My lit class last year began with a chapter from a book by Tim O'Brien entitled "How to Tell a True War Story." His answer in a word: lie. War is so absurdly heinous and ridiculous and glorious that a story from war that actually happened cannot constitute a true war story; it can't capture the beautiful chaos of it all for those who have not experienced it for themselves. Essentially, one must stretch the truth so far as to make a creative nonfiction piece whose bounds are just beyond those of reality. It must resemble reality, but in such a warped way as to twist the stomachs of the readers.
This being the first war story of the year, and my being a strict pacifist and therefore viewing all killing as unjustifiable, I could only think well, hell, why twist what's already twisted? You can get your point across just fine without unnecessary surrealistic details. Following O'Brien with Kovic's Born on the Fourth of July only seemed to serve my point: he killed a corporal from Georgia--one of his own men--why exaggerate that? But therein lied O'Brien's point: to read "I killed the corporal" and to kill the corporal are vastly, incomprehensibly different. So, how do you bridge the gap? When asked "what's it like," how do you express it? The truth is no longer any good: it's too mundane. "I killed someone" only evokes murmurs of "oh" or "I'm sorry" from the listener, but there is so much more behind that simple phrase. What does it mean to kill someone? There is the sorrow, yes, and the dread, the disgust, the guilt. But what about the adrenaline, and the exhilaration, and the power? How do you convey the wonder with the horror in those three words?
I studied war my whole junior year, wrote numerous essays on it--the good and the bad, their intersections and their distances--and still have not found an adequate answer to that question. It's not just that I can't put it into words: I don't understand it. Maybe you'll think I'm morbid to pair war with love, but I think the same dilemma appears in both: how to portray what can only be experienced? Words are marvelous tools, but there are not enough, and none carry the emotional horsepower necessary to describe the sensations of love and of killing. I have only a glimpse into the latter, and that only because I was forced through Saving Private Ryan, Black Hawk Down, The Deer Hunter, MASH, Grave of the Fireflies; through Born on the Fourth of July, The Sun Also Rises, Journey's End, Slaughterhouse-Five, Catch-22.
I am still a committed pacifist, but I no longer believe in the two-dimensional Disney version of war, nor the blood-guts-and-glory Black Hawk Down version. I believe it possesses a cold beauty, though one I still barely comprehend. I'll leave you with the first seen that convinced me killing could be beautiful:
This scene is from Saving Private Ryan (the light in the background is a bomb going off). It’s poor quality, but I couldn’t find the original scene; however, I found this remake online--check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYQ8VA2Nrx8
No comments:
Post a Comment