Sympathy for the Devil
A former soldier recounts how an encounter with a former “enemy” brought home to him the absurdity of war — and, by way of postscript, recommends a Stones song.
„Sympathy For The Devil“ — the title of one of the best-known Rolling Stones songs was already highly provocative at the time it was written. How can one feel sympathy for evil? It becomes more comprehensible if you rephrase the expression like this: „Sympathy for someone I have been persuaded is the devil.“ Our author here tells of his deployment as a soldier in the Serbia war. His testimony is valuable, for not every journalist who campaigns for peace knows war from his own experience. After the deployment he met deeply likeable people in Serbia — not a whiff of sulphur to be detected. One man he might perhaps have killed during the fighting, since both of them were fighting on the same terrain. This experience brought about a change of mind. The author resigned from his military service. An illuminating story.
Corpses and idiots are its principal products. I was lucky: in my only participation so far, war made me the latter. As is usual with idiots, it took me time to recognise this fact.
I’ve been around for a long, long year. Stole many a man’s soul and faith.
After finishing school in 1998 I was drawn to the Stabilisation Force — SFOR for short — deployment for the „stabilisation of the former Yugoslavia“. I was drawn there because, as a conscript in the air force, I could no longer bear the way my lifetime was being wasted at home. As a member of one of the last cohorts of conscripts, I had to learn over ten long months of military service how little use this state had for the lifetime of its conscription victims — and how brutally it squandered it to demonstrate its power. In hindsight, this experience probably contributed to my present-day distrust of institutions.
After months of orderly-room duty (= waiting for the end of the working day), in a mixture of desperation and thirst for adventure, I presented myself to the chief of staff of the divisional command. For reasons that would justify a story of their own, I had been given my useless post in this higher command unit. In any case, I now requested a deployment abroad. The chief of staff was a clever man and reacted to my request by trying to talk me out of it. But since I was wildly determined, he finally settled for convincing me of a posting where the dangers of war seemed largely ruled out: a trade-fair city in northern Italy.
From there, Air Force Deployment Squadron 1 (EG 1) carried out its observer mission with all of two Tornado fighter jets. Part of EG 1 was a small group of propaganda soldiers whose task was to spread cheerleading reports within the troops and to look after press representatives on site. As an underling of this group, I duly moved into a four-star hotel in northern Italy. To this day I am bound to silence, under all manner of threats of punishment, about the events in northern Italy. They were in part irritating and, in even greater part, absurd. For me they ended with the routine award of a service medal and the payout of a sum in hazard bonuses that was staggering for a school-leaver.
The essence of what happened back then is generally known today. To me it first revealed itself in the winter of 1998/99 through the expressions on the faces of the Tornado crews: this observer mission was war. At the time it was not supposed to be called that. As loyal to the regime as the mass media were even then, they propped up the lie of the politicians. And I too believed at the time that the NATO rationale of a protective operation for the Kosovo Albanians against Serbian aggression was a good thing. The drinking of the pilots after their sorties, the missing weaponry once their observer flights were over — all of it seemed to me as harsh as it was unavoidable. For a just cause.
But what’s confusin’ you is the nature of my game.
That evening I struck up a friendship — over our shared interest in the younger daughter of the house — with a man my own age. He was a law student and active in politics. An early accession of Serbia to the EU was his goal.
He spoke of this prospect with enthusiasm, with genuine emotion. After the devastation of the war it seemed to him the desired future of his country. Even though only a few months earlier he had still stood on the other side as a Serbian soldier. I learned a great deal about the background to Kosovo, the devastation of both the civil war and the NATO bombings. Above all, though, I learned something about my own naivety. This fellow was three years older than me, yet with his experience of destruction and new beginnings he seemed decades ahead of me. My own deployment, as a rear-area rabbit with a bed in a four-star hotel, seemed more absurd to me than ever.
We eventually discovered that during my own time on deployment this man had served as a military policeman at a Danube bridge. Also on one evening that I remembered from my SFOR participation. On an evening when his Danube bridge in Belgrade was destroyed by a US cruise missile. Narrowly, but unharmed, he escaped his death that time. A death for which I would have borne sufficient complicity. In that moment all my cheerfulness gave way to a deep feeling of shame. Shame before myself and the fact that I had made a complete idiot of myself. No, I hardly knew this man and could have no certainty about his deeds. My judgement of him rested merely on a shared celebration. But that was enough to be able to say with sufficient certainty: this Serbian soldier, my enemy, was of no less discernment and reason than I was at my best. To this day I am haunted by the fact that I, an idiot, only narrowly and by chance escaped being an accomplice in his murder.
Or I’ll lay your soul to waste.“
Thinking back on that evening, I wrote to the Bundeswehr a few weeks ago. I informed them that, in view of our regime’s warmongering, I refuse any further service as a soldier. In the world of army bureaucrats, my declaration was interpreted as an application for conscientious objection. I was informed that it would now be examined and that I should expect a decision on it from some other office. As little as these bureaucrats presumably care about my message, so little does their decision interest me. They may insert it into that place where, even back then, I should have planted my combat boot (official designation). War will not make an idiot of me a second time.