"We must learn to forget revenge"—Thinking about Gaza
Israel and Gaza: a time for tears, a time for thought.
Palestinian Christian girl in Ramallah (May 1989). I photographed her on Easter Monday 34 years ago. Does she have children? Are they safe? If we could see every face as an icon of God, peace would come.
“[A] contemplative politics will be one that is capable (as seems so unthinkable in public life at the moment) of recognizing and naming our own failure, the hurt done as well as received, and…
Can the Trauma of War Lead to Growth, Despite the Scars?
By Phil Klay
When we speak of trauma, it is usually as something to be avoided at all costs. But the suffering that war brings can be a strange and terrible blessing.
This article is part of a series on resilience in troubled times — what we can learn about it from history and personal experiences.
The French weapon deployed against Spanish troops in 1521 was, contemporaries said, “more diabolical than human.” The rapid-firing light bronze cannon shot iron balls that crushed battlements, careened wildly and sprayed shards of stone in all directions. At the Battle of Pamplona, one cannonball twice injured the leader of a small Spanish garrison defying calls for surrender, nearly killing him, first by striking one leg with stone shrapnel, then in the other leg by the cannonball itself. His name was Íñigo López de Loyola. The effect on Loyola was not only physical, but also spiritual: Today, he is better known as St. Ignatius.
Back then, he was no saint. One biography describes him as “a rough punkish swordsman who used his privileged status to escape prosecution for violent crimes committed with his priest brother at carnival time.” But this near-fatal injury changed him, along with a few religious books he read during his exceptionally painful convalescence, in which his bones had to be broken again and reset, and where he came so close to death he was given last rites. He went on to found the Jesuits and send disciples all over the globe, in what the British historian Dom David Knowles suggested was Christianity’s “greatest single religious impulse since the preaching of the apostles.”
When we speak of trauma, it is usually as something to be avoided at all costs. “Interest in avoiding pain,” wrote the utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer, is among “the most important human interests.” And yet soldiers like St. Ignatius, who found in their suffering a strange and terrible blessing, are not rare. Senator John McCain, brutally tortured at the Hanoi Hilton, famously declared himself “grateful to Vietnam” for giving him “a seriousness of purpose that observers of my early life had found difficult to detect.”
His might be an extreme case, but the expectation of exposure to some trauma has long been part of the draw of war. “The law is this: no wisdom without pain,” wrote the ancient Greek playwright and military veteran Aeschylus. “Wanted or not by us, such wisdom’s gained; its score, its etch, its scar in us goes deep.” Perhaps that’s true, but it leaves us with an ugly and, to some, offensive question: Can suffering be a gift?
In the early 20th century, the German writer Ernst Jünger, who had proudly served four years in brutal front-line fighting in World War I, declared the answer was a resounding yes. “Tell me your relation to pain,” he claimed, “and I will tell you who you are!” Civilization before the war had slid into bourgeoise decadence, he thought, fleeing from self-sacrifice and prioritizing safety. But the war heralded a new sort of man.
“Hardened as scarcely another generation ever was in fire and flame,” he wrote of himself and his fellow soldiers, “we could go into life as though from the anvil; into friendship, love, politics, professions, into all that destiny had in store. It is not every generation that is so favored.” Postwar Germany convinced him that the industrialized world these men returned to, which happily destroyed workers’ bodies for the construction of railways or mines, was ruled by the same cruel logic as the trenches. Men would have to rise to the challenge by accepting pain, and accepting the cruelty of the age. This is toughness and callousness elevated to a first principle. Unsurprisingly, many of Jünger’s admirers became Nazis.
One of their victims was an Austrian of Jewish descent named Jean Améry, who after the war forcefully rejected, in the starkest terms, any notions of suffering as a gift. Likewise, notions of stoic detachment born of the trenches were absurd to a man who had been tortured by the Gestapo before being sent to Auschwitz. Améry experienced pain beyond description; he was hung by his arms until they ripped from their sockets, and then horsewhipped. For the tortured man, he wrote, “his flesh becomes total reality.”
More lasting than the pain, though, the experience destroyed his ability to ever feel at home in the world, which requires faith in fellow men. Humans are a social animal, our inner self in constant outward search for communion. Torture inverts that expansive, capacious self into a collapsing star. Whatever you thought you were — a mind, a consciousness, a soul — torture reveals how simply, and casually, that can be destroyed. “A slight pressure by the tool-wielding hand is enough,” Améry wrote, to turn a cultured man into “a shrilly squealing piglet at slaughter.” There is wisdom here, though of a dark sort. “Whoever was tortured, stays tortured.” Améry committed suicide in 1978.
