ELIZABETH D. SAMET
ELIZABETH D. SAMET é autora de Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness e professora de Inglês em West Point. As opiniões expressas aqui são de sua autoria e não refletem a política ou posição oficial do Departamento do Exército, do Departamento de Defesa ou do governo dos Estados Unidos.
ELIZABETH D. SAMET é autora de Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness e professora de Inglês em West Point. As opiniões expressas aqui são de sua autoria e não refletem a política ou posição oficial do Departamento do Exército, do Departamento de Defesa ou do governo dos Estados Unidos.
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| Memorial de Guerra do Corpo de Fuzileiros Navais dos EUA, Arlington, Virgínia, março de 2025 Kevin Lamarque / Reuters |
Desde 1989, estima-se que quatro milhões de pessoas tenham morrido em decorrência de conflitos armados ao redor do mundo — 740 mil apenas entre 2021 e 2024. Compreender a fundo essas décadas violentas e a atual volatilidade geopolítica persistente exige, claro, conhecimento em políticas públicas. Mas também requer uma perspectiva que vá além da ciência política — que, por mais rigorosa que seja, nem sempre leva em conta certos elementos humanos da guerra: o desejo de glória, a sede de vingança e outras paixões irracionais que moldam a beligerância de guerreiros e nações. Em outras palavras, o material da literatura.
As nações tecem mitos a partir de vitórias e apagam derrotas com a promessa de triunfos futuros. Tendem a medir as “más” guerras em relação às “boas”, ao mesmo tempo em que imortalizam estas últimas com uma nostalgia que as atrai para buscas vaidosas — e, em última instância, inglórias — por novos conflitos.
Há algumas coisas que é preciso saber sobre as histórias. Primeiro, os seres humanos se alimentam delas há milênios — da Bíblia e das epopeias da Antiguidade ao romance do século XIX e à franquia Marvel do século XXI. Segundo, os realistas e instrumentalistas mais duros, que demonstram maior desprezo pelo valor das histórias — especialmente das ficcionais — e desconfiança em relação ao estudo literário, são muitas vezes os consumidores mais ingênuos de fábulas, arrebatados pelo poder das ficções, mas ignorantes quanto a seus limites, restrições e capacidade de iludir.
Terceiro, a história (ou narrativa) tornou-se, para muitas pessoas, a principal forma de compreender o mundo. Como argumenta o teórico literário Peter Brooks em seu livro de 2022 Seduced by Story, “a narrativa parece ter se tornado aceita como a única forma de conhecimento e discurso que regula os assuntos humanos”. Nesse processo, observa Brooks, a história eclipsou o argumento racional como principal veículo das verdades sociais, políticas e históricas.
Vivemos em um mundo em que quem conta a melhor história triunfa sobre quem raciocina com mais clareza. As histórias mais bem-sucedidas adquirem a qualidade de mito, momento em que, como escreve Brooks, “seu status de ficção é esquecido e elas passam a ser tomadas como explicações reais do mundo”. Diante dessa “tomada narrativa”, Brooks exorta os leitores “a oporem a inteligência crítica e analítica às narrativas que nos seduzem a aceitar ideologias dominantes”. O que ouvintes e leitores precisam, ele defende, é “resistir a uma narcose passiva de resposta”.
Dada a ubiquidade das histórias e a vulnerabilidade humana diante delas, os cidadãos de hoje fariam bem em praticar as habilidades da análise literária — justamente as técnicas rotineiramente ridicularizadas e desvalorizadas em um mundo entregue à tecnologia e ao tribalismo. Muitos parecem ansiosos por se livrar dos trabalhos do pensamento e da expressão — os mesmos trabalhos que os definem como seres humanos livres e autônomos — ao delegá-los à inteligência artificial generativa.
Uma maneira de compreender o estado atual do mundo é imaginá-lo ocupando a interseção entre história e guerra. A história conquistou ascendência como veículo para entender o mundo, enquanto a capacidade de interpretar narrativas atrofiou. Ao mesmo tempo, a era presente é uma época em que as guerras parecem nunca terminar — ora fervendo, ora apenas em ebulição branda — mas sempre em andamento. Na ausência de fins definitivos e vitórias conclusivas, ansiamos por uma boa história de guerra.
Há, é claro, um sentido estrito em que lutar e contar histórias se opõem: histórias criam, guerras destroem. Em momentos cruciais, contudo, uma força se rende à outra, produzindo uma colaboração ambígua. Escritores há muito se vangloriam de que o soldado nada é sem eles: o poeta e o romancista mantêm vivas as façanhas do guerreiro para a posteridade. Do mesmo modo, é axiomático que o escritor nada é sem o soldado: sem guerra, não há epopeia; sem guerra, não há filme de guerra; sem guerra, não há Guerra e Paz.
