Book on war aims to make 'people feel uncomfortable'

Peter Beaumont says his new book, The Secret Life of War: Journeys through modern conflict, is “graphic and I hope it makes people feel uncomfortable.” Email story
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Author aims to shock with graphic book on war and 'destructive impulses' behind it

Aug 29, 2009 04:30 AM
Sandro Contenta
Feature Writer

Bombs don't just kill, they kill in three different ways.

Those closest get the full impact of the blast wave: Sternums and rib cages are slammed back into spines, compressing lungs and hearts and causing internal hemorrhaging. Tendons, muscles and bones stretch and snap, tearing limbs from bodies.

A second group is killed by shrapnel from the bomb casing or a myriad of ordinary objects, including splinters of trees, car parts, bricks, glass, keys or pieces of human bone.

A third are sent hurtling through the air and crack their skulls.

It might sound like more information than needed. But getting beyond the superficial is the hallmark of Peter Beaumont's new book, The Secret Life of War: Journeys through modern conflict.

Beaumont, the foreign affairs editor at the London weekly, The Observer, isn't the first to write about the impact of war. But few have delved as deeply into the psychology of those caught up in conflicts, and the social breakdown that often makes them intractable.

"This book is about destructive impulses," Beaumont, 47, said in a telephone interview from London this week. "It's graphic and I hope it makes people feel uncomfortable."

What makes an Iraqi Shiite militant torture a Sunni rival by plunging a power drill into his knee caps, burning his chest and whipping him with an electrical cable before shooting him point blank in the head and chest?

In northern Iraq, during one of his many reporting trips to the country, Beaumont met an American soldier whose biggest fear was to be sent back home.

"This is it," Beaumont quotes the soldier as saying. "Ain't nothing better in the world. Take a big hit on the bong and then get all dressed up and get behind my gun. And then it's: `Come on, f------, fire at me' so I can shoot up the streets."

The most dreadful secret of war, he writes, is not that men enjoy killing. "It's more insidious than that. There exists a widespread envy of those who kill, and especially those who kill and kill again."

In two decades of reporting, Beaumont has witnessed war close up in Africa, the Balkans, Afghanistan and the Middle East. It's an ugly affair, one he says the anglophone media sanitizes by refusing to show pictures of the dead and maimed. Beaumont instead describes the damage caused by high-velocity bullets, those that enter the body spinning at high speed and those that lose energy and enter while tumbling end over end.

"What I wanted to do is try to reclaim the reality of what actually happens in violent acts," says Beaumont, who opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Beaumont's book, due in bookstores Tuesday, details the high risk of infection from bullet or shrapnel wounds, the projectiles sucking into the body bits of clothing and filth. It's also a metaphor for how war contaminates everyone it touches, weakening resistance to violence.

Studies have found that prolonged exposure to the stress of war fills the body with naturally produced chemicals that end up literally rewiring the brain. It affects memory, learning and the ability to control emotions, Beaumont writes.

Other studies indicate that initiation in hate begins early, with lessons coming from the family, community and culture.

One study found that by age 3, Catholic children in Northern Ireland – where sectarian violence flared for 30 years – were twice as likely as Protestant kids to say they were hostile to a police force regarded as pro-British. By the age of 6, a third of children identified with one of the two communities.

In Israel and the Palestinian territories, these early stirrings quickly develop into communal hatred. Beaumont saw Palestinian adolescents use images of suicide bombers as screensavers or pendants.

The defining ritual of the second intifada – Palestinian youths throwing rocks at Israeli soldiers as others urge them on – is a rite of passage that echoes the initiation into military and national values of Israel's compulsory military service, Beaumont argues.

Empathy is an early casualty.

A 2001 study by Israeli and Palestinian researchers asked people to rate whether 11 violent events – from suicide bombings to Al Qaeda's attack on the Twin Towers – were acts of terrorism. Israelis overwhelmingly judged acts by Palestinians as terrorism and "greatly underrated" those committed by Jews. Palestinians did the opposite.

Wars transformed Beaumont, too. After nightmares and bouts of therapy, he recently decided his days in war zones are over. But he hasn't lost hope.

"One could write a book about the amazing people you come across in conflict areas, people trying to make a difference," he says. "When Iraq was at its absolute worst, I was still meeting women who would go out campaigning for human rights, get shot, go to hospital and get back out again. That's why I can never really be a complete pessimist."