Walking the Wall

I’ve been thinking a lot about violence in the last week as I’m getting ready for the first meeting for the book club I’m organizing this summer. The topic of the book club being what it means to be human in the midst of the violence of war. The first book we are reading is Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, which is a book of short stories set in the Vietnam War (As a warning: this link goes to a Youtube video montage of Vietnam statistics, quotes from Tim O’Brien’s book, and photographs–some which are quite disturbing) with a main character named O’Brien–who is, or isn’t, or is…the author Tim O’Brien. He plays a lot with truth in the book–stating that to tell a good war story you have to tell a lie. While you are never sure which stories are really O’Brien’s, it doesn’t matter because they are “everyman” stories–at least for every man who was part of that war.

The book starts with a short story entitled “The Things They Carried” which goes on to describe the things that a group of soldiers carried with them in their packs. Letters, mosquito repellent, gum, cigarettes, lighters, water, amunition, and etc. Each thing laid out and weighed–on and on the reader is given list after list of things that men carried into war, but we know that there is something even heavier than m-16s that they carry:

They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing–these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight. They carried shameful memories. They carried the common secret of cowardice barely restrained, the instinct to run or freeze or hide, and in many respects this was the heaviest burden of all, for it could never be put down, it required perfect balance and perfect posture. They carried their reputations. They carried the soldier’s greatest fear, which was the fear of blushing. Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to. It was what had brought them to the war in the first place, nothing positive, no dreams of glory or honor, just to avoid the blush of dishonor. They died so as not to die of embarrassment.

This last burden was the burden that Tim O’Brien carried with him every day in Vietnam, and from a more recent article of his I read, he still carries it today. The two most sentences of the book are: “I was a coward. I went to war.”

That is not to suppose that all soldiers are cowards–I am not saying that by a long shot and neither, I might add, does O’Brien say that in his book. He shows the incredible heroics of the soldiers he portrays, along with the terrible lows that some are taken to when violence strips them of their humanity. His personal experience was of going into a war he did not believe was just, that he, in fact, believed was wrong–and this made him feel a coward for participating.

I found a video about Thich Nhat Hanh called Peace is Every Step that does an excellent job of showing the damage the war did to the people of Vietnam, and to the soldiers who fought in the war. It is nearly an hour long, but well worth the time to watch and listen. Thich Nhat Hanh was a young Buddhist monk during the Vietnam who saw horrific things happen, was nearly killed on more than one occasion, and who was spurred by his experience to take Buddhism to a more active social level in what is now known as Engaged Buddhism. He is wise to tell the soldiers who come to him struggling to find peace with their past actions that they are just the very tip of the flame–the burden isn’t theirs to carry alone, but is their officers, their government, and their society’s as well.

When I started thinking of violence in terms of religion, the waters became very murky–disturbingly so. Nearly all religions histories are swathed in violence and certainly the Judeo-Christian that I’m most familiar with has a very bloody history. Just reading the Christian Old Testament leaves a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. What are we to make of that? Buddhism probably has the least violent history of any religion, and even it has its outbreaks of sects and people that interpret and mold the principles into ways that allow violence–but certainly it is one in which at least the basic principles are completely against violent acts period, end of story. Yet there are instances when the Dalai Lama and even Thich Nhat Hanh will concede that violence is sometimes necessary to protect innocent people from violence–but that it must be done with the least violence possible and with extreme compassion and understanding the ramifications of committing violence. Life is full of grey areas and that is what makes it so difficult.

Can pacifism function in a world that seems intent on war? Were Ghandi’s actions a fluke or a model? Can peace only go so far, and then as Constantine and Thomas Aquinas did with the Just War Theory for the Christian church–must it devolve to supporting violence in order to thrive? Is redemptive violence (the idea that peace and order can be created out of war and violence) a valid working construct–or a myth perpetuated over and over across the centuries and into modern mentality to justify violent responses?

I remember reading a debate about whether or not it is acceptable to torture people if there is a chance for getting “good” information from them and it was shocking to me to see it in black and white–that anyone would debate that torture is acceptable. I understand the rational–the sacrificing the good of one for the good of the many, but that is such a dangerous place to be. Hanh, when asked this question, responded:

There is no `good cause’ for torture. As a torturer, you are the first to be a victim because you lose all your humanity. You do harm to yourself in the act of harming another. If you had a good cause to begin with, it is lost when you torture another human being.

While it is fairly easy to follow this logic with something as small scale as torture–does that mindset hold true on the large scale of war? When we kill in the name of peace–is the cause lost by the act of gaining it through violence?

As I sit here writing this, I realize that it is still Memorial Day (I’ve worked on it over a few days period), and I wonder at the appropriateness of writing this entry on a day dedicated to remembering and honoring the men and women who have died for this country–but I don’t think the topic is inappropriate. I am not calling into question the honor and sacrifice of these men and these women–they did what their country asked of them and I have every respect and gratitude for people who have died in the service and who are currently serving in the armed forces. Our world is such that war is a fact and the soldiers themselves are not the problem–they are brave men and women going where their countries send them. The problem goes much deeper into the ideology of violence being capable of truly generating peace–and into the question of what committing violence, even in the support of freedom, does to the men and women placed in the position of having to commit it.