War Stories, by Bill Wanlund
The stirring anthem from Les Misérables, “Do you hear the people sing?,” came to mind as I researched this Worth Noting column, especially the part about “the songs of angry men.” These days it’s probably not “the beating of the heart” echoing “the beating of the drum.” More likely it’s the drumming of diplomats’ nervous fingers as the possibility of war, somehow, begins to seem increasingly real. (And, you’re welcome for the earworm.)
Dr. Elizabeth Samet, Professor of English Lit at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, delivers an elegant essay in Foreign Policy Oct. 29, dealing with the relationship between war and the stories we tell about it. “Nations weave myths out of victories and erase defeats with the promise of future triumphs,” she writes in The Military-Narrational Complex: What Stories Do in an Age of Conflict. “They tend to calibrate ‘bad’ wars against ‘good’ ones while memorializing the latter with a wistfulness that lures them into vainglorious and ultimately inglorious quests for new conflicts.”
My family knew Homer must’ve been the real deal because my parents had the Reader’s Digest Condensed Classics volumes of The Iliad and The Odyssey on their bookshelves but nary a word by Herodotus or the other buzzkillers. As for me, my ten-year-old self couldn’t be bothered with the Classics – except for the fighting.
Samet’s article takes us to the Trojan War and back, with many detours along the way. It is presented with the obligatory official disclaimer: “The views expressed here are her own and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.” That’s no doubt true, though thoughtful commanders might consider it useful outside reading, coming as it does after Secretary of Defense and/or War Pete Hegseth’s Sept. 30 star-studded pep rally for generals and admirals. At that event, Hegseth put the military officers on notice that they and their units must be on a “war footing.”
I thought about that while reading Samet’s FP article when I came across her observation that, “Anticipating and preparing for war leads quite naturally to accepting its inevitability,” which sounds like a warning, or at least a note of caution, about SecWar’s dictum.
The Fox's Tale...
Within the nature and surroundings of her workplace, Samet’s professional world is literature, and she looks to Thomas Hardy’s 1886 novel, The Mayor of Casterbridge, for an “interpersonal version of geopolitical misconstructions.’’ Samet uses Hardy to explain why we tend to misunderstand the motives of others: “We attribute to an enemy a power of consistent action which we never find in ourselves or in our friends.”
She expands the thought: “When it comes to violent conflict, the costs of this tendency are supremely high. With stunning celerity, possibility becomes probability and then certainty, as readers reject the quiet, circuitous, and unglamorous narratives of prudential compromise, ambiguous diplomacy, or incremental progress.” Samet then lets contemporary author and critic Carlos Lozada cut through the syllables: “[T]ales of war tend to be more exciting than stories of peace.”
Samet continues, “It is a truism that history is written by the winners…At war’s end, the narrative that develops valorizes physical courage, glorifies battlefield heroics, and vilifies hubris. It distorts the relationship between war and politics while also devaluing two decidedly unromantic virtues that can prevent war—prudence and restraint—and ignoring the role of chance and disorder.”
The Hawk’s Tale…
How did we get to this point? Samet rolls us back to the Trojan War, and specifically, “The version of events found primarily in the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Homeric epics that narrate the war (to retrieve the lovely Helen from Troy) and its aftermath, serves as a template for how many people continue to imagine war, honor, heroism, and a whole set of related issues...This story retains a hold on people to a degree that most are likely scarcely aware of. It is the ultimate hawk’s tale.”
Other accounts of the war come down to us from the past, but Homer’s is the version with staying power. Why? Samet says it’s because “real-life warriors have, for millennia, found inspiration in the hawkish Homeric version of events, and not the dovish alternative. Soldiers, whether they believe it to be fact or legend, have held up Homer’s world as an ideal against which to measure their own behavior.”
Like any good lecturer, Samet finishes with a question: “What then does this mean for the practitioner, the policymaker, and the prognosticator, and for all those who produce, participate in, or hungrily consume war stories?” Or, for that matter, the PD practitioner who might be called upon to explain a war to foreign audiences?
“Novelists—those modern counterparts to the epic poets—have something to teach all those constituencies,” Samet says. “Narrative has a seemingly relentless, ungovernable momentum, but humans retain a control over war stories that does not extend to war itself. War is a realm of chance, accident, and volatility over which its participants can only ever hope to work a small measure of influence.” Nevertheless, quixotic or not, it doesn’t hurt to try.
“Meanwhile, she concludes, “someone is surely already working on the story of the next war. Savvy readers might recognize that the story of that brewing war is just that, a story—and not yet an inevitability.”
Bill Wanlund is a PDCA Board Member, retired Foreign Service Officer, and freelance writer in the Washington, DC, area. His column, Worth Noting, appears occasionally in our member newsletter Public DiplomacyToday and in this blog; it seeks to address public diplomacy and related topics of interest to all.