Brian Hall, A Curious Omission

I mentioned Brian Hall's book, The Impossible Country in a post earlier this month that has since had thousands of hits.

I said Hall's perspective was thoughtful, balanced and personal. I think, now that I've had time to consider what I've read, I should modify that statement. Although he balances Croats, Serbs, Muslims and Montenegrins, and although he lets people freely speak their minds, there is a curious omission.

It took me a while to figure out what that was because the absence of something is always harder to identify than the presence of something.

Hall has a laudable biography: Harvard University summa cum laud, award winning novelist, published magazine writer and non-fiction author. From 1982 to 1984, Hall bicycled through Europe, camping out most of the time, from which he wrote Stealing From a Deep Place. To write The Impossible Country he taught himself Serbo-Croatian, and, as we read in the book, backpacked his way around the country interviewing friends and strangers and traveling rough.

In short, he is a loner, not a groupie; he understands individuals very well, but like Pierre Trudeau, he doesn't understand, or empathize with group identity. Because he doesn't see any value in group activities—they all seem to him to lead to murder and mayhem—he misunderstands their utility.

I came to this conclusion when I realized none of the people he interviewed talked positively about group, squad or regimental identity in discussing the coming war. None were in the Army and none wanted to be in one. Indeed, ducking the draft, not volunteering, and goofing off seemed to be the standard of the young people he met.

The single exception was one man who Hall implies was a homicidal killer and was eager to get back to the front to shoot more civilians. Like the draft dodgers though, he too expressed himself as an individual rather than a member of a combat unit.

So this is what's missing. I'm guessing Hall was never in the military, never much of a team player, and thus doesn't realize that the safest place to be in a civil war is inside a well-trained, well-organized military unit. It's individuals who are more likely to be victims of neighbour-on-neighbour violence, not the volunteers and conscripts who are part of organized formations.

To Hall, as to most liberals in the West, the military mind is to be avoided, shunned and denigrated. How odd then that it was the NATO military, with its bombing campaign, that put an end to the civil strive in the Bosnian highlands.

If you want security, be part of a winning army; not part of a flock of individuals. That's the observation missing from Hall's book, missing because, I think, it never occurred to him.