"The causes of civilian incomprehension"
As I said, Fussell is devastating about the role of the news media in painting a false picture of conditions on the front for the home audience. He says that the distrust of the media in contemporary society has its roots in the falsehoods peddled widely by the press in the Great War. He also says, though, that soldiers chose to shield their families back home from what they were going through.
Consider, though, how so many Americans -- on the political right, of course -- despised the media in the Iraq War from the beginning, for the opposite reason: they thought the media by and large deliberately refused to give the good news about the Iraq War (there are still, even at this late and lamentable date in the Iraq conflict, some dead-enders). As my old boss Rich Lowry, editor of National Review, put it:
The mainstream media is biased, arrogant, prone to stultifying group-think and much more fallible than its exalted self-image allows it to admit. It also, however, can be right, and this is most confounding to conservatives.In Iraq, the media’s biases happen to fit the circumstances. Being primed to consider any military conflict a quagmire and another Vietnam is a drawback when covering a successful U.S. military intervention, but not necessarily in Iraq. Most of the pessimistic warnings from the mainstream media have turned out to be right — that the initial invasion would be the easy part, that seeming turning points (the capture of Saddam, the elections, the killing of Zarqawi) were illusory, that the country was dissolving into a civil war.
Partly because he felt it necessary to counteract the pessimism of the media, President Bush accentuated the positive for far too long. Bush allowed himself to be cornered by his media critics. They wanted him to admit mistakes, so for the longest time, he would admit none. They wanted him to fire Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, so for too long he kept him on. They wanted him to abandon “stay the course,” so he stuck to it. In so doing, he eroded his own credibility and delayed making the major strategic readjustment he needed to try to check the downward slide in Iraq.
Many conservatives chose to be deceived about conditions in Iraq -- which is more interesting to me than the fact that many liberals, even today, lambaste the press for, in their view, not telling the full horror of the Iraq war, on the theory that the press wants to be more upbeat than circumstances warrant. In both cases, though, conservatives and liberals project their own biases onto the war. What's interesting is that neither side much trusts the media, preferring to believe that things are as they wish they were, instead of how they actually are. (Insofar as the media can reflect reality in its totality, which they can't, but anyway...)
Anyway, one of the undiscussed causes of civilian incomprehension is ... civilians themselves. Recall Paul Baumer's visit home, and his going to the pub, where he was treated as a conquering hero. The old duffers there saw him as a noble warrior of the Fatherland, and only that. They had no idea what he was really going through, and didn't want to know, not really. I think if Paul, or a soldier today, were to find himself amid a group of pacifists, he would be in the same situation -- treated not as a complex human being, but as a cipher upon which the group could project their own views of the war.
Point is, we civilians are deceived, and wish to be deceived, preferring simple, emotionally satisfying truths to complex realities.