Sashaying Down The Road To War

Rev. John Millspaugh
February 2, 2003

For many months the people of our congregation, and of our country, and of our world, have struggled to understand and face the complex issues surrounding America’s potential war with Iraq.  We have many different opinions.  All of us in this room are committed to facing this situation with integrity, in a way that does honor to our country and our religious principles.

In our faith we honor the individual’s right of conscience, and we accept and cherish one another even when our consciences lead us to differing conclusions.  Here we live out the free and responsible search for truth by discussing, better understanding, and debating all points of view.  In a world where truth with a capital T is hard to come by, we need to speak to one another, and to listen to one another, to hold ourselves accountable to each other and to the Sacred.

Many of you know that I have and will continue to lend my voice to the cause of peaceful resolution of this conflict.  I also choose to support the individual Unitarian Universalists from across the country who serve in the military, and their families, who all face difficult days ahead. 

I hope you are planning to come to the Friday Forum talk this week, called “Why War?” It’s an opportunity to reflect and dialogue about the specific war our country is contemplating.  But this morning I want to turn our focus away from the current conflict to talk a little about the structure and function of war itself.  What is war? Really, what is it?  How does it work? What does it do? Let’s take a step back from this current conflict to consider the function of war itself, a consideration that I hope will inform our dialogue about the current conflict. 

When I think about war, I think of a military contest between two states. This contest is defined by three sorts of injuries.[1]  The first and most obvious is injury, or more accurately, set of injuries, is to individual human beings. The word “war” gets used for things l ike the government’s “War on Illiteracy,” but we understand “War” to be a metaphor in that context—you do not have an actual war unless it human beings are getting injured and killed. A second important sort of injury that defines war is the destruction of objects and infrastructure made by and for people.  In other words, war almost always involves blowing up buildings, leveling villages, and so on— in war we do not generally bomb an opponent’s national forest or swamplands unless we are trying to interfere with human activity. 

The first injury is to people, the second, to human handiwork like roads and buildings. The third injury is to the other side’s ideology.  This injury is the goal of war.  This third injury is an injury to our opponents’ immaterial culture, their ideology or its agenda.  So war is a contest of destruction by which “the first and second forms of damage are the means for determining which of the two sides will undergo the third form of damage.”[2] Both sides will suffer the damage to human beings and human artifacts, but the hope is that only one side will suffer the third and final form of injury, the loss of its ability to conceive of its national identity as it once did, or live out its ideology or agenda, or whatever the contested issue may be. 

War is a contest that works because we relate the activities within the war, that is, injuring and killing human beings and destroying property, to choosing a winner and loser among esoteric ideas or issues being debated outside the war. [3]  Now you might ask, what does one country’s ability to injure the inhabitants of another country have anything to do with the superiority of that country’s point of view?  Honestly? Not much.

Now must of us, whether we are for the current war effort or not, are bothered by the idea of settling differences of opinion by killing people. And war is precisely about killing people.  Let us speak honestly with one another.  Shall we? I think so.  How can I not be honest with you? War is precisely about killing people. By killing people, I mean taking a person, like you or I, and shoving metal into their brain, or causing them to be set on fire, or turning the air surrounding air into poison so that their lungs stop working, and their hearts stop beating, and everything about who they are and everything they were in the world, dies. That’s intrinsic to the structure of war, and that’s part of its dysfunction as a method of solving differences of opinion or ideology.

Most of us are extremely bothered by the idea of the natural activities of war, even if we aren’t pacifists, even if we support the current war effort. Since we are so bothered, and I think rightly bothered, it is no surprise that our culture has invented a whole vocabulary of metaphors for war. “One can read many pages of a historic or strategic account of a particular military campaign, or listen to many successive installments in a newscast narrative of events in a contemporary war, without encountering the acknowledgement that the purpose of the event described is to alter . . . human tissue, as well as to alter the surface [and] shape . . . of the objects that human beings recognize as extensions of themselves.”[4] 

Metaphors are natural and inevitable.  They can have good uses.  Some military officials see metaphors as helpful in the way they help us keep our emotions about war at bay. As William G. Hyland, former Deputy Director of the National Security Council, wrote of the human consequences of nuclear war, “Of course, if you allow the emotion of nuclear war to enter the Defense Department, you’d end up totally paralyzed.”[5]  If war makes sense as a method of international problem-solving, metaphors may be necessary.  We must find ways to talk about it that don’t leave us incapacitated, as we might be if we held in our minds what war actually involves.

