October 2002

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

Looking War in the Face

James Carroll's most recent book is Constantine's Sword. His columns appear regularly in the Boston Globe, this one on 9/10/02.

Photographic memorial to 9/11 created by homeless veteran Russ Peres, which was on display in Boston's City Hall Plaza this September © Ellen Shub

September 11. The heart-wrenching anniversary deserves, amid so much else, an urgent meditation on the subject of war. A nation at war, on the cusp of wider war, we are in danger of defining ourselves by war entire--all within the mystical aura of this shattering date. Are we being true to what was laid bare a year ago tomorrow? Do we rightly memorialize those who died so violently by making them patrons of more violence?

War is not machines. War is not threats. War is not strategy, tactics, martial music, or the proper source of a political party's advantage. War is not a way of proving manhood. To say that war is hell, implying a realm apart, is also wrong. Wars are fought no more in hell than heaven. Wars are fought, alas, on earth. Those who carry its weight are the last to know of war's transcendent meanings. They are deaf to its music. Just war, unjust war--all the same to them because they are dead.

"As I look back over the five years of my service as secretary of war" from 1940 to 1945, Henry L. Stimson wrote after World War II, "I see too many stern and heartrending decisions to be willing to pretend that war is anything else than what it is. The face of war is the face of death; death is an inevitable part of every order that a wartime leader gives."

Do our wartime leaders know this today? The cavalier belligerence with which President Bush and Cheney-
Rumsfeld-Rice speak of America's impending war against Iraq raises the key question: Do they know that death is about to become our nation's purpose? Death of soldiers. Death of old men, women, and children. Deaths of Arabs, Americans, perhaps Israelis. Deaths of the many who will die in consequential violence of legitimized "preventive war."

Tomorrow the rebuilt Pentagon will be rededicated. The marvel of its repair in one year recalls the greater marvel of its original construction in 16 months, a feat supervised by Henry Stimson. But the building was the least of his achievements, all of which were reduced in the end to a vivid sense of the actuality of war. He had overseen the entire US campaign with unflinching resolve--even to the ordering of its nuclear conclusion. Yet war reversed itself in him. The atomic bombs, he wrote, "made it wholly clear that we must never have another war. This is the lesson men and leaders everywhere must learn."

A year ago tomorrow the face of death stared back at America. For a few moments, endlessly replayed, the horror of war was anything but abstract. For months after ward, the individual faces of September's lost men and women stared out from the newspaper pages that gave us their names and stories. We felt a fitting rage aimed at their murderers but knew that rage can dishonor the dead by making them faceless victims again. Named and mourned, the September dead were our epiphany of war's actuality. The force of such death, real death, must lead--Stimson's lesson--to the reversal of what causes it.

Did the world change a year ago? Claiming it did, Bush pursues war more energetically than ever. Yet is that a sign of true change? Secretary Stimson was certain that the world had changed in August 1945. For sure he had changed. In his last act as secretary of war, he made a shocking proposal to President Truman. Thinking of the bomb he had himself built and used, Stimson urged Truman to make an immediate diplomatic approach to the Soviet Union, to avoid "a secret armament race of a rather desperate character." The secretary wanted a US-USSR covenant that would stop work on atomic weapons at once, impound existing bombs, renounce future use, and openly share atomic research for peaceful purposes.

All of this with the notoriously unreliable Stalin? Stimson anticipated the objection. Before his service in World War II he had been secretary of war (1911-13) when guns were primed for World War I and secretary of state (1929-33) when Adolf Hitler came to power. "The chief lesson I have learned in a long life," he told Truman, "is that the only way you can make a man trustworthy is to trust him."

Stimson's radical proposal was rejected, he retired a week later, and the desperate arms race ensued. But the Stimson proposal stands as a marker both of the road not taken at that critical juncture and of the road that yet remains open ahead of humanity. War is unnecessary death, period. Once a leader has seen its true face, the resolution of conflict by other means will be that leader's undying purpose. Henry L. Stimson haunts our choices. He made his proposal on Sept. 11, 1945.

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