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The human cost of war

 

It’s getting harder to watch the news at night, and lately I find myself turning off the radio when war reports begin. It’s not that I don’t want to know what’s going on; far from it. Having been in a war zone decades ago, during the civil war in El Salvador, I have a sense of what can happen on the ground in conflict zones. However, unlike some news reports I’m not keeping a tally of the dead and injured, the hours of bombing, the number of missiles that landed or were intercepted, the number of buildings destroyed, or key figures killed.

Instead, I think about daily life for civilians. What might it really be like in hot spots? Or in refugee camps? How do they survive?  What I focus on is not easy to count. The sound of bombardments that ring out and rock buildings and bodies. How sound intensifies at night. So too feelings of helplessness. Parents desperately trying to protect their children, yet unable to. The number of children robbed of their innocence. In conflict zones childhood innocence is a luxury afforded few, if any.

And then there is fear – a weapon of war that is as immeasurable as it is pervasive. How it hangs in the air like an invisible fog. How people breathe it in, and get soaked on the inside. How do traumatised adults ever recover? And what about their children? Is this not the fertile ground in which seeds of hatred are sewn? Hatred or trauma that can last a lifetime – passing down through generations.  

One scene etched on the back of my eyelids occurred long after the weapons stopped firing, and peace was brokered. A motley looking stream of men and women with an array of injuries – paralysis, missing limbs, scars and pain – hobble, roll in wheelchairs, or lurch along the road. War wounded from both sides of the decade-long conflict, (the FMLN and the military), protest that they have been forgotten. Demanding the desperate help they need, they march as one. Unimaginable during wartime, enemies now united.

It’s hard not to think about the long-term consequences of war. The seeds being sewn in current conflicts. And the aftermath. Not just at an institutional, political or infrastructure level, but for the many people forced to live with loss, be that the death of loved ones, loss of homes, of place, physical injury, or loss of innocence. And what about loss of hope? Or loss of faith in humanity?

Around twenty years ago, I listened to British Foreign correspondent, Christina Lamb, speak a about her book, The Sewing Circles of Herat, at a writer’s festival. (In 1988, Lamb was named Young Journalist of the Year for her coverage of the Soviet occupation in Afghanistan. Readers might know her as co-author of, I am Malala, or Nujeen.) During that presentation she told one story that lingered long after she left the stage. In Afghanistan, she had been desperate to get to where the action was – the front line in the war – and arranged a lift with the mujaheddin. When they stopped en route, people fleeing the conflict thought she was a doctor, and desperately sought her help. She described one woman, crouched over her young daughter, cradling her. Seven year old Lela had been hit by a rocket. The child lay still, eyes open but glazed, hovering between life and death.

‘If she dies it is too much for my mind,’ Lela’s mother intoned, explaining that her husband had been killed, and her sons had not returned since the fighting began two days prior. Lela was all this mother had left. ‘Please can you help us?’ she pleaded.

The young correspondent walked away, headed towards the car, and made some notes. She writes, ‘I had to get where the action was. I wasn’t getting the point that it was all around us.’

 

'I’m a firm believer that the hardest thing to find in war is the truth. However, the suffering of many people in conflict zones is one truth I adhere to. I hardly need listen to daily war reports to remind me of that.'

 

Years later, Lamb concluded, ‘The real story of war wasn’t about the firing and the fighting…’ She realised it was about people, just like Lela and her mother, ‘the sons and daughters, the mothers and fathers.’ And all their losses.

That’s what I reflect on. The long-term human cost. The price paid by people who do not feature in the headlines. The people who become collateral damage. Those who live with damage or loss, caused by war, for the rest of their lives. Most of all, I think of young children being robbed of their innocence.

That’s why I find it difficult to listen to the news. Besides, I’m a firm believer that the hardest thing to find in war is the truth. However, the suffering of many people in conflict zones is one truth I adhere to. I hardly need listen to daily war reports to remind me of that.

 

 


Michele Gierck is author of 700 Days in El Salvador, and a freelance writer based in Melbourne

Main image: (Getty Images)

Topic tags: Michele Gierck, War, Civilians, Trauma, Humanity, El Salvador

 

 

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Existing comments

To someone who has some limited military exposure and knows a bit about modern weaponry and the devastation it can cause, the term "collateral damage" rings absolutely hollow. But it was ever thus. It was the invention of the canon, used so effectively by the English against the Scots at Flodden in 1513, which heralded a new age. Things kept getting worse viz saturation bombing of Coventry and Dresden in WW 2. My late father fought the Germans on the Gothic Line in Italy in that war. He survived, but his only stories from that period were of the utter bravery and self-sacrifice of the Gurkhas, Sikhs and other Indian soldiers. The regiment he was attached to then won an incredible 4 Victoria Crosses (2 in Italy 2 in Burma). Two of these were posthumous. No other Commonwealth regiment won as many VCs, but they cost dearly for the brave men who served. Years later, I got the story from 'the other side.' A lady, long deceased now, who I was once engaged to, lost her father on the Eastern Front fighting our brave Russian allies. She and her mother fled from Prussia to Aachen: about as far as you can get. She never got over the death of the father she hardly saw at 3. That experience soured her life. She was never able to establish a decent relationship with a man. Her only marriage - she had several affairs - failed dismally. Two of my uncles served as Chindits in Burma. One got through OK, the other had his life shattered by that experience. We are what I consider an ordinary family, yet war has effected us in many ways. We are not alone sadly.


Edward Fido | 25 November 2024  

People who watch someone being bullied without doing something effectual to restrain the bully are enablers of the bully.

Bullying can be moral as well as physical.

Nations which watch Hamas assail Israel while holding the people of Gaza as a shield without doing something effectual in order to restrain Hamas are enablers of Hamas' moral bullying of Israel.

Was anything effectual done to restrain Hamas? Or was the heat all on Israel to stop the by-product clobbering of the innocent collaterals deliberately offered up as sacrifice by Hamas? How is Israel supposed to respond to the murderous provocations of Hamas if the collaterals are deliberately interpositioned?

It's a feasible moral proposition that when a perpetrator goes out of its way to shield itself with innocents against the responses of a defender, any harm to the innocents is solely the fault of the perpetrator. It is certainly not honouring the code that conflict is between warriors, not their women and children.

If a soldier on a battlefield sees a kid approaching him in a suicide vest, the moral universe is at the point where the soldier must shoot the child. Isn't that all there is to it?


roy chen yee | 26 November 2024  

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