Photojournalist Tim Hetherington’s gritty photographs of soldiers showcase the futility of war at all levels. The images will be published by Umbrage next spring in a book entitled ‘Long Story Bit by Bit.’ The story of war, indeed, is a long shadow in the individual memories and collective consciousness of those who find themselves in the middle of the battle they have been commissioned to fight.
“The Ghost Road” is a Booker Prize winner from Pat Barker, while “The Sutras of Abu Ghraib” is Aidan Delgado’s widely popular war memoir. The former is a story of recovery from psychological trauma in the mentally-wrenching World War 1, while the latter is moral victory from a very immoral battle. The first is about the French Front, while the latter is about the US invasion surges in Iraq. The backdrop for both is, understandably, fighting. The novels’ time frame difference is 90 years. Over a span of nearly a century, realities haven’t changed. The soldier is still scarred. The conclusion also remains the same: no one wins in a war. The insight hasn’t changed either: war does not end for those who survive. Grief and horror are the real costs of war. Tragedy is its only legacy.
In “The Ghost Road,” the protagonist Billy Prior becomes a psychological outpatient in the shell-shock ward of Craiglockhart Hospital in 1918, during the last few months of the war. In his ‘shell-shock’ therapies, the horrors of war are allowed to ‘come back to the front’ of his already shattered mind. The war portrayed in “The Ghost Road” is seen as insanity. It is the mental and emotional wounds of war that should be healed. It is also, therefore, insane why Prior still wants to return to the World War I French Front for a fourth time after experiencing three tours of duty. Life is as he says, “We are all mad here.”
In today’s so-called ‘global wars,’ war becomes more than physical endangerment and psychological torture. A battle-scarred and enraged society has turned war into a moral issue. The American invasion of Iraq has gone beyond the psychological or psychiatric predicament for the American soldiers in the surge. The definitions of good and bad have hung on the balance on the battlefield. Only victory matters, since wars have become an exercise of urgency, as well. The American soldiers in the Iraq war have a moral trauma to survive.
In the war memoir “The Sutras of Abu Ghraib,” the author Army Reservist Aidan Delgado describes the attempts of his commanders to suppress the truth about Abu Ghraib, one of the hardest-hit cities in Iraq that was devastated by the US invasion of the country. His commander wanted him to make it appear as if the atrocities and human rights violations committed by the American soldiers against Iraqi civilians were just rumors, even asking him to throw all pictures of the place. Delgado’s moral torture was soon transformed into moral courage that took the form of this war memoir.
As photojournalist Tim Hetherington has so emotionally captured in his pictures of soldiers in Afghanistan, it becomes too palpable not to accept that the soldier only knows disillusionment, and the war front will always be ugly. The soldier has a choice to forgive. The psychologically scarred soldier will forgive society, while the morally tortured one will forgive himself. But in both cases, the soldier who stops denying the truth is the one who can start to heal.
Via The Independent
