NYT : On the Ground

On the Ground

By ROBERT STONE | September 12, 2008

Every war has its own culture. Obviously, part of a war’s cultural milieu reflects contemporary modes in the countries involved. However, historians like Paul Fussell and Modris Eksteins have demonstrated how engagement in an ongoing military struggle affects the collective consciousness and self-regard of a nation, creating a transactional process between the front lines and the civilian street. Somebody seems to be winning, someone else losing, but often the important consequences of a wartime situation are not the direct results of decisions in the theater of operations. Many people die; families, marriages and cities are destroyed. Things that seem manifest at the time leave people within the next half-century wondering about the delusions and miscalculations that set hordes of men and machines into action, that send so many ardent young people to the grave, along with innocent civilian populations. How necessary it seemed to many to defend what was claimed to be “democracy” in Asia against “totalitarianism.” So American tourists in backcountry Vietnam happen on rusting tanks and mortars and buy Zippo lighters with forged inscriptions in the Ho Chi Minh City war museum in a town where socialism is a joke, and which plenty of people don’t even call Ho Chi Minh City.

Tendencies and elements in certain societies that seemed marginal before a war turn out to be much more significant. Sometimes causes, strategies and motivations fervently embraced in the heat of battle are seen to be entirely different from what they were declared to be, or even believed to be, by the individuals responsible for them.

The cultural perspective of a war is changed in perception by the passage of time and generations. As Fussell observes in “The Great War and Modern Memory,” military slang and usages pass into currency in the vernacular of the home front. Even the formal diction is militarized, literary tropes and all. The war’s frustrations and dislocations experienced on the civilian street reveal themselves in the daily speech of men and women on the line. Ironizing was muted, even covert, in the Great War, less so in the Second, rampant during Vietnam as progressively the people of the century lost their innocence, learned more about the realities, believed and did less and less of what they were told. Bitter jokes appeared, flourished, were finally drained of meaning. Today if you want to evoke a wartime ambience from the last hundred years, you turn to the popular music and songs of the time. The cadences, literally, the rhythms of life and death in combat, the fears and concerns in the world at home are reflected so intensely in those songs. Language seems to fade more quickly as a reference point than music.

Still, one of the oldest constant contributing elements of a conflict’s cultural ambience has been the interpretive prose of correspondents. During the Second World War, Ernie Pyle seemed to convey the perspective of “the little guy,” the “common man” in arms, a character much idealized in that struggle of basically non­professional soldiers against the hyper-­conditioned heroes of two continents. In Vietnam, remembering the Ernie Pyles of the Great Patriotic War, and the loyally supportive reticence of reporters who witnessed the dis­astrous events of Korea, the upper echelons of the United States military expected to receive correspondents who would be aboard and with the program. But by the ’60s America was changing and with it the values of college-trained journalists. The brass encountered a new generation of newspapermen touched by what some among the educated youth saw as a kind of reformed consciousness taking hold on American campuses. The journalist had become a more glamorous figure, driven by idealism, legitimized personal ambition and a new level of skepticism toward the official story. Youthful journalists no longer deferred to military authority, and some were driven to compete with their young contemporaries in the newly minted, increasingly blue-collar junior officer corps. These journalists often saw themselves as serving a higher truth than patriotism but also as performing a greater service to the public and the country than any number of generals. Reporters had been shocked to discover that one important weapon of military public relations is the lie. Some officers are good at it, others aren’t. In the climate of the ’60s dedicated journalists found collaborators within the military moved by the same impulses and ready to provide information that fueled their criticism. But at the outset, the American command, bless its homicidal innocence, believed it had nothing to hide.

Then, after two years of covering the most savage fighting of the war, Michael Herr assembled his reportage for Esquire in the book “Dispatches,” published in 1977. “Dispatches” was what had come to be called “new journalism,” but it transcended that form to become both a profound personal journal and the most brilliant exposition of the cultural dimension of an American war ever compiled. It captured and rendered in perfect pitch the frenetic sound and fractured consciousness of the war, the young people who endured it and its time. “Dispatches” set a high standard for reporters, but it set them free.

Now, in the tradition of “Dispatches,” with the publication of Dexter Filkins’s stunning book, “The Forever War,” it seems the journals of the brave correspondents assigned to the Middle East will take their place as the pre-eminent record of America’s late-imperial adventures, the heart of these heartless exercises in disaster, maybe some consolation to those maimed and bereaved in them.

