War is the worst evil that people have inflicted upon one another, at costs to themselves, since some hominid discovered the lethal efficacy of rocks. It is waged continually somewhere or other in every generation, furiously now, in Ukraine, and fitfully in the Middle East and Africa. The recurring horror has paused on a global scale—holding its breath, you may feel—only because, post-Hiroshima, nuclear weaponry bodes suicide for the next power to use it.
Jumping out at me is the twelfth plate, captioned “This is what you were born for,” in which a man vomits at the sight of heaped corpses. Though ugly, the man’s reaction is a rare hint, in the series, of compassionate feeling. He could be anyone civilized who comes upon carnage.
Then shame set in. Another guy would have to go in what might, after all, have been my place. In addition, there was the betrayal of my youthful conviction that of course I would serve someday, as the firstborn son of a father who had won a medal during the Second World War, in the Battle of the Bulge. Only much later did I understand that he had probably incurred lifelong psychic hurt from the ordeal, which may have explained his jumpy elusiveness as a dad.
Inevitably, one takes sides. I keep replaying the video of a Russian helicopter gunship being shot down with, I assume, a Western-gifted Stinger missile. I don’t like to think of the men who perished in that ball of fire. Instead, I contemplate the event as something cartoonishly abstract: the copter “Russia,” the missile “Ukraine.” It counts for something that the crew died while on a death-dealing mission, but they were fellow human beings.
Very interesting. Coincidentally I recently wrote a piece that also dwells on the same theme.
Une image vaut toujours mille mots ...
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