The Pain of War

British historian Martin Gilbert observed, “the greatest unfinished business of the Second World War is human pain.” If this was true for World War II it is even truer today. This weekend I watched Paul Haggis’s remarkable new film, In the Valley of Elah, a film everyone ought to see. In it, Haggis tells the story of Hank Deerfield's (Tommy Lee Jones) search for his son Mike who, after a tour of duty in Iraq, is first reported missing from Fort Rudd in New Mexico and then discovered dead--burned and dismembered in a field near the army base.

On one level the story is a classic detective piece recording a father’s attempt to find out what happened to his son. On another level, as Dennis Denby points out in his excellent review in the New Yorker, the film documents the father's painful but unflinching search to learn what kind of person his son became in Iraq. He discovers the capacity of his son and his son's friends to commit unspeakable violence both against the Iraqis and each other.

Based on a number of true stories, the movie reveals the damage the Iraq war is having on the psyche of individuals. While I see in my neighborhood more and more people with prosthetic arms and legs, what I don't see is the emotional trauma caused by the war. Yet it is the effects on the mind and the spirit, as much as the effects to the body, with which we all now have to be prepared to deal.

As Haggis’s film makes poignantly clear, the aftermath of the Iraq war has already begun. The onus is on us to listen as openly and honestly as we can to what people faced. We need to get busy advocating not only to end to the war but to make sure those who served have the mental health services they need to begin the long, slow process of recovery. It is the human pain, pain that turns so quickly into violence, that is our burden now.