Soldaten полностью

One of the major themes of literary and cinematic meditations on war—from Erich Maria Remarque and Ernst Jünger to Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now—is that ideology and all other larger reasons behind war are irrelevant. Indeed, apart from a small percentage of ideological warriors, one central characteristic of soldiers is their distance from and disinterest in the causes that led to their present situation. This is true not only when everything is falling apart, as in Reese’s description. It also applies to situations of victory. Soldiers’ attention is primarily focused on things at hand, the plane just shot down or the village just taken—and not abstractions like “the conquest of living space in Eastern Europe,” “the defense of Bolshevism,” or the “yellow peril.” Things like that form the backdrop of war and the arenas of battle connected with it. But they rarely provide the concrete motivation for soldiers’ interpretations and actions in any given situation.⁸⁸⁸

That fact runs all the way through the twentieth century. The signature psychosocial experience of World War I was disillusionment at the fact that there was nothing heroic or ideological about the hail of shrapnel soldiers endured as part of trench warfare. Fundamental senselessness was a feeling shared by American troops in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq, and by all the nations involved in Afghanistan. Indeed, it was augmented as the rationale behind those wars became increasingly abstract. Why should you fight far away from home for the freedom of people who despise you? Why defend populations and stretches of territory that have nothing to do with you personally?

With reference to the Vietnam War, one U.S. sergeant wrote to a friend: “Of course Americans are dying, and I would not belittle anyone who served ‘with proud devotion’ and faith in this enterprise. It may not have been a terribly wrong theoretical idea at one time. But the foreign introduced offensive, the consequent corruption and then the contempt that developed between people and groups—it makes a mockery of the ‘noble’ words used to justify war. It belies the phony enthusiasm with which those words may be delivered. It’s now a war of survival.”⁸⁸⁹

Today, a German captain serving with the 373rd Paratroopers Battalion in Kunduz says: “At the start, we wanted to achieve something, for example, taking some territory from the enemy. But after the death of my men, we sometimes ask ourselves whether it’s worth it. Why risk our lives, when the Taliban will immediately reappear as soon as we’re gone? We’re fighting for our lives and our mission, if we even still have one. But in the end in Kunduz, we’re above all fighting for sheer survival.”⁸⁹⁰

Soldiers’ statements about their experience of war frequently show strong similarities and points of overlap. Andrew Carroll, the founder of the Legacy Project, a volunteer initiative aimed at collecting and preserving correspondence by U.S. veterans of all foreign wars, has said that the similarities and not the differences stand out when one compares letters by American soldiers with correspondence written by their German, Italian, and Russian counterparts.⁸⁹¹