American Necrophilia

One of the most provocative statements of this essay claims that "war is necrophilia". The statement is both startling and cathartic, associating war, specifically the ongoing Iraq war, with all the emotions of shock and disgust that reject necrophilia and simultaneously evoking the sentiment that will haunt the American subconscious for years. The essay excerpted from the newly released book Collateral Damage: America's War Against Iraqi Civilians by Chris Hedges, who is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist for the New York Times. The language Hedges uses and the eye-opening interviews he includes reveal a particularly dark and tormenting image of the Iraq war, an image left out of the mass media spotlight. As I read through the essay, I couldn't help but recall almost every film and book I've seen and read about the Vietnam war.

This reminded me of The Things They Carried when Rat randomly massacres a water buffalo.

And we were approaching, and they had a family dog. And it was barking ferociously, because it was doing its job. And my squad leader, just out of nowhere, just shoots it. And he didn't -- motherf---er -- he shot it, and it went in the jaw and exited out.

This reminded me of Full Metal Jacket, when one of the squad members (was it Cowboy?) posed with corpse of a Nothern Vietnamese soldier.

... in one incident, soldiers laughed as an Iraqi corpse fell from the back of a truck. "Take a picture of me and this motherf---er," said one of the soldiers who had been in Mejía's squad in 3rd Platoon, putting his arm around the corpse.

Of course, as Hedges himself describes, soldiers now in Iraq use the term "haji" exactly as how soldiers used the term "gook" in Vietnam. I never really realized how close those books and films were to reality. I suppose I had some abstract knowledge that American soldiers perpetrated a number of war atrocities during the Vietnam War, not limitted to the My Lai massacre, corpse mutilations, and random napalm droppings, but the US involvement in Vietnam ended a decade before I was born and so it seemed very distant. Given that the Iraq War is progressing right now, the depravity imbued in those acts of violence suddenly appear much more vividly. Additionally, whereas the existence of atrocities perpetrated by the US during the Vietnam war is a generally accepted fact, the same does not apply for the ongoing Iraq war.