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A Call To Witness

By Ben Chitty (Reviewer)

Hell, Healing and Resistance: Veterans Speak, by Daniel Hallock (Plough, 1998)

For some folks a book like this is just same-old same-old; for others it may be a blast from the past, maybe even a little quaint. Dan Hallock's "Hell, Healing, and Resistance" is all of this, and much more.

Brother Hallock, a member of the Bruderhof Community and an ROTC veteran, has dredged up our old horrors, presented them anew, and added some more from earlier and later wars. Compiling reports and testimony of veterans and survivors of wars, his collection is not so much analytic or methodically systematic as poignant - it cuts like a knife. His book was completed before the latest Tailwind and Ranch Hand allegations, but even for some older controversies - Vietnam veterans' suicide rates and the "yellow rain" allegations of Communist chemical warfare in Laos and Cambodia - Hallock does not try to settle the issues. Controversy is beside the point: the veterans and survivors know what they know and say what they say, and Hallock's research serves mainly to put the testimony into context. His real interest is elsewhere.

Hallock is a pacifist. He's not so much interested in the rights and wrongs of any particular war but the costs of any war, and especially for its participants. He began his project after meeting some incarcerated veterans; throughout he concentrates on what participation does to the people who came back from war. This is far from an indulgence in morbid fascination or vicarious (and cheap) thrills. He has a dual agenda, and the testimonies serve both.

Hallock believes the experience of war has marked us in a way which makes us especially valuable to the people among whom we have come home to try to live. His book is a call to witness, an urgent invitation to veterans and other survivors of war to tell what we learned from the experience. He hopes that the tales will teach our civilian brothers and sisters, daughters and sons, what war means, and why (if not how) the youngest generation of war veterans should be the last.

He also expects the telling to be therapeutic. Most of us can remember how hard it was to speak of war, how little we wanted to talk about it, except among ourselves. Little knowing what we had done or who we had become, how could we explain ourselves to anyone else? If he is right, what we have to do is try, and try again. Many of the veterans in this book are certainly speaking for the first time.

So far I doubt many VVAW folks would disagree. But Hallock is a Christian, and his diagnosis is spiritual. He believes that telling confesses guilt and brings forgiveness, and leads to peace. For him and for other veterans this is a life of brotherhood in a Christian community. I would not deny him or anyone the solace of such a journey's end.

Even so, the question of individual guilt is tough. Most of us never killed anyone "up close and personal" so to speak. Many never fired a gun. How are we guilty of anything, at least of anything worse than following orders?

"Baby-killer" is the epithet most of us seem to recall. Some veterans deny the charge, an astonishing feat of denial in itself. We shot at half-seen movements, raked hills and valleys with explosive ordnance, salted the ground with mines, and poisoned the earth with dioxin. We made it happen. Babies died. Someone killed them. Who but us?

Maybe that's Hallock's point. Check it out.

Ben Chitty is VVAW's East Coast Regional Coordinator.