FORCE and the Value of War Stories.

I thought twice about venturing into the attic that July afternoon in 1997. For one thing, there was the stifling heat to be endured for as long as it would take me to locate and drag the heavy cardboard cartons into an adjoining bedroom. Then there was the heavy emotional freight in those boxes.

The Library of America, known for its handy, inexpensive editions of classic American authors, had recently published a two-volume collection entitled Reporting World War II (1995). Now an editor at the Library of America had invited me to serve on the advisory board for a comparable collection of the best war journalism from the Vietnam era. Although I said yes, I had misgivings. I had spent eleven years researching and writing The Wars We Took to Vietnam: Cultural Conflict and Storytelling (1996). In a gesture that reflected my weariness of the subject and my desire to move on to something else, I had relegated my research files to the least accessible part of the house.

I don't regret braving the heat of the attic that afternoon, for I came across a manila envelope that hadn't been opened in a quarter of a century. It contained a copy of Selective Service System Form 150, the Special Form for Conscientious Objectors, together with a carbon typescript of my responses to questions on the form. The form shows the date in March 1969 when I mailed my request to be reclassified from I-A to I-A-O. In layperson's terms, this means that I was willing to serve in the military but in a specialty that did not require me to bear arms. Draftees from the I-A-O pool were usually sent to Fort Sam Houston in Texas for training as medics.

A few months later, in 1970, the U.S. Supreme Court would determine that applicants could object to combat on moral or philosophical grounds. Until then, conscientious objectors had to ground their objection in religious belief--a requirement that favored members of traditionally pacifist religions such as Quakers and Mennonites. Though a Catholic, I believed that I could make a persuasive religious case based on my training in theology and participation in Catholic social service.

Ultimately, however, I couldn't conceal the philosophical roots of my objection to armed participation in war. Responding to the first question on Form 150, which asked me to describe the nature of the belief upon which my claim was based, I cited an essay that had impressed me deeply when I read it in a college metaphysics course. Simone Weil's "The Iliad, or The Poem of Force" first appeared in an English translation in the November 1945 issue of Politics. I paraphrased Weil's argument as follows:

   Her central idea is that the aggressive force employed in war is capable of
   reducing a human being to a thing even while he is alive; this is the
   ultimate immorality. I mention this essay, not only because it seemed to
   articulate my own more inchoate feelings about war, but also because it led
   me to the further conclusion that force is a two-edged sword: it violates
   the humanity of the aggressor as well as that of his victim. The increase
   of violence we have experienced as a nation in the past ten years has shown
   us that a people which continually resorts to military force becomes itself
   brutalized and morally degraded.

I can imagine the members of my draft board in Waukesha, Wisconsin, rolling their eyes as they read 'these words. During the Vietnam War, draft boards were constituted largely of white middle-aged merchants and businessmen, veterans of the good war against Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito. Who was I to lecture them on the immorality of war, and why should they be swayed by arguments borrowed from a French woman of suspicious political sympathies? My own politics were suspect, for I was then a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley. From Berkeley--everyone knew--the virus of revolution had spread to campuses across the country, including the state university in Madison, Wisconsin. If anyone needed a dose of army basic training--the real thing, with bayonet drills and hours of firing at human silhouettes--it was this prodigal son in California. The good burghers of Waukesha probably made up their minds in less time than it took me to sign my name to Form 150.

What was I to do? I saw no obvious course of action because my position was frankly anomalous. I had grown up hunting deer and small game yet drew the line at hunting members of my own species. Though I believed that armed force is occasionally justified, I couldn't be its instrument. It wasn't the war that I wished to avoid so much as killing people. Furthermore, I was idealistic enough to believe that I could influence U.S. culture for the better, make it less reliant on force, by persevering in my studies and becoming a college English professor. That plan would probably be scuttled by flight to Canada or a term in prison.

