真實戰爭-殘酷與平凡的心得

       I am most interested in the kinds of true war stories and war memories capacious enough to include the blood and guts as well as the boring and the quotidian. True war stories acknowledge war's true identity, which is that while war is hell, war is normal, too. War is both inhuman and human, as are its participants. Photographer Tod Papageorge's American Sports, 1970: Or How We Spent the War in Vietnam portrays war in exactly this fashion. The book features seventy photographs, all but one capturing American sporting events: the players and the fans, the press conferences and the team buses, the dugouts and the locker rooms, with the participants being men, women, young, old, black, white, ugly, beautiful. The last photograph is the one that does not depict a sporting event or its participants. It is of the War Memorial in Indianapolis, with these words on the facing page: "In 1970, 4,221 American troops were killed in Vietnam." This is horror as an appendix to the banal, which is how many civilians experience war. Papageorge suggests that even as American soldiers die abroad, life continues at home, an experience repeated decades later with America's wars in the Middle East, which often hardly feel like wars at all in the United States. While O'Brien's stories may be true war stories from a soldier's point of view, Papageorge's photos are true war stories from a civilian's point of view. The spectacular gore of a certain kind of true war story distracts us from the dull hum of the war machine in which we live, a massive mechanism greased with banalities, bolted together by triviality, and enabled by passive consent. To tell and hear these kinds of banal and boring true war stories is necessary for what philosopher William James called "the war against war." So far as we imagine wars to be dangerous (but thrilling), wars will not end. Perhaps when we see how boring wars actually are, how war seeps into everyday life, then we might want to imagine stopping wars. The citizenry can end war at any time by refusing to go along with it, which is no easy matter-perhaps even utopia itself, versus the passive consent to the contemporary global dystopia of perpetual war.

心得：書中呈現69:1，運動：紀念碑的照片比例，在那個時代，戰爭對於平民不是天天爆炸、血腥，而是出現在電視或報紙的某個角落，平民的生活仍在繼續，戰爭的恐怖對他們而言只是日常中的小註腳。作者刻劃出平民視角的重要性，真正能終止戰爭的是看清戰爭的banal and quotidian.

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