-Caveat Lector-
>From The Independent (UK)
> <Picture><Picture: Independent Books>
> June 3, 1999
>
> <Picture: bol >
>
> An Intimate History of Killing by Joanna Bourke, Granta, �25
>
>
> Frank McLynn
>
> NO GODDAM sonofabitch ever won a war by dying for his country; he won
> it by getting the other poor dumb sonofabitch to die for his." General
> George Patton's striking words skate over the problem. How exactly
> does one train the "ordinary" man to be a killer in wartime? How does
> one get him to fight at all? As Joanna Bourke rightly argues, these
> issues have scarcely been addressed in serious literature. It is
> simply assumed that the gung-ho ethos of, say, the US Marines will
> spontaneously produce its own ideology of combat. But, as Michael
> Hickey demonstrated in his recent volume on Korea, and Bourke herself
> shows from her examination of the two world wars and Vietnam,
> so-called "bug-out fever" takes a lot of overcoming.
>
> Bourke argues that if the experience of warfare were universally
> perceived to be as grim as in, say, Robert Graves's Goodbye to All
> That, one of two things would happen. Either war would become
> impossible and the pacifists' dream fulfilled, or civilisation itself
> would be overwhelmed by a tidal wave of brutal soldiers, returning in
> their millions to destroy "normal" life.
>
> That neither of these events takes place is strong evidence for a kind
> of dualism in the human male, and possibly the female. In wartime
> sane, well-adjusted men can be socialised into efficient killing
> machines - "willing executioners" - yet smoothly make the transition
> back to normal life. This is because certain psychic mechanisms can be
> energised in wartime. We are back with the pleasure principle again.
>
> Bourke argues that legitimised killing in wartime can produce feelings
> of pleasure and even creativity. She outlines the various ways in
> which being a warrior has compensations. In the first place, the
> chances of dying may have been overstated, and in the second there are
> massive rewards for being a licensed killer. One can role play, and
> imagine oneself a John Wayne or Clint Eastwood; there is a kind of
> comradeship and love not available in civilian life; one may be
> introduced to new horizons, become aware of new worlds beyond the
> ghetto, factory and mill, and even achieve a breakthrough into a world
> of different values.
>
> Most of all, there is the sexualisation of warfare: not just the
> "orgasmic" pleasure of killing, but the freedom from restraint on
> rape. Bourke establishes that it was routine in Vietnam for combat
> platoons to kidnap desirable women from Vietnamese villages and then
> gang-rape them, moving on the next night to repeat the experience.
> Whether the woman was killed after the mass rapes depended entirely on
> how G I Joe was feeling that night.
>
> This leads Bourke into a depressing, stomach-churning section on war
> crimes. She is to be commended for her unflinching courage in facing
> up to this dark aspect of mankind. Two conclusions seem inescapable.
> First, war crimes are a ubiquitous feature of warfare, and although
> the criminals at Nuremberg deserved their fate, their trial and
> execution was no more than hypocritical "victor's justice". Second,
> theorists of human perfectibility must have been considering a species
> other than homo sapiens. There is not a chance in a million that the
> "normal" depravity analysed by Bourke could form the basis for a New
> Jerusalem.
>
> Bourke's book, buttressed by massive scholarship and a complete
> absence of parti pris, is an outstanding achievement and completely
> convincing as far as it goes. But I wonder if her main thesis - that
> the best killers are ordinary people full of love and empathy, who do
> not suffer significant postwar trauma - is not vulnerable to two
> telling objections.
>
> First, she concentrates on US, British and Commonwealth troops in
> three conflicts where their casualty rates were extremely low. The
> Americans lost more men killed in their Civil War than in the two
> World Wars and Vietnam combined. I am doubtful that the thesis of
> pleasure and creativity as compensation could be sustained in, say,
> the "Great Patriotic War" of 1941-45 between Germany and the Soviet
> Union, in which 50 million people died. Moreover, her thesis that
> returning veterans are not made unfit for civilian life seems refuted
> by one salient statistic: 55,000 Americans were killed in combat in
> Vietnam, yet 100,000 US veterans committed suicide after their return.
>
>
> I would not want to suggest that this is anything other than a
> splendid and original contribution to a debate which must entail
> ultimate questions about the meaning of being human. Bourke includes
> fascinating, if depressing, chapters on the role of military
> psychologists, padres and women, and allows no facile answers to
> emerge. Her mastery of the psychoanalytical literature is impressive,
> and throughout there are the unmistakable signs of a broad
> intelligence at work rather than a narrow specialism.
>
> Her excessive concentration on face-to-face killing with the bayonet
> may raise some eyebrows, but it seems all the old clich�s are true.
> Corporal Jones, according to Bourke, was right: "They don't like it
> up'em, Captain Mainwaring."
>
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