Where does that leave those who suffer? For the medical community, the safest option is addressing symptoms, not metaphysics. The writer and former Marine infantry officer David J. Morris has described his own therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder from his time in Iraq, during which he was urged to retell the stories of his trauma, practice breathing exercises, and reframe his cognitive responses to his environment and his traumatic memories.
But he was not encouraged to grow in response to what he had gone through; when he would try to speculate on how his experience might be converted to wisdom, psychologists would admonish him, he reported, “for straying from the strictures of the therapeutic regime.” One senior psychologist at the Department of Veterans Affairs told him that notions of post-traumatic growth were an insult to those who have suffered. For a medical community grounded in science rather than spirituality, and rightfully leery of telling the Amérys of the world to look on the bright side, suffering is no gift.
But another current can be found in theories developed during the Vietnam War. The study of psychological trauma suffers from what the psychiatrist Judith Herman has called “episodic amnesia,” in which periods of active interest, frequently following wars, are followed by “periods of oblivion.” But the generation of soldiers disaffected from war during Vietnam organized and demanded the first systematic, large-scale investigations of war trauma’s long-term effects. In addition to a medical diagnosis — PTSD was added to the American Psychiatric Association’s official manual in 1980 — many of these same veterans and their allies argued for the spiritual and moral significance of their condition.
Psychiatrists like Robert Jay Lifton and writers like Peter Marin argued that the suffering of Vietnam veterans was not simply neurosis, but appropriate moral response to horror. “All men, like all nations, are tested twice in the moral realm,” Mr. Marin wrote. “First by what they do, then by what they make of what they do.” Rather than numbing themselves to pain, they needed to sensitize themselves, to become alive to the “animating” guilt they supposedly lived with. Guilt forces the suffering consciousness outside of itself, the theory goes, sparking empathy and a drive to make reparation.
Whether guilt results in healing, though, is debatable. Some of the most fascinating research on growth after war trauma emerges out of a four decade-long study initiated by Zahava Solomon, which followed the PTSD trajectories of veterans of the 1982 war in Lebanon and the Arab-Israeli war of 1973, also known as the Yom Kippur War. A 2016 analysis of Israeli P.O.W.s from the 1973 war, who faced systematic torture, deprivation and social stigma, did find that those who reported the most guilt about their experience also reported the most growth. However, those veterans also had greater reports of PTSD symptoms as well. As Aeschylus warned, the wisdom they felt they had gained came with deep scars.
None of this would likely have surprised Ignatius of Loyola. In his tradition, suffering was at best a mystery: God never really answers Job, and Christ’s prayer to “let this cup pass me by” goes ungranted. As a Jesuit friend recently told me, suffering is never a gift, never truly willed by God; suffering is real, and awful, and not to be forgotten. “Consider how the Divinity hides Itself,” Ignatius’ followers have been directed to ask for hundreds of years, “how It could destroy Its enemies and does not do it, and how It leaves the most sacred Humanity to suffer so very cruelly.” But of course, that doesn’t mean that we cannot respond to such suffering with grace.
Phil Klay is a U.S. Marine Corps veteran, a visiting professor at Fairfield University and the author of “Redeployment,” winner of the 2014 National Book Award for Fiction, and the forthcoming novel “Missionaries.”
On the last Monday of May we pay tribute to the American men and women who have died in service to our country. To honor the occasion, here is an essential list of nonfiction and fiction which honor their sacrifices. From classic, and award-winning, novels to front-line journalism, these titles take readers back to the Civil War and up to the Middle East conflict.
REDEPLOYMENT by Phil Klay
Winner of the 2014 National Book Award for Fiction, Marine Corps veteran Phil Klay's Redeployment takes readers to the frontlines of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, asking us to understand what happened there, and what happened to the soldiers who returned.
THE GHOSTS OF HERO STREET: HOW ONE SMALL MEXICAN-AMERICAN COMMUNITY GAVE SO MUCH IN WORLD WAR II AND KOREA by Carlos Harrison
The Mexican-American families who lived on one street in Silvis, Illinoi sent fifty-seven of their children to fight in World War II and Korea—more than any other place that size in the country. Eight of those children died. It’s a distinction recognized by the Department of Defense, one that earned that strip a distinguished name: Hero Street. Based on interviews with relatives, friends, and soldiers who served alongside the men, as well as personal letters and photographs, The Ghosts of Hero Street is the compelling and inspiring account of a street of soldiers—and men—who would not be denied their dignity or their honor.
