The Thin Red Line by James Jones
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Modern State in Action

The Thin Red Line continues the futile tradition of telling the truth about warfare. Steven Crane and Norman Mailer are James Jones’s American predecessors but the genre is universal. The truth is that war is tedious, sordid, and soul-destroying, as well as harmful to life. There are no winners, only broken survivors who share an experience of embarrassment masquerading as camaraderie. No one recovers.

The most remarkable feature of war-memoirs by common foot soldiers is their detailed similarity. Reading them without knowing the era in which they were written, each could be attributed to to any of the numerous wars of the 20th century and into the 21st. The descriptions of military life and combat are more or less the same and certainly consistent, from the World Wars to the subsequent conflicts in East Asia and then in the Middle East. Adjusting for weaponry and participants, the numerous 19th century conflicts from the Napoleonic to the American Civil Wars fit the same existential patterns. The repetition seems inevitable:

“One of the hazards of professional soldiering was that every twenty years, regular as clockwork, that portion of the human race to which you belonged, whatever its politics or ideal about humanity, was going to get itself involved in a war, and you might have to fight in it.”

It is obvious that the private soldier physically suffers. What is less obvious is that this suffering is intentional and has less to do with military necessity or incompetence than military discipline. Foot-soldiers are positively instructed in the art of being cattle. This means bearing the misery of living in rain, mud, and extreme temperatures often without adequate food or water, with nothing but the occasional impotent bellow in response. To survive that misery soldiers establish their own hierarchy within the official one. This informal structure is enforced by subtle but persuasive violence when required and demands the adoption of an appropriate neurotic persona:

“… everybody lived by a selected fiction. Nobody was really what he pretended to be. It was as if everybody made up a fiction story about himself, and then he just pretended to everybody that that was what he was.”

Such fiction allows them to line up placidly in an orderly fashion for feeding, shelter, and transport to whatever abattoir has been chosen by their superiors.

If anything, however, the common soldier’s mental and spiritual anguish is even more intense, because more relentless than his physical suffering. He lives in a state of fear. And there as many kinds of fear for an infantryman as there are kinds of snow for an Inuit. Fear of the enemy and the randomness of receiving a fatal projectile of one sort or another is obvious. But this fear is acute, and although intense, relatively infrequent and transient. Chronic fears of one’s superiors, and the opinions of one’s fellows, one’s reputation among the folks at home, and of the consequences of non-compliance fill in the gaps between ‘contacts’:

“When he analyzed it, as he tried to do now, he could find only one reason why he was here, and that was because he would be ashamed for people to think he was a coward, embarrassed to be put to jail.”

Then, of course, there is the act of intentional killing. Aside from the occasional psychopath, to kill, even at a distance, is traumatic. One may be trained to do it but this training cannot erase a lifetime of prohibition. Guilt for the taking of life is not something that can be mitigated by the shibboleths of duty, survival, or necessity. It is probably undecidable whether killing or watching others being killed is the more traumatic event in a soldier’s career. To kill inevitably provokes the question ‘to what end?’ And guilt is implicit in the only honest answer possible:

“It had all been done, and was being done, for property. One nation wanted, felt it needed, probably did need, more property; and the only way to get it was to take it away from those other nations who had already laid claim to it. There just wasn’t any more unclaimed property on this planet, that was all. And that was all it was. He found it immensely amusing… Property, property, all for fucking property. ”

But there’s another kind of fear as well, a dread probably as disturbing as death itself: the fear of abandonment. Paradoxically this fear is generated by one’s established place in a collective. It is the collective and its components - the squad, the platoon, the company, the regiment, etc. - that have an identity. The individual’s attachment to that identity is the equivalent of being imprisoned. Choice is not possible. Even disobedience as a choice is not possible because this simply annuls the attachment and results in rejection by one’s family, friends and the rest of society, a living death in other words. The illusion of a beneficent society is revealed. The Leviathan shows itself to best effect in war:

“It was a horrifying vision: all of them doing the same identical thing, all of them powerless to stop it, all of them devoutly and proudly believing themselves to be free individuals. It expanded to include the scores of nations, the millions of men, doing the same on thousands of hilltops across the world. And it didn’t stop there. It went on. It was the concept—concept? the fact; the reality—of the modern State in action”

That the tradition of this kind of writing is futile is demonstrated by the fact that so few take it at all seriously. And even fewer of them seem to attain positions of authority in the Leviathan.

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