First Parish Unitarian UniversalistWar: Fog or Force?
A sermon preached by the Reverend Diane Teichert
First Parish Unitarian Universalist - Canton, MA
October 24, 2004
“We leave you our deaths. Give them their meaning.” We heard these words this morning in the poem “Young Dead Soldiers” by Archibald MacLeish.
On the eve of what I feel, deep in my bones, to be the most pivotal presidential election of my lifetime, these words haunt me. I hope they haunt you.
More than anything else, for me, this election is a referendum on the war in Iraq. I respect your view if it differs from mine, however.
“We leave you our deaths. Give them their meaning.”
I hear in those words a complex set of questions. Yes, we surely must give meaning to the deaths of our ( U.S. and coalition) young (and not so young) soldiers.
Must we also give meaning to the deaths of the Iraqi police and militia working with our forces? And to the deaths of Iraqi civilians, now estimated to be between thirteen and fifteen thousand [see iraqbodycount.net]? Must these civilian deaths be given meaning, also? And what about the deaths of civilian development and humanitarian aid workers, from various countries, another of whom was seen begging for her life in a video in the past few days? Must we also give their deaths meaning?
And, I have not even mentioned the deaths of the Iraqi insurgents, what meaning ought we to give to their deaths, or is that not our concern???
While all of those people who have died in Iraq since our invasion in March 2003 have not been “young” or “soldiers,” they are all “dead.” Their numbers may not compare to the military and civilian casualties of other wars, but the Bush Administration started this war in our name and they are now dead. How shall we give meaning to their deaths?
“We leave you our deaths. Give them their meaning.”
The American poet Archibald Mac Leish knew something about war. He volunteered in 1917 to serve the American Army in WWI and eventually saw action in the second battle of the Marne, as commander of Battery B of the 146th Field Artillery. He was then ordered back to the United States to instruct draftees in artillery use and was there, a first lieutenant, when the war ended. It is said that MacLeish became embittered toward the war when his brother Ken, a fighter pilot, died in combat.
After World War I, he returned to his legal studies and then a successful law career, but he quit on the same day he was offered a partnership in February 1923. He and his wife left for France, where they lived for five years, he as a poet and she as a singer. They returned to the States and he became a writer for the new Fortune magazine, eventually attracting the notice of President Roosevelt who appointed him to be Librarian of Congress and then assistant director of the Office of War Information (1942-1943). In 1945 he resigned this position and led the U.S. delegation to the organizational meeting of UNESCO, and in 1946 he served as assistant head of the U.S. delegation to UNESCO. Only after that did he return to private life, and became the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard in 1949 until 1962 when, at 70, he reached the age of mandatory retirement.
He created poetry, prose and drama, prolifically, and won three Pulitzers before he died at nearly ninety years of age. In his writing, he never stopped engaging the public issues of the times, from “Young Dead Soldiers” written for the memorial dedication of Flanders Field to his outspoken opposition to fascism abroad in the thirties and the anti-Communist craze of the McCarthy era in the fifties; his 1967 play Herakles which warns of the destructive potential of science and his 1968 ode to the Apollo 8 image of earth taken from space: "To see the earth as we now see it, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the unending night--brothers who see now they are truly brothers.” (Riders on the Earth, p. xiv). [From on-line American National Biography. Ed. John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Copyright © 1999 by the American Council of Learned Societies.]
MacLeish was someone who knew something about war—he’d served in combat and he’d lost a brother to it. Whereas I had no brothers of military age during the Viet Nam War; and none of my friends were drafted or enlisted. My father was drafted to serve in Germany, but not until the end of World War II and to be a translator, so he never saw combat. His father, my grandfather, did, but I never heard his stories about it. He, who left Germany as a young man to avoid serving in its army, joined the US Army in WWI and was fortunate to return safely home. My only connection to the pain of war is that my other grandfather lost his small business during the Second World War, when the warehouse in which he rented space was taken over for military purposes without recompense; and in a sense he lost his life, as well, from drinking after that happened.
So, to gain at least “book knowledge” of war, I prepared for this sermon by watching the Academy Award winning 2003 documentary, The Fog of War. And reading the 2002 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction book by Chris Hedges, War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning. The juxtaposition of the book (available at the library or in paperback at most bookstores) and the documentary (which I rented at my local video store)—each on their own, compelling and disturbing-- is profoundly disquieting.