It is not facetious to speak of work like that of Dexter Filkins as defining the “culture” of a war. The contrast of his eloquence and humanity with the shameless snake-oil salesmanship employed by the American government to get the thing started serves us well. You might call the work of enlightening and guiding a deliberately misguided public during its time of need a cultural necessity. The work Filkins accomplishes in “The Forever War” is one of the most effective antitoxins that the writing profession has produced to counter the administration’s fascinating contemporary public relations tactic. The political leadership’s method has been the dissemination of facts reversed 180 degrees toward the quadrant of lies, hitherto a magic bullet in their never-ending crusade to accomplish everything from stealing elections to starting ideological wars. Filkins uses the truth as observed firsthand to detail an arid, hopeless policy in an unpromising part of the world. His writing is one of the scant good things to come out of the war.

The old adage holds that every army fights the previous war, learning nothing and forgetting nothing, as someone said of the restored Bourbon dynasty in France. The United States military did learn one strategy for preventing the public relations disasters of Vietnam, and this was the embedding of correspondents with military units engaged. Michael Herr in Vietnam could not have been more alienated from the United States government’s P.R. handouts, but his sharing the fortunes of American troops made his compassion, sometimes his plain love, for them available to thoughtful Americans. It’s hard to imagine that Donald Rumsfeld’s politically intimidated brass had “Dispatches” in mind when they decided to embed correspondents with American units, but it started out as an effective policy. One of the memorable bites of the early days of the Iraq invasion was the exultant embedded correspondent citing Churchill on camera: “There’s nothing more exhilarating than being shot at and missed!” A far cry indeed from being shot at and hit.

All that worked for a while. Filkins opens “The Forever War” with a prologue describing the attack on the Sunni fortress of Falluja by the First Battalion, Eighth Marines. Embedded (and how) with Bravo Company, Filkins shares the deadly risks of street fighting in a hostile city in which the company, commanded by an outstanding officer, takes its objective and also a harrowing number of casu­alties. The description makes us understand quite vividly how we didn’t want to be there and also makes ever so comprehensible the decision by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to give our last excursion into Asia a pass. (“Bring ’em on!” said the president famously about this one.)

Filkins had been covering the Muslim world for years before the invasion of Iraq, and his book proper opens with a scene beyond the grimmest fiction, a display of Shariah religious justice staged in a soccer stadium in Kabul during the late ’90s. Miscreants are variously mutilated and killed before a traumatized audience that includes a hysterical crowd of starveling war orphans whose brutalized, maimed futures in an endlessly war-ravaged country can be imagined.

For the reviewer — perhaps for the selfish reason that it takes place closer to home — the most dreadfully memorable witness that Filkins bears takes place not half a world away but in Lower Manhattan on Sept. 11. Filkins is making his way past Battery Park.

“My eyes went to a gray-green thing spread across the puddles and rocks. Elongated, unrolled, sitting there, unnoticed. An intestine. It kind of jumped out at me, presented itself. It’s amazing how the eyes do that, go right to the human flesh, spot it amid the heaviest camouflage of rubble and dirt and glass.”

In Tel Aviv, Filkins recalls, he watched Orthodox Jewish volunteers seeking out the same sort of item in the aftermath of a suicide bomb.

Filkins takes shelter from the cool night in the Brooks Brothers store in One Liberty Plaza.

“Later that night,” he writes, “I was awoken many times, usually by the police. Once when I came to, a group of police officers were trying on cashmere topcoats and turning as they looked in the mirror. There was lots of laughter. ‘Nice,’ one of them said, looking at his reflection, big smile on his face. ‘Look at that.’ ”

Dexter Filkins, one of The New York Times’s most talented reporters, employs a fine journalistic restraint, by which I mean he does not force irony or paradox but leaves that process to the reader. Nor does he speculate on what he does not see. These are worthy attributes, and whether their roots are in journalistic discipline or not they serve this unforgettable narrative superbly.

Someone, Chesterton it may have been, identified the sense of paradox with spirituality. Though Filkins does not rejoice in paradoxes, he never seems to miss one either, and the result is a haunting spiritual witness that will make this volume a part of this awful war’s history. He entitles his section on Manhattan “Third World,” and he leaves us feeling that the history he has set down here will not necessarily feature in our distant cultural recollections but may rather be history — the thing itself — come for us at last.

Robert Stone is the author of the novel “Dog Soldiers,” set during the Vietnam War. His most recent book is “Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties.”