Antecipar e preparar-se para a guerra conduz, de modo bastante natural, à aceitação de sua inevitabilidade. Histórias concorrentes seduzem pessoas e nações a entrarem em guerra. Uma vez envolvidos no conflito, participantes e espectadores acrescentam mais camadas de narrativas para tentar compreender sua relação com aquele caldeirão violento. O período pós-guerra oferece terreno fértil para narrativas sobre a origem, a condução e o desfecho do conflito. Contar histórias é um empreendimento tanto individual quanto coletivo. A lembrança pessoal se entrelaça com a ficção política, o fato histórico e a distorção mitológica no dilúvio de narrativas que normalmente se segue a uma guerra.
O presidente dos Estados Unidos Dwight Eisenhower introduziu o conceito de “complexo militar-industrial” há décadas, em seu discurso de despedida de 1961. “Nos conselhos de governo, devemos nos precaver contra a aquisição de influência indevida, buscada ou não, pelo complexo militar-industrial”, alertou ele. “O potencial para o surgimento desastroso de um poder mal direcionado existe e persistirá.” Pode-se debater se o presidente estava descrevendo um fenômeno novo ou apenas nomeando uma relação antiga entre as figuras públicas que autorizam guerras e os atores privados que lucram com elas. Mas ele também estava contando uma história sobre como e por que as guerras começam — uma que vinculava o ato de guerrear a uma condição patológica (um “complexo”). Essa narrativa contrariava a história supremamente heroica — que ele próprio ajudou a escrever — da Segunda Guerra Mundial: a “boa guerra” que o tornou famoso.
Mais de seis décadas depois, o que surgiu foi um complexo militar-narrativo, em que a guerra se torna uma história boa demais para não ser contada — repetidas vezes. Estados — e agora também atores não estatais — vêm travando guerras de vários tipos quase continuamente desde a Segunda Guerra Mundial. A cada vez, parecem buscar uma história que proporcione as satisfações narrativas associadas àquele conflito: causas justas, enredos claros e poderosos de libertação e vingança justa, heróis e vilões inequívocos, fins definitivos. No entanto, nenhuma das continuações da Segunda Guerra Mundial esteve à altura da história original.
PAGE TURNERS
Humans are always drafting and revising war stories, even when they aren’t actively fighting. Indeed, they routinely write themselves into and out of wars. Anticipating and preparing for war leads quite naturally to accepting its inevitability. The historian Odd Arne Westad offers an example of this dynamic in the British-German antagonism that precipitated World War I. “It wasn’t structural pressures, important as they were, that sparked World War I,” Westad argued in Foreign Affairs, in 2024. “War broke out thanks to the contingent decisions of individuals and a profound lack of imagination on both sides.” Westad also discerns a resemblance between this early-twentieth-century doom loop and the current attitudes toward U.S.-Chinese relations: “Any opening for cooperation, even on key issues, gets lost in mutual recriminations, petty irritations, and deepening strategic mistrust.”
This is the domain of grand tragedy. Potential adversaries interpret political action in zero-sum terms; see malice and evil design in mere blunders and coincidence; trumpet necessity rather than navigate choice; and, in extreme cases, invent pretext or promise profit to make more palatable a dubious cause. In The Mayor of Casterbridge, his 1886 novel about a man who attempts to outflank the great error of his past, the English writer Thomas Hardy offers an interpersonal version of the geopolitical misconstructions Westad articulates. Individuals tend to misunderstand each other’s motives, Hardy writes, because “we attribute to an enemy a power of consistent action which we never find in ourselves or in our friends.”
When it comes to violent conflict, the costs of this tendency are supremely high. With stunning celerity, possibility becomes probability and then certainty, as readers reject the quiet, circuitous, and unglamorous narratives of prudential compromise, ambiguous diplomacy, or incremental progress. The journalist and critic Carlos Lozada has called attention to the hawk’s “narrative advantage” over the dove. “It is unfair, but tales of war tend to be more exciting than stories of peace,” Lozada wrote in The New York Times in 2023. “Dire scenarios of risk and escalation are almost always more captivating than those dissenting voices that explain how to avoid a fight.” Hawks might whip up enthusiasm by waving a bloody shirt or recalling a stab in the back. Sometimes the case for war’s inevitability is couched in expressions of rue and reluctance. U.S. Air Force General Mike Minihan, now retired, followed that pattern when, as commander of Air Mobility Command, he began a 2023 memo on China: “I hope I am wrong” before revealing, “My gut tells me we will fight in 2025.”
