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.”
Thursday, June 5, 2014
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1 comment:
Once again, you nail it! I'm familiar with everyone except Tim O'Brien... and I agree with everything you said, so well. Thank you. "When will we ever learn?"
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