So I decided to report for induction and hope for assignment to a combat support specialty. Shortly before taking that momentous step, I justified my decision in a rather grand and earnest letter to a friend: "Can I impart a sense of the American myth that will save this country from out-and-out fascism? I don't know. But the very possibility that I might was what ultimately made me decide against leaving the country or resisting induction." I almost wish that a copy of that letter hadn't survived so I wouldn't have to read it today. I feel like Don Quixote, cured and complacent, reading Don Quixote.

As luck would have it, I was sent to Vietnam in 1970 as a noncombatant. I spent my tour of duty in Chu Lai as the sergeant of a military pay team, responsible for maintaining the financial records of an infantry unit. From time to time we also recalled the military payment certificates issued to GIs and replaced them with a new issue--an exhausting procedure calculated to prevent our "funny money" from further devaluing the shaky South Vietnamese currency.

Though relatively safe, Chu Lai was not exempt from force. The war occasionally paid us a visit in the form of incoming mortars, rockets, and sniper fire. We also had a perimeter to defend, a responsibility that my pay team shared with other units in the headquarters company. Those all-nighters in a bunker reminded us that we were still soldiers, men whose lives depended on a familiarity with the deadly tools of our trade-rifles, machine guns, and hand grenades.

Fortunately, I never had to use those weapons. Thus I escaped the transformation that I had dreaded as a college student. I still felt human when I returned to the United States to complete my graduate studies and begin, in the mid-1970s, a career in college teaching.

A decade later, when popular films and the dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial provided occasions for Americans to revisit our least popular war, I expanded my classroom repertoire to include a course in the war literature. Half a dozen times in the late 1980s and early 1990s I taught Literary Responses to the Vietnam War in classrooms located a few blocks from the building where I was inducted into the army. Then battle fatigue set in and I sent my lecture notes to the attic, along with my research files.

There they remained until that warm day in July when I hauled them out, along with Form 150 and a battered copy of Weil's essay. Rereading my application and her essay, I recalled why I had wanted to teach the Vietnam course in the first place. I remembered why it is important for people, young people in particular, to read war stories. Suddenly I was no longer weary of the subject.

My next opportunity to teach the course proved to be the spring semester of 1999. The news media were preoccupied with force, specifically the forces at work in Yugoslavia. Under Slobodan Milosevic's leadership, the Serbs were forcing ethnic Albanians to leave their homes and murdering thousands in the process. The countries belonging to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization--"NATO forces" in the parlance of journalism--were responding in kind. Although NATO ultimately restricted its "use of force" to bombing, the alliance considered deploying "ground forces" in Kosovo.

The readings in the Vietnam course told much the same story. The Library of America's Reporting Vietnam had just been published, giving the students ready access to Seymour Hersh's famous account of those ordinary men, soldiers belonging to my old division, who turned into monsters in a village twenty miles southeast of Chu Lai. The students also read of atrocities committed by Viet Cong guerrillas who used torture and assassination to compel allegiance to their cause. Force took even more horrific forms as the war spilled over into other parts of Indochina. Reporting Vietnam includes an account of a Khmer Rouge execution in Cambodia. Soldiers forced the victim, a civilian, to stand up before hundreds of people as they sawed off his head with sugar palm leaves. It took them three days to complete the execution. By more efficient means the Khmer Rouge killed over a million other people.

Simone Weil understood that force affects not only the obvious victims but also--as I told my draft board--those who use or even witness it. The Khmer Rouge execution brutalized the soldiers and onlookers even as it turned a man into a corpse. Philip Caputo and Lynda Van Devanter, writers whose memoirs we read in the course, saw this principle at work in themselves and others. In A Rumor of War, Caputo records the example of a fellow officer who shot an old Vietnamese woman in the chest when she accidentally spat betel nut juice on him. "The thing that bothers me about killing her," the officer later confided to Caputo, "is that it doesn't bother me." In Home Before Morning, Van Devanter tells the story of a sympathetic caregiver who was transformed into a soulless shell by daily exposure to the casualties of war. Like Caputo, she became a helpless witness to her own dehumanization.