PACO’S STORY: A NOVEL by Larry Heinemann
Paco Sullivan is the only man in Alpha Company to survive a cataclysmic Viet Cong attack on Fire Base Harriette in Vietnam. Everyone else is annihilated. Brilliantly and vividly written, Paco’s Story–winner of a National Book Award–plunges you into the violence and casual cruelty of the Vietnam War, and the ghostly aftermath that often dealt the harshest blows.
THE THIN RED LINE: A NOVEL by James Jones, Foreword by Francine Prose
They are the men of C-for-Charlie company—“Mad” 1st Sgt. Eddie Welsh, Pvt. 1st Class Don Doll, Pvt. John Bell, Capt. James Stein, Cpl. Fife, and dozens more just like them—infantrymen who are about to land, grim and white-faced, on an atoll in the Pacific called Guadalcanal. This is their story, a shatteringly realistic walk into hell and back.
GENERATION KILL: DEVIL DOGS, ICEMAN, CAPTAIN AMERICA, AND THE NEW FACE OF AMERICAN WAR by Evan Wright
Based on Evan Wright's National Magazine Award-winning story in Rolling Stone, this is the raw, firsthand account of the 2003 Iraq invasion that inspired the HBO® original mini-series.
AMERICA’S WAR FOR THE GREATER MIDDLE EAST by Andrew J. Bacevich
A searing reassessment of America’s foreign policy in the Middle East over the past four decades—by a retired Army Colonel and New York Times-bestselling author. From the end of World War II to 1980, virtually no American soldiers were killed in action while serving in the Greater Middle East. Since 1990, virtually no American soldiers have been killed in action anywhere else outside the “open-ended war” in the Greater Middle East.
WORLD WAR I AND AMERICA: TOLD BY THE AMERICANS WHO LIVED IT edited by A. Scott Berg
For the centenary of America’s entry into World War I, A. Scott Berg presents a landmark anthology of American writing from the cataclysmic conflict that set the course of the 20th century.
VOICES OF WAR: STORIES OF SERVICE FROM THE HOME FRONT AND THE FRONT LINES edited by The Library of Congress
The experience of war has affected every generation in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and every soldier has a story to tell. Since the year 2000, the Veteran's History Project, a permanent department of the Library of Congress, has been collecting and preserving the memories of veterans. In the first book to showcase the richness and depth of this collection, Voices of War tells a compelling, emotional, history of the experience of war, weaving together veterans’ stories from in World Wars I and II, Korea, Vietnam, and the Persian Gulf.
FOR YOUNGER READERS
THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE by Stephen Crane, Wendell Minor; Ages 9-11
Henry Fleming dreams of the thrill of battle and performing heroic deeds in the American Civil War. But his illusions are shattered when he comes face to face with the bloodshed and horrors of war. Now he's a raw recruit, Henry experiences both fear and self-doubt. Will war make Henry a coward or a hero? A vivid fictionalized account of the experiences of an ordinary innocent young soldier on the battlefields of the American Civil War, introduced by American writer, illustrator and historian, Wendell Minor.
VIETNAM WAR (DK EYEWITNESS BOOKS); Ages 8 to 12
A visual and informative guide to one of the longest and most controversial wars in American history, now revised and updated. Explore the people, places, battles, and weapons of America’s Indochina struggle. Now available for the first time in paperback, DK Eyewitness Books: Vietnam War tells the dramatic story of patriotism, tragedy, bloody conflict, and heroism.
For more on these and related titles visit the collection Memorial Day 2017
So we’ve spent the past several classes studying the Iraq War, the Syrian Civil War, the Yemen War (threw that one in today for kicks), and the war against ISIS- all of which are interconnected. Today my job was to highlight that interconnectivity, and to widen students’ focus to explain- wait for it- proxy wars!
Giant. Geopolitical. Lesson. Of. Doom.
I mapped out who’s on which side (directly or indirectly) in each war, and we chatted about whether being on the same side always meant wanting the same end result (short answer: no). What I asked students to consider was how conflicting interests among major regional and global powers could cause problems in these wars, and make it harder to get results (ie- how might it make it harder for forces to succeed in taking Raqqa, an operation they read about for homework). And I asked them to consider how a country’s decision with regards to one war might affect the others. The ultimate takeaway- and it’s a big one for ninth graders- is that decisions countries make have far-reaching consequences. Students don’t tend to “see the whole board,” which I know I’ve written about before, and showing them how to do it is awesome. And exhausting. But mostly awesome.
