War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning: Jack Roderick

Posted At : February 12, 2009 1:00 AM
Related Categories: History

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Taken from War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning by Chris Hedges, published by PublicAffairs, a member of the Perseus Books Group.

Contributed and read by Jack Roderick, former Anchorage mayor and oil historian: "Once when I was a child, my father told me he had bayoneted a German in the first World War. That thought has stayed with me my entire life."

In War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, Chris Hedges looks at the soldier's actual reality of killing another:

"To say the least, killing is nearly always a sordid affair. Those who carry such memories do so with difficulty, even when the cause seems just. Moreover, those who are killed do not die the clean death we see on television or film. They die messy, disturbing deaths that often plague the killers. ... I have looked into the open eyes of dead men and wished them shut.... Even hardened soldiers drape cloth over such faces or reach out and push the eyelids shut. ...

Nothing is more sickening in war than watching human lives get snuffed out. Nothing haunts you more. And it is never, as outsiders think, clean or easy or neat. Killing is a dirty business...."

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