War and Peace

By LANCE MORROW

A full symphony of history's possibilities

Bards and journalists have always known that war is the most dramatic of stories, the richest to tell. It is dense with spectacle and passion, with endless subplots of fear and bravery and cowardice, of betrayal and hope. Although it is grotesque to say it, war has everything, which may explain its persistence on the human agenda. It is character and politics and statecraft and violence and destruction and redemption, almost the full symphony of his tory's possibilities. War is mankind in full panoply and in extremis. It has always been, too, a form of madness. But until this century, the world has been more inclined to consider the necessity of war, the glory of it, at any rate the inevitability of it, before pausing to reflect on its insanity. War was an adventure and a rite of passage:

each generation of young men had to have its war. In the past few generations, the character of wars has changed--both the wars that were fought and now the one that nobody has dared to begin. There was World War I, the war of the trenches; the futility and waste of human life, the vast pointlessness of the exercise, led much of civilized opinion to the conclusion that warfare had become madness.

It was left to Adolf Hitler to embody the idea of war as individual psychosis, and to the Bomb to give the world its presiding terror: the vision of one maniac pressing the obliterating button. Hitler's extravagant madness broke over Europe in a dark wave. He began with Poland at the end of the summer of 1939. As usually happens with history in the process of occurring, it was sometimes difficult for the world to weigh Hitler, to judge him, to predict him, to know his ambition or his lunacy. He was a perfect phenomenon of the age of Einstein, in which seemingly infinitesimal causes can produce spectacular effects: cataclysms. Hitler was an atom, a nonentity convinced he could conquer the world. But the very madness of Hitler's enterprise made war, from the Allied perspective, seem sane and necessary. If ever there was a war that should be fought, it was that one, against such evil. But war always has its reasons, its internal logic. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was despicably aggressive to most Americans but made abundant sense to the Japanese general staff. It was an essential means of staking out the Japanese sphere of influence. That imperial ambition was only extinguished, at last, by the terrible light that burst over Hiroshima. The end of World War II was the beginning of the unthinkable. The Bomb became the black presiding presence in the world: in the logic of arms race and nuclear deterrence, the wild id of the world was made to function as superego; the very terror of the thing enforced constraint. Evil will make us be good. The world lived with it, the alternative being the threat of planetary death. The image of such global cessation was arresting. So the unthinkable came to be not only thinkable but endlessly and eloquently conjured, by cold statistics, projections of megadeaths, and a procession of movie fantasies. An entire rhetoric of doomsday burgeoned, evoking the horror that was imminent, the last flash tomorrow. But in burgeoning, it had the ironic effect of becoming itself a convention, and thus routine.

In the shadow of the Bomb, military ambition in the world seems to have grown more limited. If ideology still has imperial hopes, it tends to send them around the world somewhat self-consciously, in local disguises, working the odd civil war here and there, mostly in Third World targets of opportunity. Conventional wars have continued at their furious and modestly homicidal pace, of course, and this is still the most murderous century. War, once a business to be transacted between soldiers, with everyone else stepping aside, is more than ever an indiscriminate killer. In little war, guerrilla war, there are no lines for civilians to hide behind, and in big war, hiding is impossible.

Korea was a sort of transitional conflict, a civil war enacted with all the panoply of conventional battle, each side supported with allies and joining on an open field of battle. But then war tended to fade into jungles and a thousand ambiguities of costume and faction and political subtlety. Viet Nam was America's painful education in this new form. Overarmed and under informed, the Americans came onto the battlefield and found that it was all quicksand and fog. Viet Nam was morally impenetrable as well. Americans could not tell enemies from friends. The war became a terrible waste of idealism. An older generation of men who had had their war at Normandy and Iwo Jima would grow nostalgic for the moral simplicities they had known. After the Tet offensive in 1968, Viet Nam came to seem as futile as the Western Front once had to the men in the trenches, a mere killing ground. President Richard Nixon promised to depart from Viet Nam when he had got "peace with honor." But the possibility of honor seemed to have vanished somewhere in the terrible course of things. War, once history's stirring, Homeric pageant, degenerated into futility and rout, and bodies dangling from the skids of the last helicopters out of Saigon.

--By Lance Morrow This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.