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Hallock, Daniel W. Hell, Healing and Resistance: Veterans Speak. The Plough Publishing House: Farmington, PA: 1998. 429p. paper.

“At the moment I pulled the trigger, my life changed forever...I realized who I was: nothing but a killer.”
Doug, an American sniper in Central America

“I’ve seen all the movies about Vietnam. But, I don’t see movies that talk about the real person: what the military took out of that person, and what they put back in.”

Walter, a Vietnam helicopter gunner

It may be naive to admit this, but I am continuously surprised that commercial products in the forms of novels and fiction film tend to so regularly and spectacularly supersede the real thing: the documentary and true narrative. After all, I know enough about Western culture, and American life in particular, not to be surprised that the films Schindler’s List, about the Holocaust, and Saving Private Ryan, about war, have had Hollywood’s (and the world’s) highest honors bestowed upon them. These are well-produced and directed products, planned, well-executed fantasies. However, the real has much more of an impact for me exactly because it is real, perhaps disjoined, prolonged, messy, and with an impact which goes on much, much longer than the hours it takes to watch in the comfort of a movie theater. Well, we do like to be entertained, and I guess it is easier to justify genocide and war as entertainment if it is fictionalized and not real—and thanks to that, at least! It is why we can view these subjects as desirable for entertainment that is problematic for me. Is it testosterone?

Hell, Healing and Resistance is borne of written narratives and interviews of veterans of war conducted lovingly by a member of the Bruderhof Community, a movement founded in the teachings of Jesus Christ. It is both a valuable and disturbing addition to the pantheon of books about war. As the best books about war are really about the utter urgency of achieving peace, the stories therein, primarily of survivors of both world wars, Korea, Vietnam, and the Gulf Wars, shout for the end of “killing for profit and power.”

Beginning with the story of Lee, the book charts lives shattered by war. When Lee went to Vietnam, he was not clear on either his purpose or the purpose of the war. He found increasingly that he could stay high on marijuana. Pot was the great buddy bonder of Vietnam; thus meaning was found in altering one’s consciousness rather than in the muddied rationales for fighting. Lee also found solace with Chi, a girl he loved. They eventually married with the blessing of her family, but the American military refused to recognize their union, even after appropriate documentation of the ceremony was proffered. Frantic and depressed at not being able to take his wife (and child, by this time), home to the states, Lee met with them just before his departure, at a romantic spot they had used before, and killed them, watching in numbed horror as they tumbled into the sea. Lee married again in the states, naming a daughter after Chi, but he was haunted by his first wife’s memory, and his new marriage failed. In the years ensuing, Lee drifted in and out of jobs, feeling increasingly isolated from the society which dispensed him to war. He wound up in a psychiatric hospital, where he proceeded to mend. Only many years later was he able to speak about his war experiences.

Lee’s story may be the most intensely disturbing in the book because he managed to kill two people he loved dearly: soldiers, after all, are trained in depersonalization: to hit targets and avoid connecting their humanity with that of the “enemy,” who may not be an enemy at all but simply an innocent caught up in the throes of war, as were the 500,000 children under age five years who died in the period 1990-1997 as the result of economic sanctions imposed on Iraq by the Gulf War. Unfortunately, Lee’s story is not the most disturbing to read—all these stories are disturbing, simply because of the horror they evoke. Hell is heavy with similar stories of men, women, children, and parents whose lives were irreparably, irrevocably changed by war.

The book’s structure takes the reader on a progression from selling the idea that war is good (“Be all that you can be”), to the devastating physical and emotional changes that war causes, to the effects of war on those outside the mainstream: blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans, etc.—but not, unfortunately, gay and lesbian people, which I hope will be included in future books when inclusivity of human experience is the goal. In addition, the book considers the effects of the anti-war movement, and attaining peace, including “inner” peace involving healing spaces and managing survivor guilt. Hell is directed to war veterans, parents of children considering war as a career (R.O.T.C.), high school personnel, those 18-25 who are most vulnerable to the military’s seductions of enlistment, and peace and justice advocates.

Hell is powerful for its real-life accounts of the destruction of war both immediate and long-lasting: think of Agent Orange and the years it has taken veterans to force the military to recognize its effects and offer some compensation for it—it is like reading an account of how the military even makes war against its own warriors! But, it is also powerful in revelations which suggest that war might be fought unnecessarily (there are some who believe that some wars are fought necessarily). Take, for example, the documented fact that the United States government knew that the Japanese were planning a surrender before the atomic bomb was dropped on hundreds of thousands of civilians.

Hell ends with calls for peace with which readers of the Peace Letter are acutely familiar. It does not, however, do what perhaps another, similar book, must: seriously and specifically consider making a peaceable world out of one which seems to be fighting some war, some place, all of the time. It’s a wonder that we have not blown ourselves to smithereens, isn’t it? Let the discussion on peace begin, then, with Dwight D. Eisenhower:

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”

Frank Grant is a volunteer with the Washington Peace Center.

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