War stories work because it is, quite simply, much easier to define oneself against an enemy than it is to look within. They win because can-do cultures, such as those within the military, require objectives and need to believe that victory is achievable. War stories have acquired even greater momentum since railroads and military staff colleges emerged in the late nineteenth century, when states committed themselves to the business of planning—a serious work that nevertheless entails playing war games and imagining scenarios. Preparing to meet a host of contingencies entails writing a series of scripts that predict the future.
It is much easier to define oneself against an enemy than it is to look within.
The British military historian John Keegan revealed the hazards of this kind of planning in his anatomy of the Schlieffen Plan, the German strategy for fighting a two-front continental war that was devised, in 1905, by the chief of the army’s general staff, Alfred von Schlieffen. Schlieffen grounded his plan in the “mathematical realities” of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but also, as Keegan notes, in “wishful thinking.” After all, Keegan continues, “plans do not determine outcomes.” Schlieffen’s fixation on the Carthaginian general Hannibal’s masterful envelopment of the Romans at Cannae, combined with a desire to reproduce the German victories of the Franco-Prussian War, distorted his math: “The dream was of a whirlwind,” Keegan observes; “the calculations warned of a dying thunderstorm.” The German army’s general staff largely ignored the frank acknowledgment, buried deep in the plan, that the Germans were “too weak” to bring it to fruition. In the end, Keegan writes, when Kaiser Wilhelm II “might have put brakes to the exorable progression of the Schlieffen Plan, he found he did not understand the machinery he was supposed to control, panicked and let a piece of paper determine events.” Once written, the script’s fantastic promise distracted its readers from the fatal holes in its plot.
As soon as a battle or a war has been fought, victors and losers alike begin to tell different stories. Official stories have a deliberate, not necessarily sinister, design. The rise of the PowerPoint “storyboard” in the U.S. military during the global “war on terror,” for example, helped ensure that every engagement would be recorded a particular way. One need only search the web for a “U.S. Army storyboard template” to see how institutionalized narratives can homogenize experience by molding episodes into a particular form or genre until all content starts to look and sound alike.
It is a truism that history is written by the winners, yet it is often the losers who tell the better story—an “if only” myth that has endless permutations: If only the bad weather had held off. If only the radio hadn’t malfunctioned. If only the colonel hadn’t been sick. If only the general hadn’t been quite so ambitious. If only our hands hadn’t been tied. If only we had the resources of our enemy, or the requisite political will. At war’s end, the narrative that develops valorizes physical courage, glorifies battlefield heroics, and vilifies hubris. It distorts the relationship between war and politics while also devaluing two decidedly unromantic virtues that can prevent war—prudence and restraint—and ignoring the role of chance and disorder. The Confederate “lost cause” narrative that developed in the wake of the American Civil War, which romanticized the antebellum Southern way of life and turned the conflict into chivalric tragedy, offers a case in point. So, too, does the obsession, during the Reagan and first Bush administrations, with winning a war (even a cold one) in order to “kick” the Vietnam syndrome that had seemingly eclipsed the victorious story of World War II.
ORIGIN STORY
Numerous works of literature illuminate the stakes of weaving and consuming war stories, but for many people, there is no more definitive beginning than the Trojan War—the founding war story of Western literature and, for some, the original conflict between East and West (in this case, Greece and Asia). The version of events found primarily in the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Homeric epics that narrate the war and its aftermath, respectively, serves as a template for how many people continue to imagine war, honor, heroism, and a whole set of related issues to this day. This story retains a hold on people to a degree that most are likely scarcely aware of. It is the ultimate hawk’s tale.
Those who have read Homer’s Iliad—even those who haven’t—think they know the story of the Trojan War. In a nutshell, the Trojan prince Paris sails to Sparta to capture Helen, the beautiful wife of the king of Sparta, Menelaus. Recruiting a coalition of Greeks to get Helen back from Troy, Menelaus and his brother lead a war that lasts ten years. The Iliad tells the story of the Greeks’ greatest warrior, Achilles, who sulks in his tent for most of the poem before rejoining the fight and turning the tide. The epic ends with the death of Troy’s champion, Hector, but the war carries on.
