The Fog of War / Features / Untitled Books

Not to make light of it, but I have found war often as surreal as it is frightening, more waiting around than heart stopping action.

The Fog of War

TOM COGHLAN, The Economist's man in Afghanistan, on why the best war reportage is seldom about the fighting itself.

We live in a different age; of messy insurgency, 'asymmetric warfare', roadside blasts and suicide bombs

On a remote British base in the south of Afghanistan, I watched a Camel spider kill a scorpion. The insects, found by an army chef and imprisoned in a Tupperware box, were unwilling gladiators for the British soldiers' entertainment. Out here, a lot of money rides on bug fights.

As the insects fought, a battle spluttered into life at a British army post three miles away. At this distance, across a warren of mud-walled compounds and endless poppy fields, machine gun fire sounds as harmless as bursting popcorn, and no less innocuous are the blooming puffs of smoke from distant Taliban rocket propelled grenades.

Northward incessantly, the flickering gunnery rumbles,
Far off, like a dull rumour of some other war.
What are we doing here?

So wrote Wilfred Owen, as the snow fell in a quiet sector of the Western Front in 1917. These words could equally be applied to this snapshot of war in Afghanistan. I watched one of the soldiers look up briefly, and then turn his attention back to writhing insects as the scorpion swiped his lethal tail at the cowering spider.

Not to make light of it, but I have found war often as surreal as it is frightening, more waiting around than heart stopping action. It is rarely told like this in newspapers of course: towns fall, major offensives against insurgents are launched, and the currency for a British soldier's death in Afghanistan is currently 200 words of copy.

But the greatest war reportage, in novels, memoirs and poetry, captures something different: the sense of life simultaneously skewed and concentrated. Time shifts unevenly in war; often achingly slow (and the moments when the bullets are flying are perversely the slowest of all) leading to acute boredom and jet black comedy; and then accelerating suddenly, lit by adrenaline, fear and great tragedy.

The discomfort of war is well-documented and often, out here, I am reminded of Norman Mailer's great novel of World War Two, The Naked and The Dead. Mailer saw relatively little active service himself, being employed primarily as an army chef. However, The Naked and the Dead, based on a single extended patrol he undertook on the Pacific island of Leyte, is infused with a familiar mixture of nagging fear and chronic fatigue; of mosquitoes and sweat stained equipment; and otherwise quite unremarkable and flawed people pushed to their very best and very worst. Statistics can easily cease to mean much - 97 British soldiers dead in Afghanistan so far, 4,000 American dead in Iraq - but break it down to individuals, each with a family and a future extinguished, and the tragedy of it all is inescapable. Sentimentality is entirely absent from The Naked and the Dead but it is a great novel which resonates with the harshness and wastefulness of war.

To the best of my knowledge there was only one novel actually written in the trenches. Completed in 1916 by the French author Henri Barbusse, Under Fire has been rather neglected in the intervening years. It is a work of extraordinary immediacy and a potent evocation of life in the trenches. This was a book Wilfred Owen cited as a major influence, and Barbusse's writing has a strange, repetitive poetry in its description of the relentless psychological oppression and unimaginable scale of killing as industrial war reached its logical conclusion.

We live in a different age; of messy insurgency, 'asymmetric warfare', roadside blasts and suicide bombs, but I am often drawn back to the closing scenes in this wonderful book as the entire Verdun battlefield is submerged by torrential rain. The trenches and many of their occupants are drowned in the deluge, and men flounder in the slime of No Man's Land, so caked in mud that they can no longer identify friend from foe. 'We must kill war, kill the spirit of war,' says one despairing French soldier. This was the first anti-war book to emerge from the Great War, profoundly controversial at the time, and to read it is to understand the deep rooted pacifism lodged in modern European consciousness.

Another great American novel, Joseph Heller's Catch-22, succeeds in conveying the surreal nature of a war zone and the utter powerlessness of the men who make up the vast engines of opposing states. At their airbase on an island off the coast of Italy, the number of completed bombing missions required to qualify for return to America always rises just ahead of the number flown by the men in the squadron. For a modern equivalent, look at the current US Army 'Stop-Loss' orders that have so far placed a compulsory, unlimited extension of service on tens of thousands of US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan who had already completed their agreed period of service. The fighting itself rarely intrudes onto the pages of Heller's novel, forming instead the backdrop to a tyranny by bureaucracy in which insanity seems to represent the only escape.

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.

'That's some catch, that Catch-22,' Yossarian observed.
'It's the best there is,' Doc Daneeka agreed.

These three novels all feature men muddling through, desperately trying to survive and hoping the bullet etched with their name is not yet made. Yossarian, the hero of Catch-22, explains how 'the enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he's on.' But there is another side to the coin; the desire of some soldiers, perhaps many, for the dark knowledge of killing. It is a theme that recent writers on war have explored, notably Anthony Swofford in his Gulf War novel, Jarhead. Soldiers are trained to fight so it should be no surprise that they want to test themselves by getting into one. For Swofford, much of his experience of the Gulf War was coloured by the desperate desire, as a trained sniper, to shoot someone. But his war is a seemingly endless wait in the desert, while distant girlfriends and wives find other lovers, for a fight that is astonishing chiefly for its brevity and its entirely one-sided carnage.

Another unfashionable truth of war is the addictive pull it has for some. One book that deals with the adrenaline rush that turns some people into war junkies is written by Anthony Loyd, for my money one of the best war reporters currently writing. His account of the Balkan War, My War Gone By, I Miss It So (sadly out of print, but definitely worth hunting down a copy), is unflinching in its exploration of war's darker secrets. Loyd was a heroin addict when he went to Bosnia in the early 1990s, and he is candid enough to admit that, only in war, could he find a high to eclipse that of his addiction. It is a theme he returns to in a new book Another Bloody Love Letter:

Whatever you say, however you say it, you can never explain that despite the fire, the smoke, the chaos, the killing, the madness and the loss, there exists something far beyond the trite accounting of collective risk and mortality; the best-kept secret of battle - the shared and terrible love of it all.

This isn't a universal truth, you don't have to go far in a war zone to find the miserable civilian detritus of conflict. And if some develop a taste for war highs, an overdose leaves many with permanent mental scars.

'The War On Terror', 'The Long War,' or whatever title is eventually fixed for the sprawling events since 2001, has yet to deliver its literary harvest, though I suspect that there will be a crop of books out of Iraq to rival those from Vietnam; the two conflicts share much. An early, and for its viewpoint more interesting offering is Mohsin Hamid's book The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Hamid is a Pakistani writer who was educated and worked in the United States until soon after September 11th. His book is a neatly constructed short novel (just 100 pages) built around a single conversation in the city of Lahore between a mysterious American and a Pakistani whose values are slowly revealed. It is a clever study in the art of gradually ratcheted suspense, but it is also worth reading for its critique of contemporary Western values and the window it offers onto the profoundly conflicting emotions felt by many within the Muslim world as they watched the events of September 11th and all that has followed.

Thursday, 24 April, 2008