How to Sustain Perpetual War? Easy: Hide the Bodies

Sustaining America's state of post-9/11 perpetual war requires skillful manipulation of the public at home. The key tool used for this purpose is the bloodless narrative, a combination of policy, falsehoods and media manipulation that creates the impression that America's wars have few consequences, at least for Americans.

How can the American government sustain its wars in the face of dead soldiers coming home? Why is there no outcry among the American people over these losses? The answer is the narrative of bloodless war.

The Dead

The bloodless war narrative's solution to the dead is a policy of don't look, don't tell.

Dick Cheney, as Secretary of Defense for George H. W. Bush, helped decide in 1991 the first Iraq War would play better if Americans did not see their fallen return home. He recalled the images of coffins from the 1989 invasion of Panama on television, transposed against the president speaking of victory, and banned media from Dover Air Force Base, where deceased American personnel would arrive from the Persian Gulf.

The ban at Dover lasted 18 years, past George Bush 2.0 and Iraq War 2.0, overturned only in 2009, well after the casualty counts dropped off. Even then, allowing cameras at Dover was left at the discretion of the families, except of course when the president needed a blood-stirring photo op. Obama took one just before ordering the surge in Afghanistan.

Death, when it is reluctantly acknowledged, must still follow the bloodless narrative as closely as possible. Death must be for a good cause, freedom if possible, "for his buddies" later when public opinion weakens.

There is no better example in recent times than the death of Pat Tillman, America's once-walking propaganda dream. Tillman was a professional football player making a $3.6 million salary. Following 9/11, he gave that all up, and volunteered for combat. When he died in Afghanistan, the Army told his family he'd been killed by enemy fire after courageously charging up a hill to protect his fellow soldiers.

It was of course the right thing to say to support the narrative, but it was a lie.

A month later, the Pentagon notified Tillman's family he had actually died as a result of friendly fire. The month placed the non-narrative news safely after Tillman's memorial service and in the fog of faded media interest. Later investigations revealed the Army likely knew the death was by friendly fire within days.

The Physically Wounded

For all the trouble the dead cause to the bloodless narrative, the wounded are even messier. They still walk around, sometimes speak to journalists, and, well, do not always look bloodless.

The Honolulu side of Waikiki beach is anchored by a hotel run by the Department of Defense as a low-cost vacation destination for servicepeople. While some of the grounds are public by Hawaiian law, the hotel itself is off limits.

I used to have a government ID that let me in. Inside, who is a soldier? The buff bodies stand out against the beached whale look more popular among regular tourists. The odd-patterned tans - browned faces with pale white limbs - betray a recent trip to the Middle East.

But sometimes it is a missing limb on a 20-year-old, or a face that looks like raw bacon. Could've been a car wreck or a factory fire, but I doubt it. The burns sketched precisely where the helmet had, and had not, been, a map of pain.

That's on the inside. When we as outsiders see images of the wounded, they instead follow the narrative. Brave troopers, with their state-of-the-art prosthetic limbs, are shown skiing, surfing or working out. Some featured amputees even demand to return to active duty. They show off their new limbs, some decorated with decals from their favorite sports teams. They are brave and they are strong.

The inside story is again very different. A recent book by Ann Jones, They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America's Wars, fills in what the narrative omits. As a summation, Jones offers the haiku of one military trauma nurse: "Amputees up to the waist. No arms. No legs. No genitals. Age 21 or 22. We cry."

The Mentally Wounded

Military suicides have made it through the screen of bloodless narrative, but just barely, thanks to the Hollywood-ization of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

Where we need clarity, we get tropes, such as the freaked-out-at-home scenes in Hurt Locker and American Sniper. Not to say those things don't happen (they do) but to say those types of scenes are incomplete, giving enough info to arouse sympathy without actually being too alarming. As Ann Jones points out, such treatment of PTSD is "useful in raising citizen sympathy for soldiers, defusing opposition to Washington's wars, and generally medicalizing problems that might raise inconvenient political and moral issues."

At the same time, another non-Hollywood narrative bubbles just below the surface, that some vets are exaggerating or outright faking it. PTSD inherits all of our stigmas toward mental illness, and that dilutes the bad news.

One way of not knowing is not to look for the answers at all. The narrative says we should be like Mafia bosses' kids, who never ask what Daddy does for a living despite our big house and fancy cars.

When the Narrative Fails

During the year I spent in Iraq, the only deaths experienced by the Army units I was embedded with were suicides.

The death I was most familiar with was a young Private, who put his assault rifle into his mouth. No one back home saw what I saw, because they were not supposed to see: the fan spray of blood and brain on the wall, already being washed off as I arrived to look.

These things are not unspeakable, we just don't want to talk about them, and the bloodless narrative says we don't have to. That keeps it alive. Because when the narrative fails, the wars tend to end.

For example, in 1969, Life magazine published a famous edition consisting entirely of portraits of the Americans who died in Vietnam that week. Many subscribers canceled, but many more looked for the first time outside the narrative. The war found its end.

In another conflict, President Bill Clinton pulled American troops out of Somalia after a photo showed crowds cheering a dead American soldier dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. That image dogged American war mongering until it could be cleaned up by the bloodless narrative of Gulf War 1.0.

We are no longer likely to see those nasty pictures. The military has become more skillful at manipulating the media, even as the media has become more compliant. In the X-rated world of war, most of the media refuses to budge from family fare.

The military-media symbiosis is just one more tool that feeds the narrative. As long as Americans are convinced of the bloodlessness of perpetual war, the wars will go on.