To hell and back

During white-heat of combat in Afghanistan, an American solider wonders aloud if God is angry for some of the things he has done. That scene occurs in Korengal, a documentary directed by Sebastian Junger.

Like his earlier Restrepo, the film focuses on a platoon that fought a ferocious war in the Korengal Valley of Afghanistan: 42 soldiers died before US military pulled out of the area in April 2010 (but only after doling out 6,000 gallons of fuel to the locals as ‘inducement’ for not attacking their convoy).

The film provides a discomforting close-up of the warping effects of war on lives of young combatants. Junger thus captures what others such as Chuck Palahniuk have already highlighted in their non-redemptive accounts: there is no such thing as going to hell and coming back intact; that survival is “just an upside of already being eternally damned”.

That might also explain why Korengaldoes not mention religious faith as a possible psychological shield (aside from that single soliloquy presumably born of a soldier’s guilty conscience)! Ironically, something similar emerged earlier from the trenches of World War I, during more innocent times: the poet Siegfried Sassoon spoke, for instance, about “the inability of religion to cope with carnage and catastrophe”.

More telling was the image of God looking down “stone-deaf and stone-blind” in Edmund Thomas’ war poem. However, it would also be imprudent to rule out the role of religion, or aparticular interpretation of it, in the opposite camp. Surely, Samuel P Huntington must be chuckling in the clouds.