The Weekly Screed (#679)

The Bergdahl paradox
By David Benjamin

 “There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions…” 
                                                      — Joseph Heller, Catch-22

MADISON, Wis. — When I was a kid in smalltown Wisconsin, I was surrounded by veterans. Not “heroes.” We didn’t call them that. Half the dads in town had served in World War II or Korea, but you couldn’t tell from looking at them, or listening. Except for a handful of American Legion blowhards, vets didn’t reminisce about war.

Most had been draftees, “citizen soldiers” snatched from home and family, thrust into a mortal conflict they hadn’t started and did not want. Given their innate reluctance, it would have been mildly absurd to style them as heroic.

The Draft was still around when I was a kid. Every boy saw “going into the service” as one of life’s inevitable passages, especially since Uncle Sam preferred his conscripts fresh and dewy. Your typical 18-year-old was less aware of what he was getting into. The older men who’d been drafted into both World Wars and Korea, had had a real, whole life to leave behind. They understood consequences, saw more clearly and quickly the waste and madness, came home — if they’d survived — muted and emotionally scarred. They spared their wars little nostalgia, moved on thankfully, tried to forget, waited for the nightmares to fade.

Our most resilient work of WWII literature is Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, who staged the war, properly, in the theater of the absurd. The story’s only visible victor is Orr, a pilot who crashes bombers and survives dozens of times until, finally, he plunges into the sea and doesn’t come up. But in the end, he turns up in Sweden, in a life raft — his crash and disappearance all planned and cunningly executed.

Similarly, the most acclaimed novel of Vietnam is Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato. Another AWOL GI — like Orr —just walks away, weary of the industrial-scale carnage in which he has no stake, over which he holds no power. 

Readers tend not to see Orr, Yossarian, Cacciato as traitors. Even calling them — or any combat vet — cowards is a dubious charge. Before despairing of the struggle, each has already plunged repeatedly into the teeth of enemy fire, has gone forward until going forward made no sense at all. As Heller wrote in Catch-22, “a concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers… real and immediate [is] the process of a rational mind.”

War hasn’t changed. It’s still the definition of evil, reducing its every participant into a coldblooded murderer. The difference today is that we don’t snatch people from the midst of life to school them in death. We inveigle recruits, teenagers from tiny towns in backward states like Oklahoma and Idaho to go forth and bathe themselves in patriotic gore. And when they come back, gory and warped, hollow-eyed, quick-tempered and plagued by nightmares, we offer them semantic consolation. Not merely vets or dischargees, they are every one of them a hero, we say — heroes all because they’ve sacrificed their innocence to mankind’s vilest enterprise. They’re “warriors” forever, each one a flag-draped replica of John Wayne — the greatest fake soldier of all time.

These kids can’t be shattered husks, ticking time-bombs, substance-abusing social cripples. Can’t — not possible — because each is a “hero,” a cut above the mere draftees who won World War II, fought in Korea and were churned into dogfood in ‘Nam. Each is a “hero,” hailed by the newscasters, pundits and pols who have despoiled a word, but soothed a nation’s guilty conscience.

Not only do we have a glut of Alvin Yorks in podunks from Bangor to Long Beach, we have a human buffer, a shield of volunteers, each sporting his “Hero” merit badge, each one camo-clad, homogenized and kept at a distance, in camps, forts and deployments, assuring us that our own prudent sons, brothers, dads won’t be yanked from the sofa and dropped into some wasteland infested with bugs, disease and religious zealots wielding AK-47’s and grenade launchers.

But wait. Suddenly into this mass delusion strolls Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, who apparently did what Orr did in Catch-22 followed by Yossarian, what Cacciato did, what millions of Americans do everyday by not volunteering for “service” in Afghanistan or any of the armed asylums where everybody seems determined to kill everyone else. Sgt. Bergdahl allegedly chose to withhold his participation. Realizing that his only two options were killer or victim, he perceived a third way. He got up and walked away (clumsily though, into five years of captivity).

Cowardice is not his offense. Nor is desertion.  His real offense is reminding us that none of these guys — just because they sign up, follow orders and march into meatgrinders turned by madmen — is a hero by default. They’re like us — a little more gullible, perhaps more idealistic, maybe just dumber. But they’re real people, not John Wayne. They often turn out to be naturally vulnerable to the same second thoughts, misgivings, anxieties and sudden onsets of vivid rationality that save most of us from going off the deep end into the abyss.

Woody Allen once said that 80 percent of life is just showing up. But showing up doesn’t make you a hero, any more than leaving — especially when your ass is on the line — makes you a villain.

In the last lines of Catch-22, Heller, who was a veteran, captured Bowe Bergdahl’s (and every soldier’s) moment of clarity: “The knife came down, missing him by inches, and he took off.”