Unless the war in Western Asia ends abruptly within the next few weeks the US may be forced to send soldiers onto the field of battle in Iran. This would, of course, result in more carnage; war is about breaking things and killing people.
If or when they are deployed, the women and men who would do battle on the field of war in Iran would face the (predictable) realities of war ― injury, death and dying ― but probably also a particular psychological impact.
The US has become the best at killing from a distance, wrote English journalist Madeleine Bunting in 2005, thus establishing a psychological distance between pulling a trigger and the death caused. Putting “boots on the ground” will, inevitably, shrink that psychological distance.
It’s an apparently arcane philosophical position, but it’s worth some reflection. This war is not a movie script; it is not a fiction, nor will it be fought on a computer monitor.
Almost exactly a century ago, in April 1926, the French essayist and philosopher Paul Valéry wrote about the possibility of separating human beings from their lives. Valéry wrote that Western civilisation had reached a level of stability and security and had begun to play with and propagate the myths that made the West great.
These myths would, he averred, become fictions superimposed on reality and the life world of people. I have always thought of that in more contemporary terms, as an outcome of the human habit of stepping into technological (online) games and other worlds (or watching movies) and then struggling to return to real life. Scientific and technological advances in the West were the hands that midwifed this phenomenon.
A tranche of research in the early 2000s referenced that US “mobsters” would watch films such as The Godfather and television series such as The Sopranos and adopt the ways, habits, characteristics and machinations of fictional characters.
Life began to imitate art and, absurdly, art began to imitate art. For instance, the protagonist in the Sopranos saga, Tony Soprano, watched clips of “Western” and gangster movies and frequently referred to or repeated lines or acts from these films as somehow symbolic of “American values”.
In the same way that mobster fictions influenced actual criminals, war films have shaped notions of valour, courage and bravery and exceptionalism. The cynosure has been the Top Gun/Maverick films, the most sophisticated works of propaganda.
The films played with myths and metaphors of greatness and the eternal youth of the All-American Hero (a quarter of a century passed between the first and the second film, yet Tom Cruise remained, well, Tom Cruise) and the US’ eternal greatness.
In the same way that mobster fictions influenced actual criminals, war films have shaped notions of valour, courage and bravery and exceptionalism. The cynosure has been the Top Gun/Maverick films, the most sophisticated works of propaganda.
It does not really matter whether you think this is a good or bad thing. The point is that the women and men that may be deployed onto the battlefield in Iran will lack a script to work from and the soundtrack will not be produced in a studio.
Let’s have a sense of what they might encounter. They will probably face meaningless massacres and question their mission and purpose. (I borrow here from Kurt Vonnegut’s description of the firebombing of Dresden.)
Also, war has become increasingly industrialised over the past century since Valéry’s observations. In his reflection on the carnage of war Erich Maria Remarque wrote in All Quiet on the Western Front that on the field of war “men go on living with the top of their skulls missing”.
This sounds dramatic, as do fictional works about war, but, reflected one soldier after serving on the Western Front: “One must keep perfectly calm in body and mind. Therefore, instead of sympathising with the sufferings of others I have become one of them ― looking on death with indifference because I myself may die at any moment and no longer sickening at the sight of wounds and of dark-red blood on pale, yellowish skin. Pity must be left to the angels.”
This is the reality of warfare, of the difference between war in the imagination, in online games, in movies and on the battlefield. It’s difficult to be a hero when someone is shooting back at you and there is no soundtrack.
• Lagardien, an external examiner at the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance, has worked in the office of the chief economist of the World Bank as well as the secretariat of the National Planning Commission.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.