As various ancient sources recount, after Achilles is killed by Paris, the Greeks resort to deception. Odysseus, the Ithacan warrior who is as celebrated for craftiness as Achilles is for brute strength, devises a clever ruse in which the Greeks place a giant wooden horse outside Troy’s walls and pretend to sail away. After the duped Trojans wheel the horse inside their impregnable fortress, the warriors hiding within spearhead the attack. The Greeks raze the city, slaughter many of its inhabitants, and enslave those who survive. Helen returns with Menelaus to Sparta. In the Odyssey, Homer depicts Helen and Menelaus’s reunion as uneasy and sometimes tearful, after years of estrangement. While entertaining in their palace, Helen drugs the wine—the poet calls it “magic to make us all forget our pains”—so that for one evening at least, no one will cry for a world ruined by war.
Loving Achilles is an Achilles’ heel.
But there is also a radically different, comparatively dovish version of the story. According to the Greek historian Herodotus, who composed his glorious amalgamation of legend and fact in the fourth-century BC, Helen never even reached Troy because Paris’s ship was blown off course. Instead, the pair landed in Egypt, where a local king named Proteus reprimanded Paris for being such an ungrateful guest and sent him packing while holding both Helen and the stolen treasure in trust for Menelaus. Herodotus reasoned that had Helen in fact been within the walls of Troy instead of in Egypt, the Trojans would surely have surrendered her to the Greeks rather than allow their city to be destroyed. Herodotus recruits evidence from passages in the Iliad and the Odyssey to show that Homer himself knew at least fragments of this tale yet opted to tell another, better yarn.
The values Homer elevated, especially those of male honor and female duplicity, established parameters for the war story (and not only the war story) for centuries to come. But in the less-known version, the Greeks have no legitimate reason to fight at Troy, while the Trojans try to repel irrational aggressors who do not realize, do not care, or simply refuse to believe that Helen isn’t living with Paris behind Troy’s walls. In the words of one critic, Herodotus effectively calls into doubt “the whole concept of the causation of the war itself.”
Other Greek writers further embellished the tale. In the Athenian Euripides’s play Helen, for example, Menelaus discovers that he has retrieved a phantom rather than the real Helen only after sailing away from a sacked Troy. When he then encounters the genuine Helen in Egypt, the revelation that he has spent a violent decade hunting a shadow—a simulacrum of a cause—does nothing to alter his attitude toward his expedition to Troy, which remains heroic in his eyes. Indeed, the preservation of the honor and glory he won at Troy remains Menelaus’s favorite subject throughout the play. His victory loses none of its luster by being severed from its ostensible cause: prowess in battle proves a satisfying end unto itself.
Euripides’s play unsettles assumed truths of martial heroism and battlefield glory by contrasting “the hellish world of Troy,” as the classicist Charles Segal describes it, with a fantastic “Egyptian never-never land” from which Helen and Menelaus escape to return home to Sparta. The play’s deep ambivalence to war and conventional heroism certainly owes something to its historical moment. It was performed in 412 BC, in the wake of the Athenians’ catastrophic expedition in Sicily, an ill-conceived and poorly executed invasion that showed Athens the true cost of arrogant martial ambition and from which the city did not recover.
THE ROAD NOT TAKEN
All this would have little bearing on war today were it not the case that real-life warriors have, for millennia, found inspiration in the hawkish Homeric version of events, and not the dovish alternative. Soldiers, whether they believe it to be fact or legend, have held up Homer’s world as an ideal against which to measure their own behavior. The figure of Achilles, a warrior who singlehandedly choked a river with dead enemies before taking on the river god himself, provided a model for Alexander the Great and persists in contemporary popular entertainment, political speech, and military culture in celebrations of shock and awe. The ideal of the Achillean warrior lives on as a touchstone for anyone attempting to understand or reinvent military culture. The better story won a long time ago and froze into a myth with present-day repercussions. Loving Achilles is an Achilles’ heel.
The alternative story of Helen’s Egyptian detour invites a more critical examination of the relationship between war and story by highlighting the degree to which humans have been conditioned by a narrative that presents war as the ultimate stage for personal and national glory. That old story survived the reevaluation of war that took place during the Enlightenment; the transformation of the modern battlefield by mass mobilization and factory-scale killing in the twentieth century; and now, the separation between killer and target facilitated by technology.
