An odd feature of this war is that all our moral outrage is directed against Nato actions
Published 03 May 1999
I feel a good deal of sympathy for the pilot who flew the attack on that convoy of refugees. It's difficult to identify a vehicle on the ground from the air; it's difficult even to find one. I once spent an uncomfortable ten minutes or so flying up and down a stretch of the Japanese line on Okinawa looking for a camouflaged enemy truck. "Over there under some trees," the observer said. But though I flew low and slow (500 feet, 200 knots) I never found it.
I imagine the Nato pilot, in an F-16 at 15,000 feet, above broken cloud cover and with a raking afternoon light. He sees burning houses, and vehicles moving away. They look to him like personnel carriers. He makes another pass to be sure, and attacks, destroying the vehicles. Only they're not what he thought they were, they're tractors loaded with frightened families, women, children, old people. It's a terrible mistake, an awful thing to have done. But understandable. Can you tell a tractor from a military vehicle from three miles up?
To be certain of their targets, pilots will have to go down and look closely. And then the ground-fire will come hosing up, and planes will be hit, and crews will die. And it will become a reciprocal war. It isn't that now. Nato attacks Serbs, Serbs attack Kosovar Albanians, the KLA attacks Serbs. Nobody attacks Nato, and there are no Nato casualties. It's a new kind of war.
Language is the second casualty of war. Reading the newspapers, watching the news, I am aware of two war vocabularies taking form, swerving away in opposite directions from the blunt realities of military actions.
On the news, two official Nato spokesmen take turns uttering the emollient abstractions of "smoothspeak": the allies aim to degrade Serb resistance; this will create a semi-permissive environment for an eventual semi-opposed intervention; in the process some collateral damage may occur. It's easy to translate this airy babble into plain talk: first you blow up whatever you can find that might support Serb power - tank, bridges, television stations - killing a number of Serb soldiers and civilians along the way. Then you walk in.
The other language, the "roughspeak" of the war, comes from correspondents such as the Independent's Robert Fisk. I follow the day-by-day reporting of the bombing of refugee columns on the Djakovica-Prizren road: people have been slaughtered; their deaths were a massacre; Nato is guilty of an atrocity. I dip into the Telegraph and find the same words there. And I'm troubled. It isn't that these terms aren't applicable to the events they describe. It's that they are at the top of the emotional scale. Here, at the cautious beginning of what looks like a long conflict, the volume has already been turned all the way up.
But it's more than that. Those loud, condemning words all carry an implication of intention: Nato has murdered for the sake of killing. But what happened there on the Prizren road was something else - an error of judgement, a mistake, the kind of fatal blunder that occurs in every war. If we heap so much revulsion and horror on such errors, what language will we have left for the terrible intentional crimes of Milosevic's ethnic-cleansing thugs?
Another odd feature of this war is that all this moral outrage is directed against Nato actions. It's the same with the front-page photographs - the burned-out train on the ruined bridge, the bodies under the bombed tractor, the mourning women and the weeping children; they're all our doing.
The reason for this concentration on Nato's destructions is clear enough; these are the scenes that the journalists and the photographers are allowed to see. It was that way in Vietnam, too. We all remember the naked, running Vietnamese child and the main-street execution of the Viet Cong suspect. Such cruel images remain in the mind and, when they recur, the moral weight of what was to be a "humanitarian war" shifts, and we are the criminals.
Not that the first person plural pronoun turns up much in the reporting; the Nato troops are British and American and French and German, but they aren't us, not in the press or in the public mind. The war goes on, but we aren't in it yet.
I wake at 3am with an image in my head of the last helicopter lifting off from the roof of the Saigon embassy. The end of American invincibility. Nato could lose, too, and the last helicopter rise from a rooftop in Prizren or Sarajevo.
The Nato strategy - bomb now, invade later - sounds a bit like a credit-card advertisement, but it's the right strategy, or at least it's less wrong than any alternative. The west has learnt prudence in war from its disasters in Vietnam and Somalia and Algeria, has learnt to use its techno- logical muscle and to avoid taking casualties for as long as possible. And to prepare the public for casualties before the body-bags arrive.
As they will; for the end-game of war is men walking into hostile territory and, when they do, some of them die. War kills. Eventually, in the Balkans, we will get our hair mussed. But that won't make Nato's actions wrong. What else is there to do? What else is possible?
The author, professor emeritus of English at Princeton University, was a marine bomber in the second world war. His memoir, "Flights of Passage", is published by Bloomsbury
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