Force takes many cultural forms besides war, including slavery, ethnic cleansing, pogroms, and concentration camps. Unlike natural manifestations of force--such as fire, flood, and storm--these are human creations. Their effect is precisely the opposite of the cultural forms in which we take the most pride as a species--art, music, literature, philosophy. We like to think that such expressions of mind, heart, and spirit can humanize us, that good culture can serve as an antidote to bad. We are so sure of their value that we assign them a special place in higher education, calling them the "humanities."

But how do the humanities make us more human? We don't really know, or colleges would have settled long ago on a curriculum that produces the desired result. As things stand, no college can promise that its humanities course requirements will prevent a student from becoming a mass murderer.

Weil sheds light on the mysterious transformation of force into anti-force, of bad culture into good. On the one hand, she contends that a person who enters the province of force will be "turned to stone," unable to escape "except by a miracle." On the other hand, she draws attention to those miraculous moments in the Iliad in which a man temporarily recovers his soul. Hector's acceptance of his fate at the hands of Achilles is one instance, Achilles' love for Patroclus another. Encountering such manifestations of courage and love in the poem, Weil writes, we "feel with sharp regret what it is that violence has killed and will kill again." In this way the war story fortifies the reader against war and other forms of violence against the human spirit.

Of the other writers whose work we read in the Vietnam course, Bao Ninh and Tim O'Brien are the most eloquent in their claims for the war story as a regenerative cultural form. Kien, the protagonist of Bao Ninh's novel The Sorrow of War, is the sole survivor of a North Vietnamese Army scout platoon. Like his fellow veterans in Hanoi, he has little faith in the government's promises of a glorious future for the reunited Vietnam. In their despair, some of the veterans resort to suicide and other forms of self-destructive behavior. Kien, however, perseveres in order to write an honest--as distinct from a politically correct --account of the war. He regards storytelling as a sacred duty to his dead comrades.

Tim O'Brien justifies storytelling on much the same grounds in The Things They Carried. Although O'Brien maintains that war stories are never moral in the sense of embodying neat lessons to live by, he shows repeatedly how war stories affect us morally. "Stories," he asserts toward the end of this remarkable book, "can save us." Stories save the dead--childhood friends, comrades in war--by bringing them back to life in our minds. They simultaneously save the living by converting brute force into a moral counterforce, whether the counterforce is called love, courage, or simple human decency.

Wallace Stevens must have had the same conversion in mind when, in an essay entitled "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words," he characterized the imagination as "a violence from within that protects us from a violence without." He wrote those words in 1941, the same year in which Weil wrote "The Iliad, or The Poem of Force." In a time of war, both writers sensed the crushing pressure of force and the urgent need to resist by telling war stories. Stories told in time of war are all, in a sense, war stories, whatever their content. But stories explicitly about war have a special educational value in the way they juxtapose action and reaction, dehumanizing force and the humanizing response to force.

I hesitate to recommend a college curriculum based on violence. Why permit war and other cultural manifestations of force to invade the classroom when they already occupy too much space in the daily newspaper? Can't we inculcate humane values without immersing students in the inhumane? Perhaps we can. Lately, though, I find myself inclining toward Weil's view. "The sense of human misery," she insists in her essay, "is a precondition of justice and love." And again: "Only he who has measured the dominance of force, and knows how not to respect it, is capable of love and justice."

Not to respect force is actually to give it due respect, to gauge the full extent of its power. Weil was right. War does turn men and women to stone. But here's the greater miracle, the one I witness whenever I share Vietnam War literature with the next generation: what war has turned to stone, war stories turn into women and men.

Milton J. Bates is a professor of English at Marquette University and the author and editor of several books. A former Guggenheim Fellow, he will spend the spring 2000 semester as a Fulbright distinguished lecturer in American literature at Beijing Foreign Studies University.