"just rubble and charred stuff..."

'In-Country-2', a photograph by Bob Lopes of a photograph left in a
plastic bag during a rainstorm at the Vietnam Memorial Wall, 11/15/92.
(photo: Bob Lopes/The Wall)


Of War and Peace

A little over fifty years after the end of his war and over twenty years after the end of my first war, we sat together and remembered what we could not forget.

That war is beautiful should chill our bones. That war is ugly is too gentle an adjective for a process that rips apart human flesh and drowns our soul in blood. War is electric. War is anesthesia. War is vicious and mundane.

The savage nobility, the sacred rite of passage and bonding of war gets portrayed as one of the most intense religious and spiritual experiences a soldier can ever have in this life. We glorify that "band of brothers" fusion of war.

But no one ever questions what that says about us, our society, about how trust and faith and love in one another can only have profound meaning if experienced in the violent carnage that is war. Otherwise, it don't mean nothin'.

In U.S. newspapers, reports on drone attacks often amount to about a dozen words, naming the place and an estimated number of militants killed. The journalist and social worker from North Waziristan asked us why people in the U.S. don’t ask to know more.

It’s hard to slow down and look at horrifying realities. Jane Mayer, writing for The New Yorker, (“The Predator War,” October 26, 2009), quoted a former C.I.A. official’s description of a drone attack:

“People who have seen an air strike live on a monitor described it as both awe-inspiring and horrifying. ‘You could see these little figures scurrying, and the explosion going off, and when the smoke cleared there was just rubble and charred stuff,’ a former C.I.A. officer who was based in Afghanistan after September 11th says of one attack.”

"Human beings running for cover are such a common sight,” Jane Mayer continues, “that they have inspired a slang term: ‘squirters.’”

Peter W. Singer, the author of “Wired for War,” a recent book about the robotics revolution in modern combat, argues that the drone technology is worryingly “seductive,” because it creates the perception that war can be “costless.” Cut off from the realities of the bombings in Pakistan, Americans have been insulated from the human toll, as well as from the political and the moral consequences. Nearly all the victims have remained faceless, and the damage caused by the bombings has remained unseen. In contrast to Gaza, where the targeted killing of Hamas fighters by the Israeli military has been extensively documented—making clear that the collateral damage, and the loss of civilian life, can be severe—Pakistan’s tribal areas have become largely forbidden territory for media organizations. As a result, no videos of a drone attack in progress have been released, and only a few photographs of the immediate aftermath of a Predator strike have been published.

The seeming unreality of the Predator enterprise is also felt by the pilots. Some of them reportedly wear flight suits when they operate a drone’s remote controls. When their shifts end, of course, these cubicle warriors can drive home to have dinner with their families. Critics have suggested that unmanned systems, by sparing these combatants from danger and sacrifice, are creating what Sir Brian Burridge, a former British Air Chief Marshal in Iraq, has called “a virtueless war,” requiring neither courage nor heroism. According to Singer, some Predator pilots suffer from combat stress that equals, or exceeds, that of pilots in the battlefield. This suggests that virtual killing, for all its sterile trappings, is a discomfiting form of warfare. Meanwhile, some social critics, such as Mary Dudziak, a professor at the University of Southern California’s Gould School of Law, argue that the Predator strategy has a larger political cost. As she puts it, “Drones are a technological step that further isolates the American people from military action, undermining political checks on . . . endless war.”