Covering War or Glorifying It?

A new piece on CNN correspondent Michael Ware in Men's Journal makes the journalist seem compelling--and there's no doubting his bravery or his commitment to his profession.

The piece, CNN's Prisoner of War, shows how hard it is for Ware to get the war out of his head--or even for Ware to drag himself out of the zone of conflict.

It's easy to sympathize with Ware, and Greg Veis, who wrote this piece, tells us a lot about our foreign policy blunders--including the nugget that we may be essentially giving Iraq over to the Iranians.

But Veis also lets Ware get away with a common conceit, which is that war experience is somehow more valuable or "real" than other types of experience.

“Do you want to get to the nub of life?” Ware asked me. “To strip away the bullshit? Life is so distilled down in war — that’s an obvious statement — but to be able to see it with your own eyes and be able to discover that which lies within yourself, I don’t know, it’s more than life changing.

But the real bullshit is when we let ourselves believe that our experience is the only true and unvarnished one. I've had similar experiences and suffered similar delusions--"man, you don't understand life the way I do because you haven't seen..." name it.

Every experience is a real experience, every life is a real life. Ware might argue that the daily confrontation with death is what makes war real, but we all confront death every day.

What is worth saying is that our lives afford us the opportunity to ignore the fact that we confront death on a daily basis, and that we have committed a great injustice by forcing the Iraqi people to confront death whether they want to or not.