My Life as a Foreign Country

This month's selection for the Men's Book Club is My Life as a Foreign Country (2014), Brian Turner's memoir of his experiences as an American soldier in Iraq and Bosnia. I found this one very difficult to read, not because it wasn't well written, but because it seemed so brutally honest about war and soldiering. I have never been able to understand the appeal of war, but I think this book addresses that, as well as those things that are repellant and horrific. I have known some men, even some who served in the military, who believed that because they had not experienced warfare, they had missed out on something essential to masculine identity, perhaps to human identity. More than the appeal to patriotism, is the appeal to proof of manhood, to concepts of bravery and heroism and their opposites, fear and cowardice. You will never know if you measure up as a man until you subject yourself to the challenges of combat. But what I have taken away from Turner's reflections on his deployments to Bosnia and Iraq, and his recollections and imaginative recreations of the experiences of his father and grandfather and other males in his family, is reassurance that warfare brings only defeat, especially modern warfare, but I suspect this is no different now than it was in Homer's day. The only escape or release comes with death. After experiencing combat, can a warrior find his way back to home and family?

This is not a new question, but one familiar, as I said, since it was raised by Homer. Warfare brutalizes those subjected to it, both combatants and civilians. The notion that somehow in the past warfare was honorable and glorious is refuted by every historical example available to us. Even Homer's Iliad begins with an argument over captured women. And the spoils of war are everywhere in evidence in his story. War is about violence: organized, sanctioned, glorified violence of the most brutal and basic kind. Combat is about destroying the enemy, shedding blood, separating limbs and heads from bodies. No amount of heroic poetry can really disguise the basic elements of warfare. Men are encouraged and rewarded for letting loose their most basic craving for blood and violence against other men and women. In Homer men are slaughtered with swords, spears, and even large rocks, while women are collected and distributed as trophies and then raped by their new masters and sometimes carried home as slaves and concubines. Who wouldn't want to embrace such freedom to indulge our most atavistic desires?

Turner makes it clear, to me at least, that warfare is about license. For an occupying force, any amount of violence directed towards the enemy, including every perceived enemy, is sanctioned; and soon everyone and everything becomes the enemy: all men of military age, then all men, then women, then children. The enemy is everywhere beyond the secured perimeter of artificial refuge. Death is all around, watching and waiting. It's kill or be killed. Hesitate and you die. There is no innocence, only alertness to danger. Naturally, when a soldier returns home, he finds it difficult if not impossible to adjust to new civilian rules of engagement. He has been changed by his experience, and by his knowledge of what is possible, in himself and in others.

Perhaps that is why Americans have been so often disappointed by our recent attempts to engage in warfare. There is a basic contradiction in our current attitude toward war and combat. We want to minimize casualties. We place a high value on preserving life. And yet warfare, by its nature, is not about life, but about death. It's a cult of death. There is no greater glory than to die in combat, to give one's life for one's tribe or country or comrades. Warriors are meant to die in glory on the battlefield, not return to dull, quotidian, civilian life. That, I think is the meaning of the shield of Achilles in the Iliad. All of those images of domestic pastimes are in contrast to the war Achilles and his comrades are waging against the Trojans. They may dream of returning, but few will. And as we learn from Homer's other epic, when the warrior finally reaches home, there will be more killing. That is really all that warriors know to do. We may imagine it could be otherwise, but so much evidence and experience suggests that we are wrong. Warfare and combat are about our innate love of violence and death. That is the reason it endures.