Avatar & The Forever War

Aditya Sinha
First Published : 23 Jan 2010 12:49:00 AM IST
Last Updated : 23 Jan 2010 12:57:51 AM IST

The nation went through its usual madness this week: wailing over better-dead-than-red Jyoti Basu; humiliating Pakistani cricket players by snubbing them in the T20 auction; sniggering over the astrology-type wrong predictions of Himalayan glacier melting, endorsed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (whose current Chair, R K Pachauri, increasingly appears to have appropriated for himself the panel’s 2007 Nobel Peace Prize); imposing language requirements (instead of driving tests) on aspiring taxi drivers in Maharashtra; and the news that the US will give unmanned aerial vehicles, or “drones”, to the khakhi jihadis (aka the Pakistan army). No wonder shows of the incredibly-beautiful-but-utterly-dumb 3D American film Avatar were sold out this weekend in the nation’s metros (and around the world, dismaying China and the Vatican): it is a double-dose of escapism, with its hypnotic sensuality and uncomplicated view of good-versus-evil. Yes, the Americans are brilliant at inducing a narcotic awe in the rest of us while they plunder and consume Earth.

I ignored all the nonsense by reading The Forever War, a memoir of the Iraq war by Dexter Filkins of The New York Times. It was a better narcotic than Avatar. Yet that is always the paradox of war stories: they are simultaneously ugly and beautiful; depressing and exhilarating; intense and scary. No matter how terrible war is, its stories serve to attract young men to the excitement of confronting death, of proving valour, and to the kind of camaraderie that eludes ordinary life. In Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5, he tells a film director that he’s writing an anti-war book and the director responds that Vonnegut might as well as write an anti-glacier book (both are futile). In Catch-22, US air bombers posted in the Mediterranean are forever trying to outmanoeuvre an insane war bureaucracy and wriggle out of duty, hardly the stuff of valour; but the book is so knee-slapping funny and well-constructed that it is great, and by association makes war seem great too.

Philip Caputo wrote A Rumour of War based on his experience as a marine in Viet Nam; 25 years have passed and it is still one of the most intense books I have ever read. It set the standard for intense war reads: Michael Herr’s Dispatches came close, and one of my regrets is not picking up a book I saw in a Peshawar window, written by a former Soviet army officer about his war in Afghanistan (I was rushing to a protest in the old city over the just-commenced US War on Terror; when I later returned to the shop, the book had vanished). Even the best war films, like Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan and Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket do not measure up, even though Francis Coppola’s druggy Apocalypse Now comes pretty close. Filkins’ book, happily, meets Caputo’s standards. Though it shows the folly of the US invasion of Iraq, the decimation of Iraqi society, and the estrangement of a journalist from his own society, what you come away with is the book’s full “immersive” experience, more effective than Avatar’s 3D. The Forever War gives you a genuine and lasting high.

Filkins, who was posted in India a decade back for the Los Angeles Times, reported from Iraq for three-and-a-half years (he is currently in Afghanistan), and his book avoids the back story of the Iraq invasion (many good books have already done that). Instead, he starts in Afghanistan: witnessing Taliban justice in pre-9/11 Kabul (it’s a sort of “You’re not in Kansas anymore” moment, the same The Wizard of Oz quote incidentally used in Avatar); getting to Manhattan on 9/11; and moving with the Northern Alliance front against the Taliban in the post-9/11 war. There is little political commentary or punditry. And then suddenly, you’re in Iraq.

The book has no apparent structure but the series of anecdotes, incidents and events mirror Iraq’s descent into hell. The Times bureau operated outside the “Green Zone”, the fortified area that was previously Saddam’s presidential palace and where the US set up its command, and which was far, far removed from Iraqi reality (depicted in Rajeev Chandrasekaran’s Imperial Life in the Emerald City). So Filkins gets to spend time with US troops in Falluja, filled with harrowing incidents of running across streets through gun-battles and searching for IED-rigged goat carcasses, as well as with inspired descriptions like that of a flock of geese in the sky whose V-shaped flight is disrupted by the bombing below; but he also interacts with insurgents like the Islamic Army in Iraq; he witnesses personal wars between the Shias and Sunnis, and the disintegration of Baghdad as exemplified by the kidnapping (and killing) of children — in the dozens, daily.

The account of an Iraqi teenager, sitting on the roadside weeping over the bodies of his entire family (just shot dead by nervous American teenaged soldiers), made me wonder that perhaps the US invasion of Iraq was a success. Not because of the terrorists the war spawned; after all, the US need merely fortify itself against terrorists. The success was in teaching the rest of the world a lesson: that attacking the US has its consequences (of course Iraq had no link with 9/11; but destroying an already destroyed country like Afghanistan would have demonstrated nothing; and the US certainly couldn’t bomb Saudi Arabia). America showed the world that it is a predator; that it is capable, whatever the cost, of utterly destroying anyone’s home, anywhere on Earth: of creating chaos and hell.

Why isn’t Indian journalism like this book? Here’s a clue: besides staff salaries and equipment, The New York Times paid $1,000 a day for a security adviser; $250,000 for three armoured cars; life insurance for each staffer at $14,000 a month; $60,000 for a generator from the UK; and for Filkins, $250 a day to an Iraqi fixer (other staffers must have had their own fixers). This does not include the local support staff, the rent, the food, transport, etc. Over the years, that adds up to a lot of money. In the US, media houses spend money to publish news; in India some charge money to publish news.

Finally, the book’s title: on one level, Filkins possibly says the war on terror is unwinnable; or that the war on terror will play out over a long period of time; or that war in general is unwinnable; or that each instant of war seems forever to its victims. That was one of my complaints about Avatar: its war lasted only 35 minutes, which is downright silly (perhaps an hour if you include the initial attack on the Na’vi tree, which was my favourite shot: the approach of the human warship armada from where the alien are sitting looked spooky). In reality, as Filkins tells us, war lasts forever.

editorchief@expressbuzz.com

About The Author;

Aditya Sinha is the Editor-in-Chief of The New Indian Express and is based in Chennai