Sooo that was my first eighty minutes. Second eighty- and thank God again for Mrs. T and the double-block classes- was devoted to thinking big thoughts about some of issues related to these wars. First, we talked about the refugee crisis. I like using visuals and putting a face on the people we’re taking about, so I showed the immense 4.1 Miles, which is a documentary that follows the Greek Coast Guard as they rescue refugees making the crossing from Turkey (Mrs. T, who is a parent, would like me to warn you that watching it as a parent is damn near impossible because these Coast Guard guys are pulling little kids out of the water). We discussed- as do many people in the film- what should be done about the refugee crisis, and (this is the trickier question) who is responsible for doing it. They were a little quieter than I thought they might be about this, but perhaps the politicized nature of the topic made it intimidating to speak about. I have their written responses, though, and have to read those still.
The second thing we discussed- after lunch- was the way in which we fight our wars. I always have kids ask why we don’t just bomb all of Syria (or whatever country we’re talking about), or why don’t we use the same tactics ISIS uses in fighting against them, and so on; in short, they’re ask me why we have rules for waging war. A former Marine named Phil Klay recently wrote an eloquent defense of the rules of war and the importance of moral courage. He’s more expert on the subject than I’ll ever be, so I read his op-ed to the class and had them identify and assess his argument. They found that assignment quite challenging- which it is- so I gave them more time to work than I’d originally planned to give, but in the end I think we had a pretty good conversation.
Overall, I’m happy with how the day went. It’s a lot of information for the kids to take in, and none of it is simple, and that’s okay because it teaches them that war isn’t simple. It shouldn’t be waged rashly or ignorantly. And that’s a good lesson for kids to learn.
And after all that I totally deserved coffee and ice cream, right?
Mrs. B brought coffee to Mrs. T and I during our team meeting. And the powers that be served coffee at today’s afternoon teacher workshop session. Yay, free ice cream! That’s a way to make an extra three hours of work on the day less of a hardship.
After the ice cream, I went and worked with my two World counterparts on the other ninth grade teams, revising the UBD templates that describe the course. I also went to talk to Mr. I, who is one of our special ed. case managers, about a student who is struggling. I’m trying to figure out how to help him, and I need some help myself. Mr. I is on it, so here’s hoping he’s successful, because I don’t want a student to sit in my class and feel lost.
What Do I Owe the Dead of My Generation’s Mismanaged Wars?
The New York Times Opinion Guest Essay, published May 26, 2024
By Phil Klay
Fairfield University MFA Professor
Mr. Klay is a novelist and a Marine Corps veteran of the Iraq War. His most recent book is the essay collection “Uncertain Ground: Citizenship in an Age of Endless, Invisible War.”
About 10 years ago, as the war in Afghanistan was slowly, painfully winding down, I walked through Arlington National Cemetery with a fellow Marine veteran and a relative of mine visiting from Ireland. We passed row after row of pristine white tombs, the dead of all the just wars and unjust wars that made and remade this country, and my relative told us he found it quite moving; he hadn’t been expecting that. Perhaps he thought it’d be more bombastic, or obviously militaristic, and he was taken by the beauty and serenity and quiet dignity of the place.
So we brought him to Section 60 to see some of the newest graves, of kids born in the ’90s, and I told him the sight filled me with rage, these young lives thrown into a mismanaged war, where even their deaths, at that late stage, were mostly ignored. Just the background hum of a global superpower.
A couple of years later, in 2021, the Afghan war finally ended, taking with it a few American children of the 2000s, and, in a moral failure laid on top of the military failure, leaving tens of thousands of Afghans who worked with us at risk in the now completely Taliban-controlled country. The last Marines to fall died in a suicide bombing at a gate to Kabul’s airport, a blast that killed 11 Marines, one Navy medic, one soldier and about 170 Afghan civilians. The Marines were trying to manage the chaos of the poorly planned evacuation of Afghans from Kabul — a humanitarian mission at heart, trying to help those we were abandoning. A week before she died, one of the Marines, Sgt. Nicole Gee, posted a photo of her cradling a baby in Kabul and captioned it, “I love my job.”