What then does this mean for the practitioner, the policymaker, and the prognosticator, and for all those who produce, participate in, or hungrily consume war stories? Peter Brooks proposes that novelists “have recognized that life needs to be shaped and understood through narrative. But they have also understood the limits to the order that fiction can impose on life.” Novelists—those modern counterparts to the epic poets—have something to teach all those constituencies. Narrative has a seemingly relentless, ungovernable momentum, but humans retain a control over war stories that does not extend to war itself. War is a realm of chance, accident, and volatility over which its participants can only ever hope to work a small measure of influence, as Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace reminds us. The prudent way forward ought then to be to read today’s many swirling war stories with greater acuity—or even to learn how to write an altogether different story. The Council on Foreign Relations currently tracks almost 30 conflict zones around the world, including both internecine and international struggles. Meanwhile, someone is surely already working on the story of the next war. Savvy readers might recognize that the story of that brewing war is just that, a story—and not yet an inevitability.
As nações tecem mitos a partir de vitórias e apagam derrotas com a promessa de triunfos futuros. Tendem a medir as “más” guerras em relação às “boas”, ao mesmo tempo em que imortalizam estas últimas com uma nostalgia que as atrai para buscas vaidosas — e, em última instância, inglórias — por novos conflitos.
Há algumas coisas que é preciso saber sobre as histórias. Primeiro, os seres humanos se alimentam delas há milênios — da Bíblia e das epopeias da Antiguidade ao romance do século XIX e à franquia Marvel do século XXI. Segundo, os realistas e instrumentalistas mais duros, que demonstram maior desprezo pelo valor das histórias — especialmente das ficcionais — e desconfiança em relação ao estudo literário, são muitas vezes os consumidores mais ingênuos de fábulas, arrebatados pelo poder das ficções, mas ignorantes quanto a seus limites, restrições e capacidade de iludir.
Terceiro, a história (ou narrativa) tornou-se, para muitas pessoas, a principal forma de compreender o mundo. Como argumenta o teórico literário Peter Brooks em seu livro de 2022 Seduced by Story, “a narrativa parece ter se tornado aceita como a única forma de conhecimento e discurso que regula os assuntos humanos”. Nesse processo, observa Brooks, a história eclipsou o argumento racional como principal veículo das verdades sociais, políticas e históricas.
Vivemos em um mundo em que quem conta a melhor história triunfa sobre quem raciocina com mais clareza. As histórias mais bem-sucedidas adquirem a qualidade de mito, momento em que, como escreve Brooks, “seu status de ficção é esquecido e elas passam a ser tomadas como explicações reais do mundo”. Diante dessa “tomada narrativa”, Brooks exorta os leitores “a oporem a inteligência crítica e analítica às narrativas que nos seduzem a aceitar ideologias dominantes”. O que ouvintes e leitores precisam, ele defende, é “resistir a uma narcose passiva de resposta”.
Dada a ubiquidade das histórias e a vulnerabilidade humana diante delas, os cidadãos de hoje fariam bem em praticar as habilidades da análise literária — justamente as técnicas rotineiramente ridicularizadas e desvalorizadas em um mundo entregue à tecnologia e ao tribalismo. Muitos parecem ansiosos por se livrar dos trabalhos do pensamento e da expressão — os mesmos trabalhos que os definem como seres humanos livres e autônomos — ao delegá-los à inteligência artificial generativa.
Uma maneira de compreender o estado atual do mundo é imaginá-lo ocupando a interseção entre história e guerra. A história conquistou ascendência como veículo para entender o mundo, enquanto a capacidade de interpretar narrativas atrofiou. Ao mesmo tempo, a era presente é uma época em que as guerras parecem nunca terminar — ora fervendo, ora apenas em ebulição branda — mas sempre em andamento. Na ausência de fins definitivos e vitórias conclusivas, ansiamos por uma boa história de guerra.
Há, é claro, um sentido estrito em que lutar e contar histórias se opõem: histórias criam, guerras destroem. Em momentos cruciais, contudo, uma força se rende à outra, produzindo uma colaboração ambígua. Escritores há muito se vangloriam de que o soldado nada é sem eles: o poeta e o romancista mantêm vivas as façanhas do guerreiro para a posteridade. Do mesmo modo, é axiomático que o escritor nada é sem o soldado: sem guerra, não há epopeia; sem guerra, não há filme de guerra; sem guerra, não há Guerra e Paz.
Antecipar e preparar-se para a guerra conduz, de modo bastante natural, à aceitação de sua inevitabilidade. Histórias concorrentes seduzem pessoas e nações a entrarem em guerra. Uma vez envolvidos no conflito, participantes e espectadores acrescentam mais camadas de narrativas para tentar compreender sua relação com aquele caldeirão violento. O período pós-guerra oferece terreno fértil para narrativas sobre a origem, a condução e o desfecho do conflito. Contar histórias é um empreendimento tanto individual quanto coletivo. A lembrança pessoal se entrelaça com a ficção política, o fato histórico e a distorção mitológica no dilúvio de narrativas que normalmente se segue a uma guerra.