But metaphors can also have negative consequences, in that they mask the reality of the situation they supposedly describe.  And they shield us from pain that we might be better off experiencing.  We Unitarian Universalists believe in the free and responsible search for truth, right? 

But boy oh boy, have we invented a lot of ways to talk about war that let us avoid grappling with the human consequences of wartime military activity.  Can you think of metaphors for the activities of war you’ve heard lately? 

Here are some I’ve heard, and I should note that I’m getting some assistance here from George Lakoff, in an article he published in the Viet Nam Generation Journal & Newsletter.

One of the most common metaphors I have heard refers to the nations of America and Iraq, or the armies of those nations, as two giants lumbering toward each other about to engage in hand-to-hand combat.  We used this same imagery during the Gulf War, saying that the US sought to, “push Iraq back out of Kuwait" or "deal the enemy a heavy blow," or "deliver a knockout punch."[6]  I’ve heard people using in the past week, saying, “The US needs to flex its muscles from time to time.”  You might hear people name one of the giants with the name of one of the leader’s countries, like “We need to hit Saddam where it counts.”

You read this metaphor it in wartime reporting of battles— where a collection of individual men serving as infantry soldiers— perhaps including 21-year old John Cambden from Macon, Georgia, 19-year old Shandell Johnson from Rancho Santa Margarita, California, Anthony Martin from outside of Bismark, North Dakota, as well as a few thousand others, get referred to collectively as a “spearhead,” or “hammer,” or “underbelly,” or “hinge” or “joint” or “rear.”  When this metaphor system is in use “the crossing of a river is not [. . .] an event enacted by many individuals—some of whom know how to swim and others of whom do not, some vulnerable to wet and cold and some relatively immune, some who have as their worst dream being caught between two banks on a bridge and others who have waited for just this moment of trial— but is rather enacted by a single integrated creature.”[7]  It makes some sense to use this metaphor, as statesmen are usually more interested in how an army is faring as a whole, rather than the lives or welfare of individual soldiers.  But when we use this metaphor, we relocate the injuries and deaths of real people to the imaginary body of a colossus, where those injuries are no longer recognizable or interpretable. [8]  If we’re considering starting a war, for however praiseworthy a reason, let’s admit to ourselves what war includes— it does not include two giants wresting with each other.  It includes killing thousands or tens of thousands of people and badly hurting many more, hurting people in very real ways involving sharp metal and choking gasses and burning explosions. Please pardon me for being honest with you.

Another, perhaps more intentional metaphor used in wartime involves describing human bodies as being plants, vegetable matter which seems immune to pain, which we are less bothered by seeing mowed down.  “Mowed down,” there’s the metaphor right there.  You might know that the day in World War I in which 30 THOUSAND Russians died and 13 THOUSAND Germans died came to be called the “Day of Harvesting.”  The frame that holds a missile is called a “cherrypicker.”  One of the most destructive bombs in the Gulf War was called the “Daisy Cutter.”  A bomb, designed to destroy human life, called: Daisy Cutter.  War is not about cutting plants, it is a contest of destroying human lives. 

A third metaphor system describes people as inanimate objects.  We don’t kill the soldiers of the other country, we neutralize them, like the weapons that they are. We liquefy them.  We regret that we lost some innocent bystanders as collateral damage.[9] 

Or a fourth way in our rich vocabulary of war metaphors is to use medical terminology, as if the human beings from the other state are a cancer that can spread.  In this case, military operations—“operations”— “are seen as hygienic, to "clean out" enemy fortifications. Bombing raids are portrayed as "surgical strikes" to "take out" the cancer.[10] But war is not about improving human health through medicine, it is about killing and injuring.  I’ll give you an example of how dangerous metaphors can be, even for the Commander in Chief. “In his study of John Kennedy . . . Theodore Sorensen describes how during the Cuban Missile Crisis military advisors repeatedly named a “surgical strike” as one option, but it eventually became clear that the precision asserted in the word “surgical” was impossible; Kennedy realized that, acting on the military fiction of “surgical strike,” he might have brought about a massive and harrowing catastrophe.”[11] Metaphors, when we let them mask truth, are very dangerous.

