It's funny how various threads in my life will converge sometimes. I recently read Susan Sontag's essay, Regarding the Pain of Others, a dense and beautiful examination of the relationship between photography and war. It has enough fodder for a few dozen blog posts (her observation that the US has a museum devoted to the Holocaust and another to the Armenian genocide, but not a single museum devoted to the African slave trade could be fodder for a four volume gift set), but for this post I'll focus on her closing point. However much we hanker for statistics, sound bites, and photos regarding war, for those of us who haven't been there, those things can't hold more than a momentary shock to our otherwise fortified thinking. Art, film, and literature, on the other hand, can go a long way toward a deep change in how we see and understand war.
Two recent examples of this come to mind for me—the short documentary on Uganda that I wrote about recently and the Korean film Tae Guk Gi: The Brotherhood of War. The latter was loaned to me by a colleague who served in the Marines. He called it his "definitive war film." It's about two fictional brothers conscripted into the South Korean Army in 1950. Stylistically, Tae Guk Gi has a very American sensibility, a la We Were Soldiers, but it chooses to go into the damage war has on the soul far more than most American war movies are willing to go. The Uganda documentary is about real children kidnapped and forced into the army. Both films took my hand and made real for me something no newspaper photograph or statistic has.
If you think about war as a context—a framework for human interaction—it's placed on a population of people when war begins and is removed when one side caves in. Within the context of war, behavior that's otherwise criminal is justified. In every war there are soldiers and civilians who, once they've experienced killing allowed within war's context, easily cross over into atrocities defiling human rights. We rarely hear about war without hearing the death tolls attached to it. But we never hear the number of men and women who witnessed and, more importantly, performed atrocities within the context of war. These men and women carry the weight of those atrocities back home to their relationships, their work, their communities.
After allowing myself to go where these films and the Sontag essay have taken me, I don't think I can hear somebody talk about the cost of war the same way again. What is the total cost, really? Not only of dollars spent and lives cut short, but what's the cost of reintegrating the souls of emotionally disintegrated people back into society?
