John Dryden once wrote, “Beware of the fury of the patient man.” And there cannot be a man more patient than one who has gone to war, faced bullets and seen his comrades die. And when they come back from battle, nearly all are enraged: “Wasn’t there a better way for both sides?”
The recent series on the Vietnam war produced by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick and written by Geoff Ward (a long time India friend and wildlife lover), makes just this point. After Vietnam, America may still be looking for a war to win, but each time it must depend on hawks on the sidelines to send innocent young people to fight, die, and sometimes return.
Donald Rumsfeld, George Bush’s secretary of defence, never saw real war. That did not keep him from supporting America’s Vietnam involvement. Vicepresident Dick Cheney evaded the Vietnam draft five times, but later his company, Halliburton, made masses of money from hostile engagements in the Middle East, including Iraq. Many army personnel who breathe hell fire never really had the experience of fire raining from hell, or combat duty. The Greek tragedian, Aeschylus was right: the first casualty of war is truth.
After all is said and done, after the war is lost or won, the futility sets in. Wars have always been about land, but how important is that today? It once was, in our dim past, when horsemen fought over territory; acreage was then the source of wealth and power.
To aggrandise themselves, kingdoms in history needed more serfs, more tribute, more fields, more power. Then with colonialism, territory meant raw material and captive markets. That too is now past tense. If land is a driver of war today it is not on account of its inherent qualities but because religious and cultural hate is best expressed through geography.
National boundaries are like the front office; the real action happens elsewhere, globally, in this case. Toyota has sold more than 5 million of its prized hybrid automobiles across the world and not just in Japan. It employs more than 3,50,000 employees and most of them are not Japanese. The largest market for Rolls Royce cars, till recently, was China, not the United Kingdom.
Tata produces Jaguars and Landrovers, once British signature vehicles. Bofors, to nail the issue, does not make guns to fight its neighbours but sells them elsewhere for other neighbours to fight. The AK-47 is Russian, but the world uses it and some of them are hated terrorists.
It is in this context we must place Sushma Swaraj’s publicised comment that while India was setting up AIIMS, IITs, IIMs and space research, Pakistan was funding terror groups to conquer Indian lands. Obviously, India is winning because it has invested in knowledge, information technology
It is in this context we must place Sushma Swaraj’s publicised comment that while Pakistan was funding terror groups to conquer Indian lands, India was setting up AIIMS, IITs, IIMs and space research – all of these mock borders but make wealthand exports; all of these mock borders but make wealth.
That territorial conquests mattered less than global market domination was beginning to be noticed nearly a century ago. This is why many hoped that World War I, and, when that failed, then World War II, would be the war to end all wars. Which self-respecting medieval knight would have thought this way?
In terms of actual warfare, land can also be misleading. In 1968, American and South Vietnamese soldiers won the Aap Bia mountains on their 10th attempt, and after wasting hundreds of lives. Yet, within a fortnight it had lost its strategic significance and the American led forces abandoned what they had fought so hard to claim. It was nicknamed “Hamburger Hill” by US soldiers for their enemies, with their accurate ambushes, sliced bodies like a hamburger machine grinds meat, even of those who had just slicked back their hair.
Indian soldiers walked up the Icchogil Canal to the gates of Lahore in 1965, but came back soon after for territory was not on their minds. To this day people in India rue this decision, but did we really want to sit in a Pakistani city? Land was precious in history, but not today. Our brains have yet to process what our hearts already know. This is why China’s ambition to create islands in its southern seas is pure vanity; extravagant, but also anachronistic.
The current series on the Vietnam war turns this poignant lesson into a metaphor. As land in this engagement was so far away, its irrelevance now stood out dramatically. This fact is otherwise hidden by homegrown prejudice and conceit. On the other hand, such is the story of all wars and no true soldier has ever sung in praise of bullets and blood. The experience of death up close and very personal makes nearly every one of them pacifists at heart. When brains and limbs are scattered randomly over a land that has little intrinsic worth, words can’t express the lies of war.
So next time the bugle blows, catch that sadness in its tone. Above victory and defeat, it remembers most of all the futility of beautiful, young lives now lost. It is this that makes its notes waft low; the musical counterpart of a mother’s weep. But you won’t hear it when the battle is raging. For your ears to be ready, tempers must soften and hard hearts tenderise. Otherwise, war is bred in the bones.
