HEDGES, Chris (topher Lynn)

PERSONAL:

Male. Education: Colgate University, B.A.; Harvard University, master of divinity.

ADDRESSES:

Agent—c/o Author Mail, PublicAffairs Books, 250 West 57th St., Suite 1321, New York, NY 10107.

CAREER:

Journalist. Interim minister, Boston, MA; National Public Radio, Washington, DC, correspondent; Christian Science Monitor, Boston, MA, El Salvador correspondent; Dallas Morning News, Dallas, TX, Central America bureau chief, Middle East bureau chief; New York Times, New York, NY, reporter, Middle East bureau chief, Balkan bureau chief. Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, New York, NY, part-time faculty member, spring, 2003; Princeton University Council of the Humanities, Princeton, NJ, faculty member, fall, 2003.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Inter-American Press Association award for spot news reporting, 1986, and for continuing attention to inter-American affairs, 1987; Scripps-Howard Ernie Pyle Award for feature writing, 1991; New York Times publishers award for foreign reporting from Bosnia, 1996, Serbia, 1997, and Kosovo, 1998; Prix Bayeux des Correspondents de Guerre, 1998; Nieman fellowship, 1998-99; Francis Frost Wood Courage in Journalism Award, 1999; Amnesty International global award for human-rights journalism, 2002. Member of New York Times team awarded Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism, 2002.

WRITINGS:

War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, PublicAffairs Books (New York, NY), 2002.

What Every Person Should Know about War, Free Press (New York, NY), 2003.

Contributor to newspapers and magazines, including Washington Post, Globe and Mail (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), Harper's, and Foreign Affairs.

WORK IN PROGRESS:

Decalogue, dealing with the role of the Ten Commandments in modern life.

SIDELIGHTS:

Chris Hedges's career as a war correspondent, which began in the early 1980s when he was a recent divinity school graduate interested in the conflicts in Central America, has taken him to battlefields in that part of the world plus the Middle East and Eastern Europe. Having produced prizewinning coverage for the New York Times and other media outlets, Hedges used his experience of war and his study of others' experiences in writing his first book, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning.

In this book, Hedges examines why people engage in war and how they justify it to themselves. War, he argues, can give a nation's citizens a common bond and a sense of purpose; they convince themselves they are working together for a noble cause and that their adversary is fighting for an evil one. These, he argues, are the myths of war, as addictive as the most potent drug and the cause of incalculable suffering over the centuries—suffering he describes in graphic detail. Although he concludes that war is sometimes necessary—he writes, "There are times when the force wielded by one immoral faction must be countered by a faction that, while never moral, is perhaps less immoral"—he calls on humanity to develop a mind-set that will help avoid armed conflict, "some new way given to speak that lays bare the myth as fantasy and the cause as bankrupt."

Hedges has written "a brilliant, thoughtful, timely and unsettling book whose greatest merit is that it will rattle jingoists, pacifists, moralists, nihilists, politicians and professional soldiers equally," commented Abraham Verghese in the New York Times Book Review. Hedges, Verghese continued, has made a case that "we are all culpable" in the making of war. As Nation contributor Joseph Nevins explained, "All wars, even those waged by sides …[Hedges] supports, are based on national myths, most of which are, at their core, racist, he contends. They are racist in that they assert the inherent goodness of 'us' over the evil of 'them.' This black-and-white thinking allows us to kill the enemy without conscience, while celebrating our success in slaying without mercy those who oppose us.…We all have the capacity for great evil, a capacity that war helps to realize." Hedges believes that Americans' faith in the myths of war lessened greatly just after the war in Vietnam, but he sees this faith as having risen again since the 1980s and likely to gather more strength in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

Those who oppose their country's leaders in wartime are also sometimes guilty of buying into myths, according to Hedges. He deals with the fact that "the political left in the United States and Europe, for example, has disposed at times of its moral precepts and critical faculties in supporting anti-status quo forces," Nevins related. But, Nevins remarked, there sometimes are genuine moral differences between opposing parties, and partisans of one or the other are not necessarily fooling themselves; in his skepticism about opposition movements, Hedges displays an "occasional tendency to generalize about entire groups of people unflatteringly," the reviewer observed.

Unlike some people in these movements, Hedges does not identify as a pacifist. "Despite detesting war," noted George Jaeger in the New Leader, "he argues that where the industrial nations can save lives …they have a responsibility to take quick and effective action." National Catholic Reporter reviewer Tom Roberts commented, though, that "while Hedges accepts that some wars must be fought, his critique of war is so total that it is difficult to see how any might be legitimate." This critique, Roberts added, includes "personal witness" to "an indescribable amount of grotesque death and human suffering," and these accounts make the book "more than just another treatise on the futility of war."

Nevins pointed out that "this book does not offer any concrete prescription for those struggling for a better world, one without the horrors of war its author so compellingly describes," but Hedges does urge compassion for all, including wartime adversaries, and recognition of their common humanity. "In this sense," Nevins wrote, "Chris Hedges ultimately does put forth a radical utopian vision—or at least the beginnings of one—especially if we understand, and thus contest, mass violence in all its roots and manifestations." Similarly, New York Times contributor Robert Mann observed that Hedges's book "is a persuasive call for humility and realism in the pursuit of national goals by force of arms." To Hedges, Jaeger added, "the only antidotes to war's inhumanity and self-destruction are humility, compassion and brave acts of love. These qualities may not always triumph or avert massive damage, but they can at least help expose the myths and keep us human, as the author's most moving stories demonstrate." Verghese concluded that Hedges's "ultimate aim" is for readers, particularly Americans, "to recognize war for what it is, so that 'we, who wield such massive force across the globe, see within ourselves the seeds of our own obliteration.'"

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Nation, November 18, 2002, Joseph Nevins, "Letting out the (War) Dogs," p. 50.

National Catholic Reporter, November 29, 2002, Tom Roberts, "Seeing through the Lie That Is War: From the Nightmare of the Battlefield, a Warning against National Self-Worship," p. 11.

Naval War College Review, summer, 2003, Jon Czarnecki, "Such Is War's Effect," p. 157.

New Leader, September-October, 2002, George Jaeger, "The Danger of Good Intentions," p. 22.

New York Times, October 22, 2002, Robert Mann, "A Reporter Scrutinizes War and Its Myths," p. E5.

New York Times Book Review, September 29, 2002, Abraham Verghese, "Wars Are Made, Not Born," p. 21; July 6, 2003, Robert Pinsky, "How War Is," p. 9.

Sojourners, January-February, 2003, Molly Marsh, "An Enticing Elixir," p. 48.*