TruthDig.com
Director
of National Intelligence James Clapper, center, and other officials
testify on Capitol Hill last Wednesday at a Senate Intelligence
Committee hearing on national security threats. From left: National
Counterterrorism Center Director Matthew Olsen, FBI Director James
Comey, Clapper, CIA Director John Brennan and Defense Intelligence
Agency Director Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn. (AP/Pablo Martinez Monsivais) I
had my first experience with the U.S. military when I was a young
reporter covering the civil war in El Salvador. We journalists were
briefed at the American Embassy each week by a U.S. Army colonel who at
the time headed the military group of U.S. advisers to the Salvadoran
army. The reality of the war, which lasted from 1979 to 1992, bore
little resemblance to the description regurgitated each week for
consumption by the press. But what was most evident was not the blatant
misinformation—this particular colonel had apparently learned to
dissemble to the public during his multiple tours in Vietnam—but the
hatred of the press by this man and most other senior officers in the
U.S. military. When first told that he would have to meet the press once
a week, the colonel reportedly protested against having to waste his
time with those “limp-dicked communists.”For the next 20 years I would go on from war zone to war zone as a foreign correspondent immersed in military culture. Repetitive rote learning and an insistence on blind obedience—similar to the approach used to train a dog—work on the battlefield. The military exerts nearly total control over the lives of its members. Its long-established hierarchy ensures that those who embrace the approved modes of behavior rise and those who do not are belittled, insulted and hazed. Many of the marks of civilian life are stripped away. Personal modes of dress, hairstyle, speech and behavior are heavily regulated. Individuality is physically and then psychologically crushed. Aggressiveness is rewarded. Compassion is demeaned. Violence is the favorite form of communication. These qualities are an asset in war; they are a disaster in civil society.
Homer in “The Iliad” showed his understanding of war. His heroes are not pleasant men. They are vain, imperial, filled with rage and violent. And Homer’s central character in “The Odyssey,” Odysseus, in his journey home from war must learn to shed his “hero’s heart,” to strip from himself the military attributes that served him in war but threaten to doom him off the battlefield. The qualities that serve us in war defeat us in peace.
