Memory Hole

As the War in Iraq drags on with no end in sight, it’s only natural to see the parallels to the wars of
yesterday.

I had one of those experiences recently when I finished An Iliad by Alessandro Baricco. It is the
book version of a script he authored as a way to present Homer’s Iliad orally to a modern audience (as
Barrico notes in the introduction, the translation that has come down to us is unrecitable). So Baricco went back to his Homeric roots and cut away all that was extraneous, leaving a lean, muscular tale—the story that surely enthralled the poet’s audience 25 centuries ago. It is an epic of bravery and pride, love and hate, beauty and savagery. It is a tale that begins with a wounded ego and ends in blood-drenched slaughter. And, instead of being told by a god-like, impersonal narrator, each character—the living and the dead—tell their shard of The Iliad in their own way and with their own voice.
It’s a brutally personal Iliad now, one that will haunt you (particularly the ending, which shows how
all wars must end no matter the promises of politicians and old men).

Of course while reading An Iliad you can’t help but think about the current Iraq War and the similar
circumstances that led us there—while not explicitly analyzing these parallels himself, Baricco
acknowledges them in his epilogue, an essay on the “beauty” of war. What has probably always made Homer’s epic relevant is its ability to touch the very foundation of our humanity and remind us of our
“beautiful” savagery, and how it coexists as a sort of despotic twin always ready to lead us fragile,
civilized beings to ruination. Like the Acheans of The Iliad, we have tens of thousands of men in a faraway place, fighting a grinding, relentless, never-ending war of attrition triggered as much by pride as an implicit threat. And like that ancient war, our war is seeing the young men who enthusiastically enlisted as soldiers and shipped off to the fight growing into old, weary, disillusioned killers (multiple
deployments simply breaks up the monotony of long-service with the taste of peace—which may make
our very American Iliad a more perverse epic).

In terms of our current war, the American Iliad, like the Trojan War before it, has nothing noble, nothing
virtuous, nothing redeeming or liberating about its cause (in spite of the political rhetoric). It’s a
dirty fight in the name of hubris. And no matter how hard we try to dress it up there is nothing beautiful
about war. It is, in fact, ugly murder on a massive scale. I write this as someone who loves the military
ethos, who is an expert in a martial art, and who believes that it is morally justified to defend
oneself. And because of all those things, I also know that war is a treacherous path that touches
everyone—participant and non-participant alike—and should be avoided at all costs.

Homer knew the cost—and that is why he sang about both sides, sang about the women, sang about the children, sang about how all of them were consumed in savage, bloodstained beauty. Remember this as the American Iliad writes itself: No matter if you support or oppose the war there is only one truth—there’s no going back.