Columnist Susan Snyder: War’s horror cannot be deleted

Friday, May 14, 2004 | 4:31 a.m.

Susan Snyder's column appears Mondays, Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Reach her at snyder@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4082.

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May 15 - 16, 2004

"There surged around me an evil-smelling stink, men and boys reached out to touch me. They were in rags and remnants of uniforms. Death already had marked many of them, but they were smiling with their eyes. I looked out over the mass of men to the green fields beyond, where well-fed Germans were plowing." -- A 1943 account by the late Edward R. Murrow, a CBS reporter describing the Buchenwald concentration camp, 1943.

We didn't always need digital cameras.

The horror. The unspeakable acts. The commands given and carried out by those in incredibly unreasonable circumstances. We didn't always need photographs to know the disgusting, despicable acts of people at war existed.

And they have always existed, in the prison camps of World War II, in the jungles of Vietnam and in the prisons of the Middle East. Ours. Theirs. Doesn't matter who stands on which side of the bars. We do to them what they do to us. And back and forth it goes until we're all battling on the same barbaric level.

What's disturbing is that our collective memory is so short and that it takes a bigger club with every war to get those of us back home to remember that there is more to patriotism and war than tying American flag bandanas for our dogs and singing along with pop-radio tunes that extol the virtues of being a soldier. Many of us don't even know a solider. And those of us who do know one, know that we probably wouldn't recognize that person under fire unless we knew him or her because we'd shared a foxhole.

During World War II, radio gave us Murrow's finely tuned, descriptive accounts. During Vietnam, television gave us dinnertime pictures of bombings with the 6 o'clock news every night.

In the digital age, we can see events almost as they happen, thanks to satellites and the Internet.

With cameras tucked into everything from cell phones to PDAs, we don't even have to obtain the images from journalists anymore. That's good, because so much of our international press corps has been corrupted and curtailed by a government that keeps them embedded, corralled and out of the way.

But what have we learned from all that we can see?

We are expected believe that these degenerate acts carried out by U.S. officials at Abu Ghraib prison are isolated and somehow different than what has happened before.

We are expected believe Under Secretary of Defense Stephen Cambone when he tells a Senate committee that, "Until the photographs started appearing in the press, I had no sense of" the extent of the human indecency.

We have been expected to believe that this -- or any -- war is a necessary evil to make the world a safer place.

What we weren't expected to do was see what the necessary evils looked like.

As we walked out into the courtyard, a man fell dead. Two others, they must have been over 60, were crawling toward the latrine. ... I pray you to believe what I have said about Buchenwald. I reported what I saw and heard. For most of it I have no words. If I have offended you by this rather mild account of Buchenwald, I'm not in the least bit sorry." -- Murrow.