Friends and Enemies

I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned
Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.
I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.
Let us sleep now...

Those of course are the last lines of Wilfred Owen's Strange Meeting.  The dead soldier tells what his life could have been to the soldier who killed him.  

This poem was brought to my mind by an item on the Today programme the other morning. 

During the Falklands War an anti-aircraft gunner shot down a fighter jet and thought he had killed the pilot.  He then found out that the pilot had survived.  The gunner went to meet him, now a retired Commodore and living in a village in Argentina.  The Commodore had no hard feelings and said:-"Each one of us had to fulfil our duties". 

It's common enough for soldiers to return from wars with admiration for the enemy's fighting prowess and bravery.   Soldiers, sailors and airmen who once tried to kill each other can meet, shake hands and say that was what they had to do. However, the torture victim cannot greet his torturer with such easy feelings.  He may agree to forgive, after something like a truth and reconciliation process, but this is not the meeting of equals.  Nor would the women of Berlin in 1945 be ready to say, it was your duty, to the Soviet soldiers who raped them.  The aftermath for them was horror and shame and suicide.  You can be shot at by an impersonal force, but not deliberately humiliated, tortured or raped.  You are in some kind of relationship between human beings that has gone grossly awry. 

So further to Robert Fisk's reaction to the Marines urinating over the dead Taliban,:-

If war were not about the total failure of the human spirit, there would be something grotesquely funny about the American reaction to the pissing pictures.

For note, it was not the killing of these men that worried the Marine Corps in the US – it was the pissing. Nothing wrong in killing amid the "core values" of the Marine Corps; you just shouldn't urinate on the corpses. And even more to the point: YOU MUSTN'T DO IT ON CAMERA! Too late. It comes to this. Armies are horrible creatures and soldiers do wicked things but when we accept all these lies about "bad apples" and the exceptionalism of crime in war – "there may have been some excesses" is the usual dictator-speak – we are accepting war and going along with the dishonesty of it and we are making it more possible and easier and the killings and rapes more excusable and more frequent.

There is a reasonable aspect to this argument. If atrocities are run of the mill, that should be known.  The public like to think that there can be such a thing as a clean war, not many hurt, everything sorted out.  With any war in the offing they should realise that it's not just the killing and maiming, destruction and mayhem but the chance for humiliation, rape and torture.  Also, remember that humiliation, rape and torture are a great pleasure for some men and that the taste for them can spread among a platoon or a regiment. Giving a man a gun is giving him brief and petty power - and some will become Caligulas and Uday Husseins.   So if bringing to mind the horrors of war can prevent more wars, all to the good. 

However I don't think "war is the total failure of the human spirit "- Auschwitz is, and Hiroshima is, and rape and torture and atrocities are.  But war?  All wars, for whatever reason?  

"For note, it was not the killing of these men that worried the Marine Corps in the US – it was the pissing. Nothing wrong in killing amid the "core values" of the Marine Corps; you just shouldn't urinate on the corpses."

It's the Marine Corps' job to kill these men.  You can call it a terrible job, you can say they're involved in an unjust war, but that is how wars are conducted.  You kill or disable the enemy.  You don't inflict gratuitous humiliation on him, even after death.  Wars happen, and they are horrible.  It is better though that there are things like Geneva conventions and political leaders who are embarrassed when they are conducted with unnecessary cruelty (see Normblog on this). 

Pacifists say "war is murder".  But that is not generally accepted.   We don't do the dulce et decorum thing any more - Wilfred Owen was one who taught us not to - but we acknowledge the necessity of war in certain circumstances, carried out for certain ends.  Those fighting it will at their best regard those they are fighting against as caught up in something larger - duty perhaps, or professional pride or patriotism.  So they can meet afterwards without personal animosity.    They can say, I am the enemy you killed, or tried to kill, my friend. (Wilfred Owen was a soldier as well as a poet.)

But you can't say:-

I am the enemy you raped, my friend
I am the enemy you tortured, my friend
I am the enemy you pissed over, my friend

Comments

[Frank S]

I think there will be no 'afterwards' for a long time to come in the wars being waged by believers in Islam against non-believers. It is a permanent conflict until they achieve dominance. This makes for a huge difference between this conflict and wars between broadly similar nations with similar belief systems and moral standards. There, there can be an end and an 'afterwards' within years and within lifetimes.

[Moira]

I don't believe the dropping of the atom bombs was such a bad thing when you consider what an invasion of the Japanese home islands would be like. Remember, we had to drop two bombs! The Japanese military didn't believe we had any more bombs and so they were not going to surrender! To me that is grotesque.

[Omar]

Moira,

"The Japanese military didn't believe we had any more bombs and so they were not going to surrender! ..."

Is that so? I remember reading somewhere that the Japanese were preparing to surrender when the second bomb went off.

But at that stage of the war there was precious little goodwill on the Allied side towards the Japanese people, and none at all for the Japanese military.

[Noga]

"Is that so?"
Oliver Kamm wrote about it:

"Thus she asserts that the US President ordered the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki “when the Japanese enemy was known by him to have made two attempts toward a negotiated peace”. She also maintains that the Allies were wrong to promulgate the aim of Japan’s unconditional surrender in the Potsdam Declaration, for “the Allies’ demands were mostly of so vague and sweeping a nature as to be rather a declaration of what unconditional surrender would be like than to constitute conditions”.

As I mentioned in my earlier posts, no such efforts towards a negotiated peace were made by Japanese leaders. The most that can be said is that certain elites envisaged a bargain in which Japan would retain its autocracy and Empire. This was far from an offer of surrender, and it did not in any event come from the government of Japan. We know this from decoded Japanese diplomatic cables that have since been declassified, but even the published material available to Miss Anscombe in 1956 contradicted her claims (e.g., Robert Butow’s 1954 volume, which remains indispensable, Japan’s Decision to Surrender). Moreover, the terms of the Potsdam Declaration were not vague at all. They were explicit on what was required and also what was promised in return (you can read it here; note in particular points 9-12). I shall return to the question of Japan’s unconditional surrender – a just and necessary requirement - when I address Norman’s argument."

http://oliverkamm.typepad.com/blog/2007/08/hiroshima-and-e.html