Moral Combat

Chris Hedges On War, Faith, And Fundamentalism

As a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist for the New York Times, National Public Radio, and other media outlets, Chris Hedges has spent much of his adult life on the front lines, reporting on war. He has borne witness to atrocities and given a voice to victims of oppressive regimes around the globe. His writing paints such a clear picture of war that it is sometimes difficult to read.

As a boy, instead of reading comic books or The Hobbit, Hedges immersed himself in works about the Spanish Civil War and dreamed of fighting the fascists like his hero George Orwell. But he didn’t start out to be a war correspondent. Hedges grew up the son of a Presbyterian minister, and in 1975, six days after having graduated from Colgate College, he packed up to attend Harvard Divinity School. While working toward his degree, he accepted a position at a church in Roxbury, a poor, predominantly African American Boston neighborhood. Hedges preached on Sundays, worked with inner-city youth, and harbored high hopes of helping people. But he discovered that the “gentle pastor” routine was not going to work for him there. The neighborhood boys challenged his authority and made threats, and he got tough, cursing at them and even getting physical, then hating himself for it.

One day Hedges discovered that two boys, both heroin addicts, were waiting in his house to kill him. It was time for him to go — and it was then he realized that he could go, whereas the boys he “served” could not: when it came down to it, he was one of the privileged, the oppressors. It was a turning point in his life. In his book Losing Moses on the Freeway: The Ten Commandments in America (Free Press), he writes, “The darkness I discovered in Roxbury was my darkness, our darkness. . . . It is knowledge of this darkness alone that makes faith possible.”

From there Hedges went out to become a war correspondent, first in Central America, then in “refugee camps in Gaza; the un feeding stations in the southern Sudan; and the cold, murderous streets of Sarajevo.” After many years of living in gruesome and brutal war zones, Hedges realized he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, and he decided to take a break. He reconnected with the ordinary life of work and family and allowed himself to be warmed again by human contact.

Hedges lives in New Jersey with his wife, actor Eunice Wong, and their three young children. He is the author of numerous books, including American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America (Free Press); War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (Public Affairs); and, most recently, I Don’t Believe in Atheists (Free Press). In the acknowledgments of his latest book, he writes of his family: “They matter most. This is just a book. They are my life.”

In addition to writing books and articles, Hedges lectures and has a weekly column on TruthDig.com. In person he projects the kind of passion that used to be called “religious.” He is serious but gentle, angry but wise.

Saltman: In War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning you say that you became “hooked on war.” What exactly is the source of the high?

Hedges: I say I got “hooked” because combat can resemble, in the span of twenty-four hours or less, every possible drug trip, from speedlike adrenaline rushes, to hallucinogenic landscapes of eviscerated bodies, to zombielike states caused by sleep deprivation. It’s all there, and I drank deep from that dark elixir.

War also gives you a sense of purpose, a sense of solidarity. At one point in my reporting I met a group of Bosnians who’d suffered during the war, and yet they missed it. They were in despair because the war was over. They’d never have that epic conflict to define them again.

Saltman: You write, “Combat is Zen. There is no past, no future.” What do you mean?

Hedges: I mean that combat is a Zen-like experience. You’re more aware of your surroundings than ever before. Even colors are brighter. You are totally present.

Saltman: You went into many life-threatening situations. Did you have a death wish?

Hedges: No, but I would take tremendous risks if I believed the payoff was worth it. For instance, when a bunch of civilians were killed in a town in Kosovo and the authorities had blocked all the roads, I walked in, even though it was dangerous, because otherwise those civilian deaths wouldn’t have been recorded. But I admit I was walking in also because I liked the rush of danger. It’s all wrapped up together. I think war correspondents aren’t always honest about the dark motives that push them. People like getting as close as they can to the flame without getting burned. It’s like Winston Churchill said: “There’s nothing quite as exhilarating as being shot at without success.”

By the time I ended up in the Balkans, however, I was disintegrating: morally, physically, psychologically. I realized that I had to break free from that lifestyle, or it would kill me. I was probably carrying around a few hundred traumatic or violent mental images, and I felt alienated from the world. I couldn’t connect with anyone, including the people who loved me the most. I wasn’t an alcoholic, but I would drink when I couldn’t sleep, because at night you revisit the trauma, and you wake up in the morning exhausted and numb. Two or three nights of that in a row is brutal. You feel like you’re at the bottom of a black hole, and no one can reach you. You drink at night so you won’t remember your dreams.

Saltman: How long did this last?

Hedges: It probably took me three years to pull myself back together. I did it mostly by connecting with my kids: becoming a “soccer dad,” making lunches, going to school plays. It was that, more than anything else, that healed me. I needed to work my way back to love. Dostoyevsky said, “What is hell? Hell is the inability to love.” I think when you’re so cut off that you can’t love, then you die. 

Saltman: Did you get into therapy?

Hedges: I did, but it didn’t work. Although I’m a great believer in therapy, I have this tendency to want to out-intellectualize the therapist. By the time I made an appointment, I’d read every book on post-traumatic stress disorder. I drove the therapist crazy. After three or four sessions, he’d had enough.

