Here's an unpublished piece I wrote in the days immediately preceding
the first Gulf War. It relates, I think, to this topic.
Mark
TEACHING IN TIME OF WAR
January, 1991
On the day that the U.N. resolution permitting the
use of force in the Persian Gulf took effect, but before the first of
the bombs fell, I asked my composition class at Tucson's Pima
Community College to write a paper justifying Saddam Hussein's
position. I explained very carefully to my students that I didn't
agree with his position, and that I doubted that any of them did,
either, but I thought that it never hurts to understand an
adversary's point of view. People risk wars because they think that
the cost is justified--even a madman in a modern technological state
can't prosecute a war against the will, or at least without the
complacency, of large numbers of his subjects. I also told my
students that the almost universally-trumpeted claim that non-Arabs
are incapable of understanding the complexities of the Arab mind
struck me as a cop-out. It seemed to me that as human beings we are
morally, and of necessity, committed to the effort to understand each
other, regardless of the obstacles presented by history and culture.
Nonetheless, almost all of the papers trotted out
the inscrutability theory, and several of the students respectfully
declined to fulfill the assignment, defending, instead, George Bush's
position. Some of them claimed that they lacked sufficient
information to write 500 words about the Iraqi position--they had
apparently not noticed its almost incessant presentation and
interpretation, albeit with negative commentary, in the printed media
and even on the better television news programs. Still others felt
that it was somehow unpatriotic to appear to be defending an
adversary's position.
I was new to Tucson--I had in fact been in town less
than two weeks when I gave the assignment. Some of the reactions to
the war there surprised me. I knew that Arizona has the reputation of
being a stronghold of the most extreme conservatism, and I also knew
that the military is an important part of the
community--Davis-Monthan airbase is within the city, and a huge army
base, Fort Huachuca, is close by. I would have expected a higher
level of jingoism than I in fact encountered. What I felt most
strongly was the closeness of the war--almost everyone I spoke to
seemed to know someone on the firing line in the Gulf, and they
expressed fear for their loved-ones far more than enthusiasm for
American policy.
There also seemed to be a division according to age.
The young, who, like my students, had never experienced a war, tended
to be far less ambivalent than their elders.
I use students' papers, xeroxed, but with name and
identifying information masked out, as the texts for my composition
classes. I reproduced a paper by a polite boy with short blond hair
who had defended America's decision to attack. My concern was misuse
of analogy and authority. It seemed to me that these were being used
by the administration and the media to manipulate public opinion, and
my student, together with most of his classmates, had bought into the
manipulation.
Specifically, my student had used the Hitler-Saddam
analogy, which suggests that failure to respond promptly and
violently to the takeover of Kuwait could lead Saddam to attempt
world domination, as Hitler had after Munich. Analogies tend to blur
distinctions: Hitler, after all, was dictator of a world power,
perhaps the great industrial power of its time, with a large
population and a long history of successful warfare against other
great powers, despite World War One. Saddam commands a small,
impoverished nation with no industrial base and only one significant
export. In a brutal war against a neighbor that effectively lacked an
airforce it had barely managed a stalemate. Saddam would have to be
considerably crazier than we like to think Hitler was to imagine
himself with that class of political potential, but the analogy would
be a good selling pitch for our administration if it remained unexamined.
My student had also quoted Billy Graham to the
effect that "we must have military power to keep madmen from taking
over the world." Putting aside the authority that might attach to the
person of Graham in my student's mind, the quotation begs three
questions: who are the "we" referred to, who diagnoses the madmen,
and who decides which madmen exercise that kind of threat.
I set out to make these points about uncritical
acceptance of the language of politicians, but between the assignment
and that day in class serious fighting had broken out, and while I
made efforts to make clear that my criticisms were not political per
se, I probably made my points too vehemently, distressed as I was. At
any rate, there was a moment during the class when I became aware
that the student who had written the paper was undergoing a
transformation--I was really seeing it happen, but the protocol of
the classroom prevented me from intervening until the hour was over.
His posture and expression stiffened, and his eyes went dead. The
hard, impenetrable wall of hatred had descended.
I recognized immediately what had happened--I had
seen it often enough during the Vietnam War. Although the scale of
our political differences was relatively small, in his mind I had
become one of those intellectuals who humiliated people like him. It
was a class division: I had become the enemy.