O presidente dos Estados Unidos Dwight Eisenhower introduziu o conceito de “complexo militar-industrial” há décadas, em seu discurso de despedida de 1961. “Nos conselhos de governo, devemos nos precaver contra a aquisição de influência indevida, buscada ou não, pelo complexo militar-industrial”, alertou ele. “O potencial para o surgimento desastroso de um poder mal direcionado existe e persistirá.” Pode-se debater se o presidente estava descrevendo um fenômeno novo ou apenas nomeando uma relação antiga entre as figuras públicas que autorizam guerras e os atores privados que lucram com elas. Mas ele também estava contando uma história sobre como e por que as guerras começam — uma que vinculava o ato de guerrear a uma condição patológica (um “complexo”). Essa narrativa contrariava a história supremamente heroica — que ele próprio ajudou a escrever — da Segunda Guerra Mundial: a “boa guerra” que o tornou famoso.
Mais de seis décadas depois, o que surgiu foi um complexo militar-narrativo, em que a guerra se torna uma história boa demais para não ser contada — repetidas vezes. Estados — e agora também atores não estatais — vêm travando guerras de vários tipos quase continuamente desde a Segunda Guerra Mundial. A cada vez, parecem buscar uma história que proporcione as satisfações narrativas associadas àquele conflito: causas justas, enredos claros e poderosos de libertação e vingança justa, heróis e vilões inequívocos, fins definitivos. No entanto, nenhuma das continuações da Segunda Guerra Mundial esteve à altura da história original.
PAGE TURNERS
Humans are always drafting and revising war stories, even when they aren’t actively fighting. Indeed, they routinely write themselves into and out of wars. Anticipating and preparing for war leads quite naturally to accepting its inevitability. The historian Odd Arne Westad offers an example of this dynamic in the British-German antagonism that precipitated World War I. “It wasn’t structural pressures, important as they were, that sparked World War I,” Westad argued in Foreign Affairs, in 2024. “War broke out thanks to the contingent decisions of individuals and a profound lack of imagination on both sides.” Westad also discerns a resemblance between this early-twentieth-century doom loop and the current attitudes toward U.S.-Chinese relations: “Any opening for cooperation, even on key issues, gets lost in mutual recriminations, petty irritations, and deepening strategic mistrust.”
This is the domain of grand tragedy. Potential adversaries interpret political action in zero-sum terms; see malice and evil design in mere blunders and coincidence; trumpet necessity rather than navigate choice; and, in extreme cases, invent pretext or promise profit to make more palatable a dubious cause. In The Mayor of Casterbridge, his 1886 novel about a man who attempts to outflank the great error of his past, the English writer Thomas Hardy offers an interpersonal version of the geopolitical misconstructions Westad articulates. Individuals tend to misunderstand each other’s motives, Hardy writes, because “we attribute to an enemy a power of consistent action which we never find in ourselves or in our friends.”
When it comes to violent conflict, the costs of this tendency are supremely high. With stunning celerity, possibility becomes probability and then certainty, as readers reject the quiet, circuitous, and unglamorous narratives of prudential compromise, ambiguous diplomacy, or incremental progress. The journalist and critic Carlos Lozada has called attention to the hawk’s “narrative advantage” over the dove. “It is unfair, but tales of war tend to be more exciting than stories of peace,” Lozada wrote in The New York Times in 2023. “Dire scenarios of risk and escalation are almost always more captivating than those dissenting voices that explain how to avoid a fight.” Hawks might whip up enthusiasm by waving a bloody shirt or recalling a stab in the back. Sometimes the case for war’s inevitability is couched in expressions of rue and reluctance. U.S. Air Force General Mike Minihan, now retired, followed that pattern when, as commander of Air Mobility Command, he began a 2023 memo on China: “I hope I am wrong” before revealing, “My gut tells me we will fight in 2025.”
War stories work because it is, quite simply, much easier to define oneself against an enemy than it is to look within. They win because can-do cultures, such as those within the military, require objectives and need to believe that victory is achievable. War stories have acquired even greater momentum since railroads and military staff colleges emerged in the late nineteenth century, when states committed themselves to the business of planning—a serious work that nevertheless entails playing war games and imagining scenarios. Preparing to meet a host of contingencies entails writing a series of scripts that predict the future.
