War is really cool and groovy...
Lets talk war and how fab it is for everyone except the poor suckers getting their legs blown off. After the Vietnam war the American military learnt its lesson very very well. No longer do we ever see pictures of lovely little kiddies screaming till their eyeballs burst as they run naked down the road covered in napalm. Nowadays you can’t even get a decent shot of a flag draped coffin or a naked Iraqi prisoner being tortured without there being all sorts of whoo har and general mumblings about national security. So let us put Michael Moore and his over hyped machinations to one side for a minute and learn from our past mistakes: World War One to be exact. British writer Pat Barker wrote three amazing books called The Regeneration Trilogy (Regeneration, The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road) that deal with the huge and agonizing gulf between the jingoistic rhetoric of all the right and mighty reasons why we go to war and the sheer bile churning agony of looking at your 19 year old fiancé after he has had half his head blown off but can, on good days, gurgle a bit.
Barker’s books are fictional accounts of real (Robert Graves, Sigfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen) and imaginary people who lived through the ‘great war’. The cleverness of these books is that they do not focus on the actual bang bang bit of the war, but its effect on the people involved and how it hurt them. Perfectly fit young men who found themselves unable to speak, unable to eat, stuttering uncontrollably and wetting the bed during nightmares where they screamed themselves hoarse. Makes Gulf War Syndrome look a tad tame doesn’t it? Perhaps tomorrows politicians should consider the impact to both the individual and society when some poor bloke finds himself plunged head first inside another man’s decomposing stomach with rotting flesh stuffed in his mouth and nostrils: anyone for more war?
bravenet.com