The events at Haditha, in which Marines may have killed civilians in retaliation for the loss of one of their own, are shaping up to be the My Lai of the Iraq war. Some people are horrified. They did what? Not the US Marine Corps! Others, while not exactly happy about the possibility that this happened, are more philosophical: Hey, it's war. Besides, they say, focusing on a few out-of-control incidents gives a false overall picture: we're doing this for you. Don't ask too many questions about how we accomplish the objectives. Both are valid reactions. The correct path lies in the middle.

Literature teaches us that people have always had this ambivalence about the things that happen in war, or “out there.” The people safe and secure at home mostly don't know what the men in the field have to do to win. If they did know, they'd be horrified, and usually are when they find out. Spec Ops, psychological torture, physical torture, secret prisons -- you don't want to know. Just say, “Thank you.” That's the view of the hawks. And to a degree they're right. It's hypocritical to pretend that war is clean; it isn't. Innocent civilians die awful deaths; the whole infrastructure collapses and children starve to death or are turned away from bombed-out hospitals. Why all of a sudden get upset about a few more?

This point of view is well developed in literature. One of the classics is Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, about a man named Kurtz who plumbs the depths of his own evil as an ivory trader in the Belgian Congo. (Some readers will have seen the Vietnam War movie “Apocalypse Now” based on this.) The “Heart of Darkness” of the title is metaphoric in two ways. Ultimately it refers to the moral darkness at the center of our own hearts. Kurtz is also at the center of Africa, called the “dark continent” -- not because of the color of the people who live there but because unexplored, overgrown, and mysterious from the point of view of the Western colonizers.

I've recently concluded a consideration of this book in a course at the Naval Academy about the relationship of the West with writers from the world outside: if you live there, it's not a dark continent at all. But Heart of Darkness has another aspect even more relevant to the military: this realization that the means used by men working outside the home country in its ends aren't pretty, and can never be shared by the people back home. It's the basis of what I call the glamour of battle, its sense of being something out of the ordinary, something not for the home folks, something extreme but for that reason alluring. Especially to men: it's the ultimate situation where you don't have to color inside the lines, which men notoriously hate doing. Think of Huck Finn, always trying to escape the clutches of the widow who's trying to “civilize” him.

Kurtz seems to have set himself up as a god to whom human sacrifices are made. He's feared; his methods work. The attitude of the other Europeans towards Kurtz ranges from jealousy (he's making them look bad because he brings in so much ivory) to awe. Kurtz may be as horrified by discovering his own liking for these methods as his scorn for the fact that they work. On a work left after his death he's scrawled: “Exterminate all the brutes!” And his dying words, to the narrator Marlowe, are “the horror, the horror.” He certainly doesn't want the people back home to get wind of them.

This isn't, apparently, because he's afraid of being punished. It seems rather to be that the people back home mustn't know what goes on outside. They wouldn't be able to take it. They should ask no questions, all these people for whom he's doing what he does.

Marlowe contrasts the world of darkness with the “white city” of Brussels, enriched by the ivory brought back by such dubious means. This “white city” seems populated mostly by women: first the string-pulling auntie who gets Marlowe his job, and then later by Marlowe's fiancée, his “Intended,” to whom Marlowe brings the word of Kurtz's death. The men go out into the field and do whatever it takes. And in the end, Marlowe (who's said he hates lying) seems to lie to the Intended in order to preserve her beatific vision of what's going on out there in the jungle. She asks what Kurtz's final words were; Marlowe tells her that in dying, Kurtz spoke her name rather admitting what he really said.

In class, we always discuss this question: Is Marlowe in fact lying? or is the point precisely that the “Intended” and her “don't want/can't know” blindness is precisely the “horror” of which Kurtz in fact spoke with his last breath? The Intended in any case is thrilled; this is exactly what she expected, wanted to hear. The fiction is preserved. And that seems to be Conrad's point: it has to be. The deal is this: I do your dirty work; you don't ask questions.

Those who go into battle for America in far-flung places frequently see themselves as doing necessary dirty work. Frustratingly enough, when they do whatever it takes to get the job done, they're often chastised by journalists, liberals, or in the court of public opinion for having done what they had to. Many times the military takes the “just let me do my job and don't complain” attitude that Kurtz exudes.

We back home might be shocked at things like wiping out villages, killing innocent civilians, or even the unfortunate fact of friendly fire. Yet a sizeable percentage of those in the military, I think, regard things like these as the regrettable but necessary price of doing business. Even the ugly, drab reality of killing is revolting when looked at without the adrenaline rush that makes it possible for people to do it. So they're exasperated that the people back home seem to reserve the right, somewhat hypocritically, to be shocked at the methods necessary to attain the goals these very people have sent them out to achieve.

We can understand this point of view without accepting it. Yes, war is hell. But just as there are circles of hell, so there are of war. We should do all we can to keep war in the upper circles of hell, not the lower.