It is much easier to define oneself against an enemy than it is to look within.
The British military historian John Keegan revealed the hazards of this kind of planning in his anatomy of the Schlieffen Plan, the German strategy for fighting a two-front continental war that was devised, in 1905, by the chief of the army’s general staff, Alfred von Schlieffen. Schlieffen grounded his plan in the “mathematical realities” of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but also, as Keegan notes, in “wishful thinking.” After all, Keegan continues, “plans do not determine outcomes.” Schlieffen’s fixation on the Carthaginian general Hannibal’s masterful envelopment of the Romans at Cannae, combined with a desire to reproduce the German victories of the Franco-Prussian War, distorted his math: “The dream was of a whirlwind,” Keegan observes; “the calculations warned of a dying thunderstorm.” The German army’s general staff largely ignored the frank acknowledgment, buried deep in the plan, that the Germans were “too weak” to bring it to fruition. In the end, Keegan writes, when Kaiser Wilhelm II “might have put brakes to the exorable progression of the Schlieffen Plan, he found he did not understand the machinery he was supposed to control, panicked and let a piece of paper determine events.” Once written, the script’s fantastic promise distracted its readers from the fatal holes in its plot.
As soon as a battle or a war has been fought, victors and losers alike begin to tell different stories. Official stories have a deliberate, not necessarily sinister, design. The rise of the PowerPoint “storyboard” in the U.S. military during the global “war on terror,” for example, helped ensure that every engagement would be recorded a particular way. One need only search the web for a “U.S. Army storyboard template” to see how institutionalized narratives can homogenize experience by molding episodes into a particular form or genre until all content starts to look and sound alike.
It is a truism that history is written by the winners, yet it is often the losers who tell the better story—an “if only” myth that has endless permutations: If only the bad weather had held off. If only the radio hadn’t malfunctioned. If only the colonel hadn’t been sick. If only the general hadn’t been quite so ambitious. If only our hands hadn’t been tied. If only we had the resources of our enemy, or the requisite political will. At war’s end, the narrative that develops valorizes physical courage, glorifies battlefield heroics, and vilifies hubris. It distorts the relationship between war and politics while also devaluing two decidedly unromantic virtues that can prevent war—prudence and restraint—and ignoring the role of chance and disorder. The Confederate “lost cause” narrative that developed in the wake of the American Civil War, which romanticized the antebellum Southern way of life and turned the conflict into chivalric tragedy, offers a case in point. So, too, does the obsession, during the Reagan and first Bush administrations, with winning a war (even a cold one) in order to “kick” the Vietnam syndrome that had seemingly eclipsed the victorious story of World War II.
ORIGIN STORY
Numerous works of literature illuminate the stakes of weaving and consuming war stories, but for many people, there is no more definitive beginning than the Trojan War—the founding war story of Western literature and, for some, the original conflict between East and West (in this case, Greece and Asia). The version of events found primarily in the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Homeric epics that narrate the war and its aftermath, respectively, serves as a template for how many people continue to imagine war, honor, heroism, and a whole set of related issues to this day. This story retains a hold on people to a degree that most are likely scarcely aware of. It is the ultimate hawk’s tale.
Those who have read Homer’s Iliad—even those who haven’t—think they know the story of the Trojan War. In a nutshell, the Trojan prince Paris sails to Sparta to capture Helen, the beautiful wife of the king of Sparta, Menelaus. Recruiting a coalition of Greeks to get Helen back from Troy, Menelaus and his brother lead a war that lasts ten years. The Iliad tells the story of the Greeks’ greatest warrior, Achilles, who sulks in his tent for most of the poem before rejoining the fight and turning the tide. The epic ends with the death of Troy’s champion, Hector, but the war carries on.
As various ancient sources recount, after Achilles is killed by Paris, the Greeks resort to deception. Odysseus, the Ithacan warrior who is as celebrated for craftiness as Achilles is for brute strength, devises a clever ruse in which the Greeks place a giant wooden horse outside Troy’s walls and pretend to sail away. After the duped Trojans wheel the horse inside their impregnable fortress, the warriors hiding within spearhead the attack. The Greeks raze the city, slaughter many of its inhabitants, and enslave those who survive. Helen returns with Menelaus to Sparta. In the Odyssey, Homer depicts Helen and Menelaus’s reunion as uneasy and sometimes tearful, after years of estrangement. While entertaining in their palace, Helen drugs the wine—the poet calls it “magic to make us all forget our pains”—so that for one evening at least, no one will cry for a world ruined by war.
