Book review from the Economist on Line
The morality of warfare
Is closer necessarily worse?
AN INTIMATE HISTORY OF KILLING.
By Joanna Bourke.
Granta; 564 pages; £25
LIEUTENANT William Calley
seemed bewildered
when he was prosecuted for
organising the massacre,
accompanied by sadism and
sexual violence, of about
500 unarmed civilians in the
Vietnamese hamlet of My
Lai in March 1968. “I had
killed, but so had a million
others,” he wailed. “It
couldn’t be wrong or else I would
have remorse about it.” Having
recently had a scolding
from his colonel for allowing
“men, women and
children or other Viet Cong
soldiers in our area to
escape,” he was determined, he
said, to act as
ruthlessly as Saul had in the
Old Testament, when he
set out to “utterly destroy”
the Amalekites.
Mr Calley himself was not the
only person who fumed
or protested over his indictment and eventual conviction
for premeditated murder.
Eight out of ten Americans disapproved of the conviction or
sentence, according to one
opinion poll. Some insisted the massacre could never have
happened. “Any atrocities
in this war were committed by the communists,” said the
governor of Alabama.
Others, including many of those in a position to know, made
the opposite point: there
was no reason to single out the My Lai killings from a
general pattern of behaviour by
American troops in Vietnam or in other 20th-century wars.
Anyone now pondering the moral and judicial issues raised
in the aftermath of the
Kosovo war should read Joanna Bourke’s scholarly,
spine-chilling and almost
encyclopedic account of the agonies (and occasionally the
joys) of combat as
experienced by English-speaking soldiers in two world wars
and Vietnam. She
maintains (though her case is not quite proven) that
atrocities in Vietnam were easily
matched by those committed by the Americans, Britons and
Australians in the other
two conflicts. Only because part of American society
dissented from the war in
Vietnam did a climate exist in which horror stories could
come to public knowledge.
Or so Ms Bourke argues, recalling public rallies in 1971 at
which more than 100
Vietnam veterans “bore witness” to atrocities they had seen
or even helped to commit.
After 1945, when American troops entering Germany “engaged
in orgies of rape and
murder”, there had been no appetite for collective
self-examination.
She also reports the scepticism among war veterans,
whatever they think of the
causes in which they fought, over the ability of civilian
judges to reach fair
conclusions about the deadly calculations of war. “How can
anyone judge who has
never seen his buddies mangled or been shot at himself?”
asked an Australian
military trainer in 1946.
Most of the book is about combat at close quarters—how men
were trained to kill, why
they fought (for comrades and the respect of comrades,
mostly) and what role doctors
and clergymen played in combat. But it is also studded with
reminders that different
moral and psychological issues can arise in “standoff”
warfare: the launching of
bombs and missiles from a safe distance. Not even the most
hardened Vietnam vet
could match the sang-froid shown by the navigator of the
Enola Gay, who after doing
his bit to annihilate close on 100,000 people in Hiroshima,
recalls that he “had a bite
and a few beers, hit the sack” and, so he claims, never
lost a moment’s sleep for the
next 40 years. Admittedly, some bombers were less sanguine;
the book also quotes
airmen who observe (more as a passing thought than in
self-reproach) that, if
Germany had won the war, they might be facing a war-crimes
prosecution for
carpet-bombing civilians.
As Ms Bourke reminds us, different sorts of war crime shock
people to different
degrees; that is one of the problems that need to be faced
in winning acceptance for a
permanent war-crimes tribunal. To western city-dwellers
with no military experience
(Tony Blair, for example), the sickening acts of violence
seen in the Balkans recently
seem almost unbelievable. As Bill Clinton is reported to
have told his British friend: “If
people saw (the Serbs) tying groups of 15 people together
and setting them alight, they
would wonder why we didn’t flatten the place.” It is much
harder to persuade
Russians who have witnessed the wars in Chechnya,
Azerbaijan or
Tajikistan—either at close quarters or on Moscow
television, which is far less
“tasteful” in its war footage than the BBC, that there is
anything egregious about the
fighting in the Balkans.
Of course, it is not good enough to shrug your shoulders in
the face of atrocities and
say that “everybody does it”. There are choices in war, and
there are different degrees
of atrocity. Killing prisoners is one of the commonest
crimes. Mass rape, often
sanctioned or at least condoned by commanders, is another.
The premeditated killing
of non-combatants, whether in Vietnam or Kosovo, is
different from acts committed in
the heat of battle. None of these horrors can be excused in
the name of cultural
relativism. Nor, on the other hand, will any attempt to
outlaw the worst crimes in war
enjoy any moral authority if it seems to focus exclusively
on old-fashioned sorts of
horror—things done with machetes and bayonets—and winks at
the more high-tech
variety. It may be harder still to persuade politicians
from Arkansas, say, that the
behaviour of American soldiers should in any circumstances
be subject to
international scrutiny and held strictly to the laws of
war.
BUY