My God, I thought, I've lost him, and I was so
bereft that for a moment I imagined myself falling uncontrollably.
My student left the room immediately after class,
but I promised myself that I would speak with him after our next
class. All weekend, while the jets played tag over the city, flying
in formation in preparation for the killing field, I rehearsed
different strategies for approaching him, hoping against hope that I
could breach that wall before it hardened into permanent antagonism
to anyone who carried authority and differed from his received
opinions. I thought, if I can save the flexibility of this one mind I
would have accomplished something in the face of the disaster that
was befalling us.
My student didn't show for class on Monday. Filled
with apprehension, I awaited Wednesday's class. Still he didn't show.
I had lost him. He never came back to class.
Sometime during the following week I was having a
beer with a friend. He had been in Vietnam while I was picketing.
"Hell," he said, "everybody in Arkansas signed up. We didn't know
what we were doing, we just wanted to get away from home." He thought
that now that we had begun the battle we had better stay and finish,
and that there could be a positive outcome--America's self-esteem
could at last rebound from the slough of Vietnam. And he seemed to
think that the sacrifice of lives, ours and theirs, was worth the
gain. And I realized that somewhere along the line I had stopped
dividing the dead into ours and theirs.
I think it was that night that the war came home to
me. I was eating dinner by myself, my mind drifting over this and
that, when I suddenly found myself exclaiming out loud, "Shit, we're
in another war." It was as if I had found some sort of key, and I was
flooded with grief. I began sobbing. All of the turmoil of the
Vietnam War, not just the deaths, but the hardening, the destruction
of hopes at home in America; and the war before that, and its
attendant cold war, with its red scares that had played out in my
fantasies as a giant pogrom (the terror that accompanied the trial
and execution of the Rosenbergs typifies that time for me, not the
question of guilt or innocence, but the lynch-mob glee in the streets
and the newspapers); and even my few memories of the war before that,
my father's war, that killed his friends and corrupted him and my
childhood, came flooding back. I remembered the riots at Columbia,
where I had been knocked unconscious by a cop's blackjack, the
endless protests, and the march on the Pentagon, where, staring into
the muzzles of the machine guns trained on us from emplacements on
the roof, for a brief moment I thought that fundamental changes were
possible. I remember that it felt as if the whole several hundred
thousand of us had climbed a tall mountain to get to the ridiculously
small fence that was supposed to keep us out, which, by the time I
reached it, had been flattened under the multitude of feet; once
crossed, we broke from our narrow parade ranks and spread out across
that lovely grassy field, the late afternoon sun beginning to set
before us, so that we were silhouetted, glowing at the margins as if
transfigured. Everybody, it seemed to me, was smiling--we had made it
to the gates of power, and we hadn't been killed, they couldn't kill
us. And up front, at the ledge that dropped down from the paved
forecourt of the Pentagon, dozens of people were scaling ropes to get
closer, and they seemed suffused with joy and youth, and maybe the
walls would really crumble, and maybe we could find a way to live
beyond the narrowest expediency, and the brutalization, the
victimization, that happened to all of us in those slaughtering
times, could end.
And I remembered the swift disappointment of those
hopes, from which I have never recovered.
In my deepest self, I had never imagined that we
would ever fight another war.
Back at school a few days later, I went into the
cafeteria to grade some papers. All of the tables were occupied, and
I asked a man of about my age if he minded my joining him. I had sat
down and begun sorting my things, when he asked me, "Were you in 'Nam?"
Until his question, I hadn't really noticed him. He
was a tall man in soiled clothes with an unkempt beard, and he had
before him a literacy textbook. He looked as if he might have been a
long-term client of the local Veteran's Hospital.
I answered his question. No, I told him, I had been
a student during the war.
We talked politics for a moment. He backed what we
were doing in Iraq, he said, but his voice, his eyes, his entire
manner seemed unsure. I told him I disagreed, not so much about our
goals as about our methods.
"But the worst thing for me," I said, "is the
flashbacks. I guess it's even worse for you. I think about it all the
time, and I've started having nightmares. I never thought we'd be
here again, and I'm angry as hell. But mostly I'm just sad."
"Yeah," he said.
We sat together for a while in silence, mourning.