But boy do we use them.  A fifth set of war metaphors we use to describe out-injuring our opponent has to do with sports and games.  Military strategist Liddell Hart described the difference between air mobility and the mobility of tanks by using the difference in chess between a knight’s move and a queen’s move. In the Gulf War, “Commanding officers told their troops, ‘This is our Super Bowl.’  The major American tactic was named after a football play.[12]  In George Bush’s State of the Union Address a few days ago he said “Our war against terror is a contest of will.”  Well, it’s a contest, but it is not a contest of will. If it was just a contest of will, Bush could just have a staring contest with Saddam.  It’s a contest that involves will, but it is a contest of injury and killing.  How can we judge whether we as the American people want to engage in this sort of contest unless we are clear with ourselves about the sort of action we are contemplating?  Let’s not kid ourselves.

A sixth set of metaphors describes war as if it is just the continuance of some other more benign activity.  Take for example Karl von Clausewitz’s famous statement, “War is the continuation of politics by other means.”  Well, that’s a breathtaking sentence. War is just the more mature version of something benign. Along those lines, I guess drowning is swimming, only moreso. Dying is living, only not exactly.  War is politics? War may have political aspects, it may be spun politically, but it is not politics.

Sometimes war is described as if its intrinsic activities are identical to the goal of war.  Elaine Scarry writes: “a person who believes (perhaps quite rightly) that the outcome of a particular war will be greater political freedom for a given population may wrongly think of the interior activity of war as “freeing”  But if actually asked to look at several hundred people in a forest slipping behind trees, edging out, lifting a rifle, disappearing, reappearing, bleeding, falling, he would probably agree that the best identification of the immediate activity occurring there would not be “freeing,” but “reciprocal injuring.”[13]

So these are some of the sorts of metaphors we use to talk about war.  A lot, yes? I think we know why that is.  We are bothered by the fact that war is about killing people, so we talk about that activity as if it is actually just two giant people in hand to hand contest, or as if we are cutting grass, or altering inanimate material, or practicing medicine, or playing a board game, or expanding a benign peacetime activity, or directly addressing the stated issue the war is being fought over. 

You can probably think of more. But enough metaphors.  You’ll hear enough yourself in the coming weeks if you listen for them. 

Metaphorical thought is neither good nor bad.  It is inescapable. But if heard unreflectively it can have disastrously negative consequences. Metaphors can let us slumber when we should be wide awake.  It’s a loving act for a concerned mother to soothe her child to sleep in wartime.  But it is unconscionable for an adult population to allow themselves to be soothed to sleep, to not admit the full reality of what they are being asked to endorse.  It’s unconscionable.

Our leaders are asking us to endorse war.  Let’s think clearly about what sorts of activities we are being asked to support. 

I’ll read you one more exerpt from [the morning’s reading, which preceded the sermon] the nonfiction Gulf War memoir, Jarhead, by Anthony Swofford.  It’s set a day or two after the war is ended.

“The cleanup mission is a freelance operation. We gear up in our three Humvees and head out each morning from the battalion bivouac. We run with glee through the enemy positions, noting the hundreds of different ways a man might die when five-hundred-pound bombs are dropped on his weakly forti­fied position. Some of the corpses in the bunkers are hunched over, hands covering their ears, as though they’d been waiting in dread. Many seem to have died not from shrapnel but con­cussion, and dried, discolored blood gathers around their eyes and ears and noses and mouths, no obvious trauma to their bodies A few weeks into the air campaign the Unite States rolled out the daisy-cutter bomb. The daisy cutter spread a mixture of ammonium ni­trate and aluminum over the target area and then ignited the cloud. If you were within two acres and exposed above aboveground or even in a barricaded bunker, you were sure to die. The infantry positions look like daisy-cutter test areas. The mouths of the dead men remain open in agony.”

That’s the reality we are considering unleashing once more.  I chose to refrain from sharing with you some of the more graphic excerpts from this Gulf War memoir. Let’s reflect carefully on what we want to do in the face of the action our government is on the verge of proposing. 