Saltman: I assume that war affects different people differently, depending on how they approach it.

Hedges: I went to war as a journalist and an idealist. Other people might go to war because they’re voyeurs or because they’re adrenaline junkies or because they have a kind of prurient fascination with violence. I didn’t want to see dead bodies — I avoided seeing them when I didn’t have to — but some other reporters went to them like they were roadkill. When you spend as much time as I did in a war culture, it owns you and perverts you and destroys you.

Saltman: Whether you’re a soldier or a reporter?

Hedges: Well, there’s a big difference between being a soldier and being a reporter. I never killed or shot at anyone, for starters. Another difference is that I went to that region by choice and believed, despite all of my demons, that it was worthwhile to go to Sarajevo and report on the siege. Many veterans I’ve met didn’t join the military to take part in a particular war, and some look at their combat service as “a waste,” whether they were in Vietnam or have just come back from Iraq. I don’t look at my efforts as wasted, and I think this allows me to cope with the trauma in ways that people who were actively engaged in the fighting often can’t.

Saltman: In Losing Moses on the Freeway you write about George Orwell going off to fight fascism, and you say, “I wanted that epic battle to define my own life.” How much of that battle is an interior one?

Hedges: I think all battles are both interior and exterior. They force us to confront our flaws and deformities. In war there’s a huge divide between the powerless and the powerful. And when I covered wars, I was part of the class of the powerful. I didn’t carry a weapon, but I often had bodyguards, and that breeds a kind of sickness. I had it in spades.

Saltman: Do you think the U.S. is hooked on war?

Hedges: It’s the myth of war we’re hooked on, not the reality. There’s a huge divide between those who experience war on the ground and those who imbibe this mythic tale of honor and heroism and glory, which is rendered hollow and obscene after thirty seconds of combat.

Saltman: For you, what constitutes a just war?

Hedges: I don’t like the word just, but I certainly supported the intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo. I don’t think it was handled well, but I supported it. The lesson of the Holocaust is that if you have the capacity to stop a genocide and you don’t act, then you’re culpable. The U.S. was culpable in Rwanda and Cambodia.

Saltman: So you think war can be a moral endeavor?

Hedges: The world rarely offers us a choice between the moral and the immoral. It’s usually a choice between the immoral and the more immoral. That’s why moral decision making is so tough. Who was more moral in the Warsaw ghetto uprising during World War ii: those people who didn’t join the uprising, because they had children and feared for their safety, or those who led the suicidal fight against the Nazis? You can’t say one was more moral than the other. It depended on who you were.

When I lived in Sarajevo, if the Serbs had broken through the city’s perimeter, a third of the population would probably have been killed and the rest driven into refugee camps. When faced with the real possibility of their own death and the death of their families and neighbors, most people will pick up a weapon and fight back. But it’s not easy for the average person to use violence, which is why the gangsters of Sarajevo were the ones who organized the defenses of the city. It’s easier to be a pacifist in the U.S. It’s only when the structure of a society gets torn down that you find out what you are really made of. Primo Levi and Dostoyevsky understood this, because they saw it happen. When we lead lives of opulence and safety, we have only illusions of who we are.

Saltman: So it’s impossible to know who you are in this country?

Hedges: No, but it’s harder, because we have to work to find out who’s being killed in our name to sustain our society, whether it’s happening in East New York or on the streets of Fallujah. Most people don’t want to look at that. We prefer to think of ourselves as nice people.

One of the terrifying truths of war is that we all have the capacity for murder. In a time of war most of us are at least silent accomplices, if not active participants. It’s frighteningly easy to co-opt decent, moral people into the project of killing, especially young males. Every roadblock I ever was stopped at in Africa or Latin America or the Balkans was manned by drunk eighteen-year-olds with automatic rifles. When you empower a young kid by handing him an automatic weapon and allowing him to kill with impunity, it takes him four days to become God. That’s what is happening with the American soldiers and the mercenary army we have unleashed on the streets of Iraqi cities.

The Iraq War is different from the first Gulf War, which, with the exception of the heavy bombing of southern Iraq, was a clash between mechanized units in the open desert. This war bears all the classic characteristics of a foreign occupation, like the Israeli occupation of Gaza, or our occupation of Vietnam, or the French occupation of Algeria. A war of occupation is always the most venal and brutal kind of war, because murder is a greater part of it — and by “murder” I mean taking the life of somebody who doesn’t have the capacity to harm you, as opposed to killing other armed forces. We know from a Lancet study that probably six hundred thousand Iraqi civilians have been killed, while later estimates are as high as 1.2 million. These kinds of conflicts are what psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton calls “atrocity-producing situations.” A soldier in the occupation of Iraq can go a year and never see the people who are trying to kill him or her. In that situation the lines between a hostile population and the enemy blur, and it becomes legitimate to strike at anyone. The machine guns mounted on the top of Humvees are belt-fed weapons that lay down lethal fire over a broad area, and they are being used daily in Iraqi cities and villages. When you think about this, you begin to get a sense of how deadly this war has become for Iraqi civilians, and how, rather than being a force for stability, we are contributing to the violence.

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