War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning

In this book, Chris Hedges calls on his experiences as a war correspondent, and his studies at Harvard Divinity to show us the horrors of war and so many reasons we have for resisting its allure as a solution to the huge challenges we face as a global population.

Chris Hedges has written a deeply thoughtful and thought provoking book on the insanity of war. Myths and identified and exploded. Realities are presented, at times, in graphic detail. Yet the book is an odd duck in some ways. Despite references to and quotations from the classics of literature, it is not an academic work; but neither is it a journalistic work. It is largely introspective; and in this sense, reminds me of the work of Joan Didion. The title offends me as it asserts a truth I wish to deny. Yet, as combat veteran, having looked closely at the dead--of my brothers and of those we killed--having stared into vacant eyes looking off to some unseen horizon, I cannot deny the truth he asserts: War is a Force that gives us meaning. Fortunately, it is not the ONLY force, and needs not be THE force, as he makes clear toward the end. Indeed, a subtitle could be "Love is THE force which gives us true meaning. I find the reviews of some of Hedges' critics rather amusing, and strongly suspect they have never worn the uniform, much less served in combat. If they did, they would realize some of their criticisms are, well, stupid. This book, for example, is not anti-patriotic, though neither is it "patriotic", at least not in any usual sense of the word. Hedges' argument is our loyalties should not lie, at least not exclusively, not decisively, with any nation or government. Our patriotism should not be blind, nor should it be a means of manipulation. Rather, it should be grounded in love and understanding. Though Hedges does not say this specifically, I think he would agree that true patriotism entails both love of country AND love of humanity. To view our "enemies" as the epitome of evil, to present them as fanatics with no respect for human life, is to lower ourselves to the level we ascribe to them. Such false beliefs are inherently self defeating. Cucolo does not seem to understand, as some great Americans have, that war is a narcotic, that patriotism often is used and abused by those who, themselves, have an inadequate understanding of humanity, and, therefore, inadequate respect for human life, who will sacrifice a nation's best for empire or to salve their own demented egos. Having stood much closer to war than Cucolo probably sits to the screen showing John Wayne movies, Hemingway understood this: "There is noting sweet and fitting in dying for your country. You will die like a dog for no good reason." John Quincy Adams also understood what Cucolo apparently does not: "And say not thou, `My country right or wrong'; nor shed thy blood for an unhallowed cause." Real patriotism, true patriotism is far more than flying a flag outside one's home. As Hedges argues, we are conditioned to believe war is some great cause, possessing some noble meaning that transcends us, that gives us some noble purpose in life which is far greater than anything we are likely to accomplish on our own, living our lives of anonymous insigni

In this powerfully honest book by this Pulitzer prize-winning New York Times Journalist, we see through a glass darkly into war as necrophilia, war that in the beginning looks like love. Hedges, who has a Masters of Divinity from Harvard, speaks with brutal honesty of his own addiction to the adrenaline rush of war as he witnessed it in El Salvador, the Middle East and the Balkans. He writes about Thanatos, the death instinct in the human psyche in constant struggle with Eros, the impulse to love. He exposes what he calls the "god-like exhileration of destroying" that emotionally maimed veterans reflect on later as "nothing gallant or heroic, nothing redeeming." He shows us in graphic detail how he almost lost his soul, but was redeemed by love in partnership that recognizes both the fragility and sanctity of the individual. He warns us that this flirtation with weapons of mass destruction is a flirtation with our own obliteration, an embrace of Thanatos. With humility and grace, he reminds us that "love alone can save us." Hegdes' message is one that the world desperately needs to hear.

