Telling the Truth about War

As the president addressed the nation Tuesday night about his decision to send more troops to Afghanistan, I found myself impressed with his seriousness and depressed over the situation. I know that he has no good options.  I can’t tell whether his decision is the right one.

Literature, as I’ve periodically noted on this blog, isn’t terribly useful when it comes to specific policy decisions.  It can alert us to when we are acting out of ego rather than principle, fear rather than love.  While it often dramatizes people facing impossible decisions, it’s usually less interested in what they should do than in how their humanity is revealed in the deciding.  The literary side of me is fascinated with the struggle Obama is going through to make his decision.  But if I had a choice, I’d choose a quick and uninteresting happy ending over a complex melodrama.

What we can do—and what I think Obama was trying to do as he eschewed drama and rhetorical flourishes—is refuse to hide behind platitudes and empty bombast but instead face up to what we are asking these young people to do.  To divert ourselves from the horrors we are sending them into, too often we resort to a facile patriotism while demonizing people who don’t agree with us.  We must acknowledge, to the extent that we can, the nature of their sacrifice.

On this score, our poets can help us out.  I’m thinking especially of the Wilfred Owen poem “Dulce et Decorum Est,” which means “sweet and fitting it is.”  The poem concludes with the rest of the sentence “to die for one’s country.”  In his description of a gas attack and of the nightmares that follow, Owen captures war with a vividness that few other poems have matched. Here it is:

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime…
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

I currently have a student who is dropping out of St. Mary’s to join the Marines.  He is caught up in a vision of fellowship and quest, and knowing how we are asking our young people to step forth, I feel that I can only support him in his decision.  But I find myself imagining him a few years hence, after he has spent time in Afghanistan (that is, if he returns from Afghanistan), and wondering if his youthful fervor will have given way to the Owen’s bitterness.