I commend both of them to you. But they left me even more haunted by MacLeish’s words than I was before. “We leave you our deaths. Give them their meaning.” Whether war is a fog or a force that gives us meaning, or both, war is not as simple as MacLeish implies when he says, “Whether our lives and our deaths were for peace and a new hope or for nothing we cannot say; it is you who must say this.”
The Fog of War, directed by Errol Morris, is essentially a one-on-one interview with Robert S. McNamara, Former Secretary of Defense under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, illustrated with war footage and newly released recorded conversations that took place in the Oval Office. In this fascinating interview, McNamara reflects on his role as a leader of the world’s most powerful military force, from the 1945 bombing of Tokyo to the near miss of nuclear war in the Cuban Missile Crisis to the protracted failure of US involvement in the Viet Nam.
Reporter Chris Hedges’ book looks at war from a very different vantage point than McNamara, being an airman, ever had: close up. For 15 years Hedges was a foreign combat correspondent for the New York Times, the Dallas Morning News, and the Christian Science Monitor.
As he says, “War and conflict have marked most of my adult life. I began covering insurgencies in El Salvador, where I spent five years, then went on to Guatemala and Nicaragua and Colombia, through the first intifada in the West Bank and Gaza, the civil war in the Sudan and Yemen, the uprisings in Algeria and the Punjab, the fall of the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, the Gulf War, the Kurdish rebellion in southeast Turkey and northern Iraq, the war in Bosnia, and finally to Kosovo. I have been ambushed on desolate stretches of Central American roads, shot at in the marshes of southern Iraq, imprisoned in the Sudan, beaten by Saudi military police, deported from Libya and Iran, captured and held for a week by Iraqi Republican Guard during the Shiite rebellion following the Gulf War, strafed by Russian Mig-21s in Bosnia, fired upon by Serb snipers, and shelled for days in Sarajevo with deafening rounds of heavy artillery that threw out thousands of deadly bits of iron fragments.” [p.2].
Yet he kept going back for more, year after year. He hated and was appalled by war, but at the same time found it to be a great emotional rush, and knew it to be the same for others. He learned, “the rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug, one I ingested for many years. It is peddled by mythmakers—historians, war correspondents, filmmakers, novelists and the state—all of whom endow it with qualities it often does possess: excitement, exoticism, power, chances to rise above our small stations in life… It dominates culture, distorts memory, corrupts language, and infects everything around it, even humor…
The enduring attraction of war is this: Even with its destruction and carnage it can give us what we long for in life. It can give us purpose, meaning, a reason for living… war is an enticing elixir. It gives us resolve, a cause. It allows us to be noble.” [p.3].
Yet, as he also observed, “war finds its meaning in death.” That sounds so abstract. But, in the book, his descriptions of the deaths he witnessed as a war correspondent were anything but abstract. Some were the deaths of people he had come to know, or deaths of their friends and relatives. He feels, and conveys, the gruesomeness, and the apparent senselessness from the up close vantage point. How could this one terrible death, added to this terrible death, to that one and that one, add up to something noble???
Nevertheless, Hedges is not a pacifist. He says, “The poison that is war does not free us from the ethics of responsibility. There are times when we must take this poison—just as a person with cancer accepts chemotherapy to live. We cannot succumb to despair. Force is and I suspect always will be part of the human condition. There are times when the force wielded by one immoral faction must be countered by a faction that, while never moral is perhaps less immoral…”
“I wrote this book,” he writes, “not to dissuade us from war but to understand it. It is especially important that we [the United States], who wield such massive force across the globe, see within ourselves the seeds of our own obliteration. We must guard against the myth of war and the drug of war that can, together, render us as blind and callous as some of those we battle.” [p.16-17].
Robert S. McNamara, of course, is no pacifist, either. Yet, to my surprise, in The Fog of War, he, who I once vilified for his leadership of the Viet Nam war, reflects back on his military career and offers insights that help us understand how we might do as Hedges recommends, and “guard against the myth and the drug of war.”
