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 PrintableVersion Bloody hell: The price soldiers payPleading for pacifismBLOODY HELL: Yes, that is the title; the first of many reasons for not buying this appalling book. Another is the worse language inside; not constant, but normally more than enough to put me off. The author is quoting soldiers. Don't buy it, that is, if you want to retain your illusion that today's wars are somehow heroic, right against wrong, defending freedom and democracy. Don't even open it if you want to go on thinking that joining the military is an option for a Christian. I mean, look at this dreadful bit: a soldier, one of our boys, enters a recently napalmed village. A woman lies on the ground with children in both arms. The skin had just melted off her face. 'In that moment - and it only took a second - I got it. I thought, is this what it all comes down to?' Later, he saw a report saying that 130 enemy troops were killed there. He knew that was a lie; they were all women and children. They usually are. 'Civilian casualties' were the unavoidable price of a 'just war'. Not now. Civilians are prime targets; farmers, fishermen, carpenters, the odd tax-collector, but mostly toddlers, schoolchildren, mums and grandmas. Soldiers strafe them for fun. A helicopter swoops low to inspect the damage; the pilot sees hundreds of skinless, sightless bodies crawling in the earth, croaking for water with their dying breaths. (God so loved the world.) Then he comes home and is supposed to go to Tesco, watch football, and be a good husband and father. (Let the children come to me.) Governments censor, cover up and lie; teenagers are lured into battle, come home traumatised, and are then ignored, threatened or locked up. Or just bits of them come back. Or not at all. One pastor told a grieving mother that if only she'd turned up at church a bit more, maybe God would have spared her son. Now she doesn't go at all. Would you? 'The war was much more than a lie; it was demonic, diabolical.' At least these words are being used properly. If ruder words also occur, perhaps they would to you if you lost both legs, bits of your head, and then your wife. 'Our' soldiers were infected by their own side during the Gulf War. American babies are now born with vital bits missing; arms, eyes, sometimes heads. Their Iraqi counterparts can't even get medicine. The ground is for ever fouled. It took Allied governments 46 years to admit to mustard-gas problems after World War 2. Wonderful, say the bomb and gun and poison makers, the land-mine producers, the arms exporters; our shares are booming. No, you don't want to read this. 'I was a born-again Christian', says one contributor; not now. Terrible stuff; we even hear from Unitarians and Buddhists. Preachers on the real hell could comb this for illustrations. Evangelicals who get hold of it will be rewarded with a magnificent final chapter about Jesus. But fancy having to wade through all this first! Don't touch it. Christopher Idle, London© Evangelicals Now - March 2002 |
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