DeWitt MA, MFT, Viet Nam 1967-1968)
War: The Clean Machine
Paul Fussell survived his service in WWII Europe as an infantry combat officer to return home and earn a Ph.D. from Harvard. He eventually became a professor of English Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. He is one of the very few academics in the field who can write about war, based upon intimate knowledge and personal experience. His clear-eyed honesty cuts through a lot of the official bullshit.
In his book, Wartime, he sets the stage for war:
“In the popular and genteel iconography of war during the bourgeois age, all the way from 18th and 19th century history paintings to 20th century photographs, the bodies of the dead, in inert, are dead. Bloody, sometimes sprawled in awkward positions, but except for the absence of life, plausible and acceptable simulacra of the people they once were. But there is a contrary and much more ‘realistic’ convention represented in, say, the Bayeux Tapestry, where an ornamental border displays numerous severed heads and limbs. That convention is honored likewise in Renaissance awareness of what happens to the body in battle.
“In Shakespeare’s Henry V the soldier Michael Williams assumes the traditional understanding when he observes: But if the cause be not good, the King himself hath a heavy reckoning to make when all those legs and arms and heads, chopped off in battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry all, ‘We died at such a place’ — some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly felt.”
What Fussell is saying is this: somewhere back three hundreds years ago or so, the old images associated with war got cleaned up.
A whole new set of images were created and delivered to the public. These newly popular ideals depicted the adventure of war as epic, admirable and heroic. Totally absent from this new view were torn body parts, crushed skulls, wanton destruction or smashed internal organs, leaking their stench out into the environment. In essence, the brutal, ugly truth was now shunted aside. All the old horrors were to be hidden away. War was to become evermore grand and noble in the popular imagination.
Let’s expose this fraud with a simple survey of real events that have happened to real people.
(Next: Brutality: The Large Scale)