Growing up in the in the 60's and 70's, nearly everyone's father was a military veteran. It was easy to identify the veterans of actual combat because they, like my father, rarely spoke of their war experiences - as opposed to the non-combat veterans who endlessly gave us their own stories. When the combat veterans did speak, it was typically cryptic, often evasive, and obviously very disturbing for them to recount. "The effectiveness of the myths peddled in war is powerful. We often doubt our own perceptions. We hide these doubts, like troubled believers, sure that no one else feels them. We feel guilty. The myths have determined no only how we should speak, but how we should think. ...we have trouble expressing our discomfort because the collective shout has made it hard to give words to our thoughts."The author breaks this stifled silence of the veterans, and expresses the intoxication and horrors that all war brings to its participants. By truthful revelation of real war, the reader can more actively and intelligently examine his own feelings and actions in the face of the troubles we face today. Read this book. The topics and history contained within have been covered elsewhere many times, but the author eloquently pieces together the common threads among the wars of the 70's, 80's and 90's into a narrative that allows the reader to accept that each new war is not a just unique exercise in patriotism or battle against evil. War is just war, and assumes a life of its own regardless of its sometime noble origin.

Everything about Chris Hedges's book, War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, is disturbing. The vivid eyewitness accounts of war crimes, the rambling disjointed highly personal style that mirrors the chaos of battle, the link between brutality and sexuality, the use of historical literature that obliterates the distance mankind has traveled from Troy to Kosovo, and his own deep addiction to the thrill of war as a long time war correspondent. Even the dust cover of the book was intended to be disturbing. The full color picture shows a multinational group of women and men with their arms raised and holding the hands of the person next to them. It is evening, but their faces, and the America flags they hold, are illuminated by candles. They are not angry. Indeed, they might be praying or singing, but clearly they rally to some significant and somber cause. In the background are the lighted skyscrapers of a large city. No doubt this city is New York and these people are responding to the events of September 11. This is one way the mythology of war constructs symbols of meaning and imbues us with its purpose. President George W. Bush's Afghanistan war had the broad support of the American people. Hedges likens war to an addiction, the high of which is all-consuming. A sustained superbowl weekend of tribal bonding, adrenaline rushes, sex, and violence. A placed stalked by the losers of peacetime-petty thieves and thugs who understand domination as a matter of force and terror. War, Hedges concludes, forms a central part of the human condition. He notes that "the historian Will Durant calculated that there have only been twenty-nine years in all of human history during which a war was not underway somewhere." From a historical sweep humans have never stopped fighting. It is a very disturbing revelation. But individuals, tribes, villages, city-states, empires, and nations have all witnessed both peace and war. And perhaps the most disturbing aspect of Hedges's narrative is trying to figure out why we ever stop fighting. For the only answer that he provides as to why we stop fighting is that we simply become bored by the slaughter. When killing becomes too routine it loses its luster and bogs down. And when it loses its luster, and we see it plainly, we are like a wife-beater who is temporarily sickened and ashamed. In the damaged faces of the innocents we can find no sustainable reasoning or meaning.Hedges argues that Americans were temporarily sickened and ashamed by the Vietnam war. But now that our collective memory has faded and new generations have been raised on the elixir of paranoid patriotism, our willingness to wage war has been revitalized. The nation with more weapons of mass destruction than any other nation on earth-than any nation in the history of mankind-is primed by this force that gives us meaning. No doubt about it, those mothers and fathers on the cover of the book were New Yorkers. Our New Yorkers. We shal

Chris Hedges in his memoir and cri de coeur, "War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning," has given us a gift of experience, heartbreak, and wisdom that should be required reading for every young adult who may some day have to face a nation's jingoism and drive to war; and every adult who has ever thought war glorious, necessary, or worth the blood of a nation's youth. His curriculum vitae are impressive. He served as a correspondent in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, the Sudan, the Punjab, Iraq, Bosnia, and Kosovo covering foot soldiers and street fighters; and when he writes of the bloodshed, carnage, horror, and waste of war, he knows of what he writes.In seven chapters Mr. Hedges takes us through a study of war that is somehow as thrilling as it is simultaneously repugnant, both scholarly and illustrative, his thesis is that war is an addiction that kills, if not the body, certainly the soul of every participant even as it gives a weird pleasure, or meaning to living. Mr. Hedges is a graduate of the Harvard Divinity School, and a student of the classics at Harvard in 1998-1999 as a Neiman Fellow, and he brings both a strong ethic and a classicist's knowledge of the great books to his memoir. He's also a hell of a writer.This is easily a five star book. It has the power to change the way you think, and in that, the power to save lives. Five stars, and three cheers!