Part of the widespread uncertainty about the military deployment stems from the fact that, when you examine it from a literary perspective, the Afghan war has virtually no point of comparison with the historic wars of the 20th century, notably the first and second world wars, Korea and Vietnam.
Literature is always a reliable guide. Each of those wars threw up a memorable literature, from Robert Graves and Wilfred Owen to Norman Mailer and Michael Herr. As children of a century of bloodshed, our imaginations have been shaped by a dog-eared library that profoundly influences our understanding of international conflict. Say what you like about those stories, they still add up to a formidable inherited grammar of war.
Part of the trouble with the current engagement is that when we consult that anatomy of war, expressed in the classic journalism of William Shirer and George Orwell, in countless war poems, novels, memoirs and films, from “Goodbye to All That” to “Apocalypse Now,” one finds virtually no connection with what’s happening in Afghanistan.
First of all, there’s been no eerie premonition. There were, no doubt, experts in Muslim affairs who warned of the menace of the Al Qaeda organization, but they went unheard. By contrast, the wars of the last century were preceded by as much as a decade of steadily escalating nervous tension.
Before the first world war, popular fiction, like Erskine Childers’s “The Riddle of the Sands,” traded on English fears of invasion. Childers’s fellow Irishman, W. B. Yeats, dreamed of future violence in a way that was echoed across Europe. In Germany, among the poets affected by a half-heard drumbeat of imminent catastrophe, Alfred Lichtenstein, who was to die on the Western front, wrote “Prophecy” in 1913:
The war we’re fighting now had no such harbingers. Unlike Sarajevo or the invasion of Poland, it came, literally, out of a clear blue sky.
True, the defiant, patriotic fervor that’s touched America since September 11 is similar to the war fever that swept Europe in 1914, but there are vital differences. The young men who enlisted in the summer of 1914 were enthusiastically joining up to be heroes and risk death in the service of their country in a way that their Stars and Stripes-waving great-grandchildren are not.
The patriotism of 20th-century wars was glorious, honorable and uplifting. Rupert Brooke, the English poet now seen as the voice of traditional jingoism, wrote of “swimmers into cleanness leaping,” of young men purging the corruption of the prewar age in the “release” of belligerent action.
The response to the outrage of September 11 has many elements–horror, shock, fear, grief. But it’s quite different. In the past the decision to go to war has unleashed a frenzy of killing. This war has been preceded by an unimaginable slaughter. In this topsy-turvy scenario, grief has ushered in warfare, not been sponsored by it.
Which brings us to another crucial difference. From the day the first troopships arrived in France to the moment the last U.S. Marine scrambled aboard the hovering Huey on the embassy rooftop in Saigon in 1975, the wars that shaped our imagination involved a colossal and tangible mobilization. For the average person in New York or London, Pittsburgh or Birmingham, Alabama, the current mobilization has no such sense of dislocation.
This is a living-room war. We have watched every moment of this crisis on TV, from its appalling beginnings to its quotidian military evolution. The writers, like Paul Auster and Jay McInerney, who have responded to it in print have been articulating thoughts inspired by television images. It’s a far cry from Stephen Crane (“The Red Badge of Courage”) or John Reed (“Ten Days That Shook the World”).
Their heirs get little or no access to the action, and are vulnerable to military spin. As recently as the Vietnam War, newspaper correspondents were allowed to travel freely to the action on military transports. By contrast, the Taliban have threatened to hang any reporter using a satellite phone. And the Pentagon, scarcely less menacing, feeds journalists exactly the information it wants them to report.
In the wars of the 20th century, reportage was as essential as field dressings or battle plans. The absence of hard facts makes this conflict the vaguest and most remote in living memory, and has contributed to the mass of speculative commentary. We know, however, that warfare has never failed to engage the human imagination, and that literature is the means by which our imagination comes to terms with itself. When the literature of this Afghan war finally reaches the printed page, it will have to be in works of fiction.