Let us not slumber.  What is the reality we are being asked to support?  Do you know how many people, individual human beings, were killed in the Gulf War?  142 men on the American side.  And on the Iraqi side?  62,000 men. That many individuals.  And oh yes, 40,000 women. And 32,000 children.  And that was just in the few days of that war.  Now, more than a decade later, that war is still having deadly effects in Iraq.  For example, Helen Caldicott, one of the founders of Physicians for Social Responsibility, notes that the highly radioactive plutonium and uranium used in our bombs in that last war are still devastating the landscape, still causing a massive numbers of birth defects.  Simply from the plutonium and uranium, girls now as young as 10 years old are developing breast cancer.[14] 

Something inside us resists hearing this sort of painful information.  It is easier to not welcome these things into our consciousnesses.  It’s easier to be apathetic.  The Greek word for nonsuffering is apatheia.  Given its etymology, apathy means the inexperience or refusal to experience pain. When we consider the reality of war, we feel the pain for an instant, but we tend to repress that pain.  We block it out because it hurts, because it is frightening, and most of all because we do not understand it and consider it to be a dysfunction, an aberration, a sign of personal weakness or vulnerability.[15] But we need to admit the reality of what our country is contemplating, and we need to act accordingly. 

I believe with Carl Jung, “There is no birth of consciousness without pain”[16]  I believe we resist painful information, not because of our powerlessness in the face of these events, but because of our fear of powerlessness.  Just speak to one of the 25 members of this congregation who took a four hour bus trip to a peace vigil Friday, singing peace songs all the way, and ask them whether we are powerless.  Pain is destructive only if it is denied.  It is dysfunctional only when it is disowned.  “Unblocking our pain for the world reconnects us with the larger web of life.[17]

To look into the void of uncertainty, to face the unknown, bereft of assurance, “has always been recognized by traditional paths as sacred.  It is precisely there, says Jacob Needleman, “in that fleeting state between dreams, which is called ‘despair’ in some Western teachings and ‘self-questioning’ in Eastern traditions, (that) a person is said to be able to receive the truth, both about nature and his [or her] own possible role in the universal order.”[18]

So. In the coming days, as our government asks us to support this war, let us remember precisely what we are being asked to support. Let us remember the activities intrinsic to war.  Let us consider whether we want the young men and women of this country to once again engage in those activities of war in this instance.  At night, let us sing our children to sleep, and in the daytime, let us think and act and speak as if we are awake.  So may it be.

In the spirit of prayer and meditation, I invite you to take the hand of the person sitting next to you, and to close your eyes.  As our country prepares for war, we lift up our concern and good wishes for our country’s leaders.  May they look to their inmost hearts, may they be blessed that they may make decisions wisely, may they be moved to place the welfare of all people before their own more limited agendas. 

We lift up those serving in the military, all those in all the militaries that may become a part of this conflict, that they may be kept safe, that their families might see them again unharmed in body and in spirit.

We lift up the innocents in Iraq, those children suffering as a consequence of our last war there those children who wake every passing day with more fear. May they know peace.

We lift up ourselves and our families and loved ones, we who are hurting and confused, we who wonder whether there is any point to our own small efforts, we who care deeply about our own country and the living of our religious values, especially in difficult times. May we know our own weakness, may we know our own strength.

So may it be. Amen.

[1] Elaine Scarry. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford University Press, New York, 1985, pg. 114.    (Return to article)

[2] ibid.    (Return to article)

[3] Scarry. pg. 63.    (Return to article)

[4] Scarry. pg. 64.    (Return to article)

[5] Joanna Macy, Despair and Personal Power in the Nuclear Age (New Society, 1983), pg 13.    (Return to article)

[6] George Lakoff, “Metaphor and War: The Metaphor System Used to Justify War in the Gulf.” Viet Nam Generation Journal & Newsletter, V3, N3 (November 1991).    (Return to article)

[7] Scarry 71.    (Return to article)

[8] ibid.    (Return to article)

[9] Scarry. pg. 66    (Return to article)

[10] Lakoff.    (Return to article)

[11] Scarry    (Return to article)

[12] Lakoff.    (Return to article)

[13] Scarry. pg. 68    (Return to article)

[14] Helen Caldicott, speech at Smith College, Northampton, MA, November 2002.    (Return to article)

[15] Macy, pgs. 3-4    (Return to article)

[16] Quotations of Dr. CarlGustav Jung    (Return to article)

[17] Macy, pg. 23    (Return to article)

[18] Macy, pg. 29    (Return to article)