In the twenty hours of interviews with Morris, that began before September 11, 2001 and continued in the months after, the eighty-five year old McNamara offers eleven lessons. Several of them speak to our response to the terrorist attacks on that day.
Take for example, the first one: Empathize with your enemies, he says, try to understand their interests from their point of view and respond accordingly. He explains that nuclear war during the Cuban missile crisis was averted in part because the former ambassador to Moscow was in on the high-level discussions and offered insights into Khrushchev’s ways of thinking that led Kennedy to decide not to attack. It worked; the Soviet Union backed off. McNamara went on to reflect that the U.S. did not empathize with, or have an adequate understanding of, the enemy in Viet Nam, resulting in our unsuccessful military strategy there.
Did we, do we have an understanding of Al Qaeda adequate to a successful strategy for destroying it?
Another of McNamara’s lessons: Be prepared to re-examine your reasoning. It seems that his assessment is that Kennedy was more inclined to do so than Johnson. For example, in October 1963, Kennedy asked him to prepare a two-year strategy for getting our 16,000 troops out of Viet Nam.
Whereas, Johnson is heard saying to McNamara, in spring 1964 conversations taped in the Oval Office, " I want you to dictate to me a memorandum of a couple of pages with 4 letter words and short sentences on the situation in Vietnam, the Vietnam picture… because Senator Scott is saying that “a war we can neither win, lose nor drop is evidence of an instability of ideas."
Robert McNamara responds, “the frank answer is we don't know what is going on out there. The signs I see going through the cables are disturbing signs. This is a very uncertain period. "
Johnson again, “We need somebody over there who can get us some better plans than we've got. What I want is somebody who can lay out some plans so we can trap some of them and whoop the hell out of 'em. Kill some of 'em. That's what I want to do."
Robert McNamara responds: “I'll try and bring something back that will meet that
objective.” He didn’t sound too enthused.
I thought immediately of our war in Iraq when I heard Johnson refer to Viet Nam as “a war we can neither win, lose nor drop.” Also, Iraq came to mind when McNamara, in the interview, warned, “don’t apply our power as the greatest force in the world unilaterally. We went it alone in Viet Nam. We had no allies. Even the greatest power needs allies.”
Not that McNamara takes full responsibility for the tragedy of Viet Nam. Asked about his complicity, he says, “I am very proud of my accomplishments and I’m very sorry that in the process of accomplishing things, I made errors. All humans make mistakes…” Yes, but… his actions were devastatingly costly in human lives—25,000 American soldiers and I’m not sure how many civilians dead in Viet Nam while he was Secretary of Defense; 100,000 civilians killed in the US fire-bombing of Tokyo, in which he had a decision-making role.
His very definition of the phrase the “fog of war” seems to obfuscate his culpability, “war is so complex. It is beyond the ability of the human mind to comprehend all the variables. Our judgment, our understanding are not adequate, and we kill people unnecessarily.”
Yet, when military planners say, "no plan survives contact with the enemy," it does point to an endless process of improvisation based on inadequate and changing data, and so we might grant Robert McNamara his complexity defense.
Yes, we Unitarian Universalists appreciate complexity, too. We liberal religionists do not much look for certainty. We are inclined to “live the questions” more than we are to “know the answers.” This sets us apart from fundamentalists of all persuasions, who praise their certainty, and profess an absolute knowledge that they are right.
President Bush says that he felt “called” to be our president, as if his feeling makes it inevitable. When asked, he cannot name his mistakes. He seems to project certainty. He talks frequently about his “instincts” and refers to what he “believes” to be true, as though one’s instincts are always right and one’s beliefs ought not be questioned.
It is my judgment that, as the nation with the most weapons of mass destruction, we need to heed reason, not instinct, and follow McNamara’s advice to “be prepared to re-examine our reasoning.”
So, when we hear the young dead soldiers, and all others who die in this war, say to us “We leave you our deaths. Give them their meaning,” let our answer be, “your death has meaning because it led us to re-examine our reasoning, and reminded us that war ought not to be a force that gives us meaning.”
Instead, let us find meaning, and hope, in doing the work of love and justice in this world. This will make us a force for peace.
Let peace be the force that gives us meaning.
Amen.