Writing Warfare (Part I): Understanding and Respecting Combat

Photo by Stijn Swinnen on Unsplash

WARNING: THIS POST DEALS WITH GRAPHIC AND SENSITIVE SUBJECTS OF VIOLENCE AND DEATH.

In closing Memorial Day week, I thought it appropriate to address writing that deals with warfare, especially pondering what Memorial Day is about: remembering and recognizing those who have fallen in real, painful sacrifice. As a note, this post doesn’t strictly apply to American wars. It’s applicable to any war, of any era, and any world.

Action is attractive to writers; conflict captures our attention. Personally, I’m drawn to war stories and accounts.

However, I think it’s easy for writers who haven’t experienced combat to get absorbed in filling pages with blood without understanding what they’re doing. Sometimes, writers seem to kill characters like mosquitoes—slap, they’re dead, move on. But it’s more than that.

I’m no expert, and I’ve only written a few drafts of a war novel, so I’m still in the trenches of figuring it out. But here are some observations when it comes to writing war.

It’s ALWAYS worse than you think

In our heads we know that war is bad, but we don’t know it in our hearts. When researching, I always find something worse than I could’ve imagined. Often, soldiers experience mindboggling evils that can only come straight from Hell.

We writers need to be careful not to glorify war. It needs to be portrayed honestly so that people can better understand and respect what soldiers have been through and given for them. At the same time, we should take care not to wallow in the gore of it. Understand WHAT you’re writing and WHY you’re writing it.

People don’t get shot like in PG-13 movies, and then there’s a PG-13 amount of blood.

People get burned. They trigger land mines. Shrapnel shreds their bodies. They get blown up so their insides come out, then they don’t die immediately. They get drilled with bullets. Soldiers must bag up remains that they can’t even recognize. In the Middle East, soldiers find unimaginable torture rooms. They see crucified women. A parked car is a staged bomb.

I saw a picture from the Vietnam War of a three or four-year-old local child wrapped in bandages for what I assume was burns. I inadvertently saw another disturbing image from the same war of a Vietnamese woman carrying a blood-covered baby. It’s not just soldiers who get hurt, and it’s not just other wounded soldiers that these fighters see. They see civilians entangled and harmed by war. Sometimes, they must do terrible things to noncombatants to follow orders or keep their own lives.

I don’t want to exploit people who’ve shared their experiences. However, I know a woman who served in Iraq during the Persian Gulf War. She told me how she saw a child’s shoe on the road, and that small thing pushed her over the edge.

No one in the thick of it sees war as desirable

It’s easy to get engrossed in grand words like, “duty,” “valor,” and “grit.”

War is often portrayed as, “…An honorable place, full of courage, heroes, and hearing epic last words from your dying best friend.”¹ But the revulsion of the nature of combat should not be lost in the courage.

War isn’t a beautiful place. People die in gruesome, unthinkable ways. Soldiers see things that God never created them to witness, and although they do bear it, it devastates them mentally. It’s one thing to see horror, and it’s another thing to see oneself as causing it.

This isn’t to say that soldiers can never see, in retrospect, that war has moments of beauty. But remember, it is not the violence itself that is attractive but what people do amid it.

“Combat was horrible, but there was a beautiful side as well—the brotherhood between black soldiers and white soldiers and Hispanics and Native Americans. When we were in combat all that matters is: Are you going to do your duty and [help me] when I get hit?...I was eighteen and knew a little about how to save lives…” Wayne Smith, Army Combat Medic (Vietnam War).²

To modify a phrase from a fellow writer, I’d like to say that the darkness of war is what makes the courage shine brighter.

The five “Rs”

1.      Remember what you’re actually saying when writing “so-and-so died.” If your story is supposed to be real, then the death is a real death. Someone’s life is lost forever. Treat it as such. This doesn’t mean having the surviving character burst into tears the moment their friend takes their last breath, but it does mean making them deal with it. You can’t let your surviving character act like nothing happened, even if that’s how they appear on the outside. There must be processing.  Value life…and its loss.

2.      Respect people that have seen battle. They don’t appreciate when you gush about how epic war is. It’s not, and they know it. Siegfried Sassoon—an English soldier of WWI—wrote a poem titled Glory of Women, which reflects the hurt he experienced from romanticizing.

3.      Read accounts or look at pictures from any war. I’ve drawn insights for my Vietnam War story that matches what WWI soldiers expressed in their writings. Pictures from the Korean War helped me to realize, understand, and portray the humanity of soldiers. Pictures don’t lie, and they often capture unspeakable grief. People are always people and war is always war, no matter what era. Getting inside the minds of those willing to share their experience is key to seeing the real thing.

4.      Resist the temptation to romanticize. Don’t bash your readers over the head with carnage and take it from soldiers who’ve lived it.  Wilfred Owen, another WWI poet, wrote a beautiful poem that shows war honestly. He entitled it Dulce et Decorum Est. Owen was killed a week before the war ended, a bitter and all too real picture of what he wrote.

5.      Reflect on why you’re writing the words on the page. Is it to sicken your readers with more blood? Or is it to show them, “This is war. This is what soldiers handle. This is what people do despite the horror”?

Consider Stephen Crane, author of The Red Badge of Courage. Although I’ve never read it, Crane’s understanding and depiction of the Civil War made the novel known for, to quote Wikipedia, “its realism.” He didn’t fight in the war—in fact he was born after it ended. But he grasped reality and did the research.

Gore for the sake of it is delighting in the deaths and hurt of real people outside the pages of your story. It’s disrespectful to those who have been through combat, living or deceased.

I once heard words described as play things, and I love that; I’ve come to adopt words as “my toys.” But death isn’t a toy. War is never a toy. Death rips a real person away from their real family and friends. Writers should never treat it lightly.

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Understand WHAT you’re writing and WHY you’re writing it.

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¹Defending That Which is Not Mine, Draft III, Liberty Bell

²10,000 Days of Thunder, Philip Caputo