America responded to those deaths with a drone strike against a Kabul vehicle the military claimed was transporting ISIS members who were about to carry out another attack, but that, in a twist that felt grotesquely emblematic of so many of our failures, turned out to carry an Afghan aid worker. The blast killed the aid worker and his relatives, seven of whom were children. The sort of people those Marines died trying to help.
How do you memorialize the dead of a failed war? At Arlington, it’s easy to let your heart swell with pride as you pass certain graves. Here are the heroes that ended slavery. Here are the patriots who defeated fascism. We think of them as inextricably bound up with the cause they gave their life to. The same can’t be said for more morally troubling wars, from the Philippines to Vietnam. And for the dead of my generation’s wars, for the dead I knew, the reasons they died sit awkwardly alongside the honor I owe them.
I watched a lot of Marines go off to Afghanistan, a war that I could have gone to but that I chose to avoid. Mostly, they were young. That’s the thing Hollywood most often gets wrong about war when they cast grown men to portray America’s finest killers. Look at a Marine infantry platoon, so many of whose members joined at 17 or 18, and you see boys. Boys who haven’t grown into cynicism yet. Some find it in the middle of their tours. Some keep that idealistic flame burning through multiple deployments. And some die before it can be extinguished.
For so many of the kids I saw, their mission mattered to them, and so their mission should matter to all of us when we remember their deaths. And the mission was a catastrophe. Memorial Day should come with sorrow and patriotic pride, yes, but also with a sense of shame. And, though it has faded for me over the years, with anger.
A few months after Kabul fell I went to the Bronx to see a war photographer I admire, Peter van Agtmael, taking a group of adult learners through a display of his photography from 9/11 to the present at the Bronx Documentary Center, photographs now collected in the book “Look at the U.S.A.”
“I just got back from Afghanistan, and it’s controversial to say, but it’s beautiful,” he told the group. “It’s beautiful to see Afghanistan at peace.”
Beautiful. I thought of a Marine in 2009, just back from Afghanistan, hollow-eyed, telling us in a monotone about his best friend taking a bullet to the head in these beautiful regions of the country, now at peace. What would he make of such a claim? Around me on the walls I saw a burned soldier in a combat hospital, the arm of a Trump supporter climbing over a wall by the Capitol on Jan. 6, the dust cloud of an improvised bomb detonation in Iraq.
Toward the end of the gallery, there was a huge print hung high up. You craned your neck and saw a homeless encampment in Las Vegas, and then, craning further, you saw an F-16 fighter jet, an aircraft that costs tens of millions of dollars, flying above. Amid our national forgetting of the wars, there was something powerful about seeing this accounting of America in the South Bronx, in a community whose struggles have so often been subject to forgetting, effacing, indifference. And, God, it was painful.
In the past when I’ve thought about the recent dead, I’ve told myself that service to country, service unto the point of death, is a momentous enough sacrifice to overshadow all other questions. The cause doesn’t matter so much if the fallen I knew served courageously, looked after their fellow Marines and kept their honor clean. But I’ve come to feel that airbrushing out the complexities of their wars is, ultimately, disrespectful to the dead. We owe it to the dead to remember what mattered to them, the ideals they held, as well as how those ideals were betrayed or failed to match reality.
This Memorial Day, as I get ready to take my sons to march in our local Memorial Day parade, our country is in the midst of the most divisive antiwar protests since the early days of the Iraq war, protests my friends characterize as either “objectively pro-Hamas” or as “opposing undeniable genocide.” Questions long dormant, about how we use our might and whom we help kill, feel like live political questions once again (even if we’re not talking much about actual American military deployments, or the troops who have most recently died at the hands of Iranian proxies). The debate is raw and angry.
Good. What a good, uncomfortable, painful national mood for remembering the dead. This year, when I remember them, I will not just remember who they were, the shreds of memory dredged up from past decades. I will remember why they died. All the reasons they died. Because they believed in America. Because America forgot about them. Because they were trying to force-feed a different way of life to people from a different country and culture. Because they wanted to look after their Marines. Because the mission was always hopeless. Because America could be a force for good in the world. Because Presidents Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden didn’t have much of a plan. Because it’s a dangerous world, and somebody’s got to do the killing. Because of college money. Because the Marine Corps is cool as hell. Because they saw “Full Metal Jacket” and wanted to be Joker. Or Animal Mother. Because the war might offer a new hope for Iraq, for Afghanistan. Because we earned others’ hatred, with our cruelty and indifference and carelessness and hubris. Because America was still worth dying for.
