Every generation has someone who truly understands the horror of war, and tries to warn us all. And always to no avail. How could it be otherwise when just 30 years after the Civil War, the soon to be president, Teddy Roosevelt, said “What this country needs is a good war.” And went looking for one. He found several. Despite Stephen Crane’s universally lauded The Red Badge of Courage, it only took 30 years for the horror of the Civil War to be forgotten, and war itself to become an attraction to would-be warriors once again.

There is a brain defect that makes people forget what their grandparents tell them about war. They think it is honorable, glorious, heroic, and even fashionable. They say it builds men. In the Civil War, families dressed in their Sunday best and flocked to picnics overlooking the battlefield to enjoy the show, and compliment their family’s soldiers afterward. At least that was the intention, until the hell of noise, from guns, cannons, horses, and men in agony took center stage. The bloodletting interrupted the picnics. The spectators fled, and the country settled in for several years of horror. Without picnics.

In 1914, young Americans flocked across the border to Canada, which was already involved in World War I because it was a member of the British Commonwealth, and the US was “neutral”. They enlisted with grand enthusiasm. The stories of the trench wars, shooting deserters and would-be deserters, and all the permanently maimed or gassed soldiers returning home to nothing, did not have much effect, as a new and improved war began less than 20 years later, killing 75 to 90 million more.

This era’s anti-war scribe is Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, who has written The Greatest Evil Is War. It is eloquent and forceful, brimming with immediacy. This is far from the first time he has written about it. He had been a war correspondent for two decades, and has seen it all up close and personal, narrowly escaping death, having his friends and co-workers killed beside him, and trekking through the stench and endless blood of pointless conflicts all over the world. “I was beaten by Iraqi and Saudi police. I was taken prisoner by the Contras in Nicaragua, who radioed back to their base in Honduras to see if they should kill me, and again in Basra after the first Gulf War in Iraq, never knowing if I would be executed, under constant guard and often without food, drinking out of mud puddles.” And all for the New York Times.

This also makes his book a very visceral, stomach-churning read. Hedges makes unarguable point after unarguable point in very personal terms. For Hedges, this is as romantic as war gets: “Legs blown off. Heads imploded into a bloody, pulpy mass. Gaping holes in stomachs. Pools of blood. Cries of the dying, sometimes for their mothers. And the smell. The smell of death. The supreme sacrifice made for flies and maggots.”

War changes everyone who participates in it. Civilians die and are injured far more than soldiers, and more of their families are victims. But soldiers see more action and suffer accordingly. And none of them ever forgets. Hedges says 22 US veterans commit suicide every day. They famously suffer from PTSD, the current name for an incurable mental state described in every major war going back to ancient Rome.

The book has a chapter on veterans back home. The hypocrisy of “Thank you for your service” shows up whenever a veteran turns out to be anti-war as a result of that service. The thanks turn to insults and abuse. The natural hatred of Americans comes to the fore when war is criticized. The country is euphoric over war and the military, despite the bad results continually posted by both.

It gets so twisted that a soldier who was depressed over his coming deployment to Iraq asked for anti-depressants (as a majority of soldiers now take) and was required by the doctor to see the chaplain first. The chaplain told the soldier: ”I think you will be happier when you get over to Iraq and start killing Iraqis.” This is the morality of war. You will be doing God’s work killing the people we’re liberating. This particular soldier ended up a quadriplegic and died at the age of 43, following two decades of agony and suffering. Hedges devotes a chapter to him and even helped him write a last letter - to President Bush and Vice President Cheney, who sealed his doom over precisely nothing.

The military is right in there pushing and shoving. Hedges cites the Office of the Surgeon General’s Textbook of Military Medicine, which even deals with fatal exposure to nuclear radiation. It specifies that even though they are terminally ill, such soldiers should receive any and all medication, including narcotics “to prolong their utility … The soldier must be allowed to make the full contribution to the war effort.”

The book divides into short chapters, focusing on some horrific aspect or another. There’s a chapter on corpses, and one featuring a female US marine whose job it was to pack and ship bits of body parts and personal effects back to the family. Dressed in a hazmat suit, she would proceed to landmine explosion sites to collect all the debris that could be determined to be human. Where she could not get to, others would send them to her for transshipment. She had to get out when she received a large bag of heads, eyes wide open, staring up at her. There’s a chapter on killing, the wholesale slaughter of the Vietnamese Americans there to defend them, and one on the differences between worthy and unworthy victims. He interviews a Holocaust survivor about her story of surviving imminent death several times, losing all of her family along the way. And there is a chapter on permanent war, as promoted by the military and its industrial contractors. These are neverending wars no one ever wins. They keep getting added to world maps as various regimes attack their own or the nearby. They are lifetime business opportunities for American profiteers.

He accurately describes some in government as Dr. Strangeloves, always eager to send others to their deaths or at very least, ruined lives. And despite continuing convictions for corruption and fraud, the same military contractors come back for more and bigger contracts, supplying not just arms but services, replacing government soldiers with a civilian contractors. It is just a business – a nearly trillion dollar annual feast. Hedges points out how the bloated military budget ($850 billion), which achieves little or nothing for society, crowds out social services and infrastructure projects because the country is constantly on a war footing. No matter the cause, these contractors are the only real gainers in war. He says their stocks rise at the mere mention of it.

He also has it in for the West, reneging on its deal with Mikhail Gorbachev not to expand NATO eastward from Germany if Russia did not interfere with the reunification of that country. NATO is now attempting to encircle western Russia by admitting Ukraine as well as all the Baltic states it agreed to leave alone. This is precisely why Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine. He clearly could not allow this to go on. He said so specifically. I pointed this issue out in a piece a month before the invasion, and it resulted in the most criticism I have ever received, including threats to me personally. Despite my being against the invasion, as Hedges is. So I have a small inkling of how Hedges feels about being anti-war in the USA.

But Hedges has seen it for himself: “There is no such thing as getting used to combat. Everyone in combat eventually reaches a breaking point, from the most sensitive and the most cowardly to the hardest combat veteran. Combat is a form of psychological and physical torture. Once you break down, as I did in the last war I covered in Kosovo, all appeals to duty, honor, patriotism and manliness are useless. After 60 days of combat 98% of surviving soldiers are psychiatric casualties.” Hedges himself was fired from the New York Times for opposing the soon-to-be war in Iraq. That’s all it took in the bloodlust country that claims freedom and liberty above all else.

In answer to Teddy Roosevelt, Hedges cites Yugoslav writer Danilo Kis, saying “The nationalist is by definition an ignoramus. Nationalism is the line of least resistance, the easy way.” It is based on a self-centered, amoral lack of knowledge or insight. The book’s message is to never romanticize war. It jeopardizes people for the wrong reason or no reason, and the outcome is always negative. If you think war is a worthy opportunity to look forward to, this is your book.

David Wineberg ( )