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STORIES OF WAR

Unfortunately, an all-too common result of cultural conflict is war. On the playground, we may teach little kids to “use their words” instead of fists, but as adults, we often resort to war. Cultural conflicts have grown into wars over religion, politics, property, geography, and values. There have been wars of aggression, wars of defense, just wars, illegal wars, good wars, lost wars, wars of conquest, genocides, battles that become wars, and wars that wound down to become battles.

But who is the enemy in these cultural conflicts that escalate into war? Who starts the hostilities? Who is the victim? Who is to blame? These are not easy questions once the fighting begins. The expression “history is written by the victors” suggests that whichever side wins the war gets to answer those questions for itself and the rest of the world. Even though there may be a grain of truth to this, the reality is more complex, as you will explore in this Conversation.

The ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus said that “in war, truth is the first casualty,” meaning that the truth about what happens during war is difficult to decipher, as well as the reasons for going to war in the first place. Two thousand years later, a Prussian military advisor, Carl von Clausewitz, wrote, “War is an area of uncertainty; three quarters of the things on which all action in War is based are lying in a fog of uncertainty to a greater or lesser extent.” Likely agreeing with Aeschylus and von Clausewitz about the difficulty of identifying the truth in war, Vietnam War veteran and writer Tim O’Brien says that it’s equally difficult to determine the truth of a story written about war. He writes:

In a true war story, if there’s a moral at all, it’s like the thread that makes the cloth. You can’t tease it out. You can’t extract the meaning without unraveling the deeper meaning. And in the end, really, there’s nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe “Oh.”

True war stories do not generalize. They do not indulge in abstraction or analysis.

For example: War is hell. As a moral declaration the old truism seems perfectly true, and yet because it abstracts, because it generalizes, I can’t believe it with my stomach. Nothing turns inside.

It comes down to gut instinct. A true war story, if truly told, makes the stomach believe.

In this Conversation, you will consider the difficulty of telling the stories of war by reading poems by soldiers who fought and, in some cases, died in battle, an essay that challenges the right of the victor to tell the story for the loser, and short stories that ask us to determine the truth of other people’s stories. Because of the nature of the topic, many of the texts will not be comfortable to read and will challenge your notions of war and truth.

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