Loving Achilles is an Achilles’ heel.
But there is also a radically different, comparatively dovish version of the story. According to the Greek historian Herodotus, who composed his glorious amalgamation of legend and fact in the fourth-century BC, Helen never even reached Troy because Paris’s ship was blown off course. Instead, the pair landed in Egypt, where a local king named Proteus reprimanded Paris for being such an ungrateful guest and sent him packing while holding both Helen and the stolen treasure in trust for Menelaus. Herodotus reasoned that had Helen in fact been within the walls of Troy instead of in Egypt, the Trojans would surely have surrendered her to the Greeks rather than allow their city to be destroyed. Herodotus recruits evidence from passages in the Iliad and the Odyssey to show that Homer himself knew at least fragments of this tale yet opted to tell another, better yarn.
The values Homer elevated, especially those of male honor and female duplicity, established parameters for the war story (and not only the war story) for centuries to come. But in the less-known version, the Greeks have no legitimate reason to fight at Troy, while the Trojans try to repel irrational aggressors who do not realize, do not care, or simply refuse to believe that Helen isn’t living with Paris behind Troy’s walls. In the words of one critic, Herodotus effectively calls into doubt “the whole concept of the causation of the war itself.”
Other Greek writers further embellished the tale. In the Athenian Euripides’s play Helen, for example, Menelaus discovers that he has retrieved a phantom rather than the real Helen only after sailing away from a sacked Troy. When he then encounters the genuine Helen in Egypt, the revelation that he has spent a violent decade hunting a shadow—a simulacrum of a cause—does nothing to alter his attitude toward his expedition to Troy, which remains heroic in his eyes. Indeed, the preservation of the honor and glory he won at Troy remains Menelaus’s favorite subject throughout the play. His victory loses none of its luster by being severed from its ostensible cause: prowess in battle proves a satisfying end unto itself.
Euripides’s play unsettles assumed truths of martial heroism and battlefield glory by contrasting “the hellish world of Troy,” as the classicist Charles Segal describes it, with a fantastic “Egyptian never-never land” from which Helen and Menelaus escape to return home to Sparta. The play’s deep ambivalence to war and conventional heroism certainly owes something to its historical moment. It was performed in 412 BC, in the wake of the Athenians’ catastrophic expedition in Sicily, an ill-conceived and poorly executed invasion that showed Athens the true cost of arrogant martial ambition and from which the city did not recover.
THE ROAD NOT TAKEN
All this would have little bearing on war today were it not the case that real-life warriors have, for millennia, found inspiration in the hawkish Homeric version of events, and not the dovish alternative. Soldiers, whether they believe it to be fact or legend, have held up Homer’s world as an ideal against which to measure their own behavior. The figure of Achilles, a warrior who singlehandedly choked a river with dead enemies before taking on the river god himself, provided a model for Alexander the Great and persists in contemporary popular entertainment, political speech, and military culture in celebrations of shock and awe. The ideal of the Achillean warrior lives on as a touchstone for anyone attempting to understand or reinvent military culture. The better story won a long time ago and froze into a myth with present-day repercussions. Loving Achilles is an Achilles’ heel.
The alternative story of Helen’s Egyptian detour invites a more critical examination of the relationship between war and story by highlighting the degree to which humans have been conditioned by a narrative that presents war as the ultimate stage for personal and national glory. That old story survived the reevaluation of war that took place during the Enlightenment; the transformation of the modern battlefield by mass mobilization and factory-scale killing in the twentieth century; and now, the separation between killer and target facilitated by technology.
What then does this mean for the practitioner, the policymaker, and the prognosticator, and for all those who produce, participate in, or hungrily consume war stories? Peter Brooks proposes that novelists “have recognized that life needs to be shaped and understood through narrative. But they have also understood the limits to the order that fiction can impose on life.” Novelists—those modern counterparts to the epic poets—have something to teach all those constituencies. Narrative has a seemingly relentless, ungovernable momentum, but humans retain a control over war stories that does not extend to war itself. War is a realm of chance, accident, and volatility over which its participants can only ever hope to work a small measure of influence, as Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace reminds us. The prudent way forward ought then to be to read today’s many swirling war stories with greater acuity—or even to learn how to write an altogether different story. The Council on Foreign Relations currently tracks almost 30 conflict zones around the world, including both internecine and international struggles. Meanwhile, someone is surely already working on the story of the next war. Savvy readers might recognize that the story of that brewing war is just that, a story—and not yet an inevitability.
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