The Secret Life of War

It’s usually the details of war that escape the accounts that fill our daily newspapers and evening bulletins. Preoccupied with general themes, bigger pictures and political implications, the minutiae of conflict for those on the frontlines or, more significantly sometimes, those caught in the crossfire, is often obscured by layers of a journalistic language that splashes broad brushstrokes where specific characterisations may better tell the story.

In his account of nearly two decades charting various flashpoints in the Middle East, The Observer’s award-winning correspondent Peter Beaumont seeks to paint a more intimate portrait of what war does to the people who fight it – and those who survive it; the psychological, neurological and psychiatric effects of killing, seeing people being killed and the desire to justify or excuse it.

The following is an extract from The Secret Life of War, from the chapter called “The Contaminated Wound”. In it, the author describes in detail the nature of a bullet wound, and uses it as a metaphor for the society that any war penetrates.

When a standard, rifled spitzer bullet – conical “ball” from a modern small-arms weapon – hits the soft tissue of the human body, the entry wound has a margin of abrasion around it. The round, forcing inwards, scuffs the surrounding skin, creating a halo of tenderness that only seems to emphasise the hidden grossness of the injury. Because of the elasticity of skin and muscle, the circumference of most entry wounds tends to be smaller than the projectile’s as it contracts almost immediately around the initial cavity. Water closing around a swimmer’s head.

The point about a rifled bullet is that it rotates at high speed, spiralling around an axis that extends from tip to tail. The same way an American football is thrown. This high-speed spinning gives the bullet its stability, its accuracy over a long distance. The result is that conventional wounds caused by high-velocity bullets – where the rounds do not fragment – appear as vicious pricks, often smaller than you would expect. But rounds can behave in different ways. When the bullet has travelled a long distance, and the ball loses energy and the spin that maintains its stable trim, the round begins to flutter in its progress – an effect called yawing. What hits the target is not a head-on – the high diver’s feet following the head and shoulders in a line, causing minimal splash – but a projectile tending towards the flop, the feet and legs catching on entry.

The entry wound created by the yawing round is different in shape, deformed into a flat letter “D” shape and often exhibiting an associated tearing of the abrasion ring. It opens a deeper cavity inside the wounds. This characteristic is not only visible in bullets losing energy and spin, or ricocheting off another surface before impact. It is a feature, too, of the very lightweight, high-velocity rounds used commonly by both NATO and the Israel Defence Forces, small balls that are designed to fragment easily and cause maximum damage to enhance their lethal capability. The low mass of the round itself increases the chance that the bullet as a whole – or fragments of it – will tumble or sharply change direction in contact with tissue, or in passing from one density to another.

If the weapon is fired at very close range, however, a very different kind of wound shape results. The gases expelled from the weapon’s muzzle explode into the cavity created by the bullet, stretching and rippling the tissue so that the entry wound is stellate in appearance. A bloody star of tears extending from the centre, radiating from a faint, burned oily ring imprinted on the body. It is not simply the kinetic energy of the bullet itself as it penetrates organs, bursts bone and severs veins and arteries, which is the issue with gunshot wounds.

A secondary consequence of being shot or hit with shrapnel is the high risk of infection, even from a graze. As the round and associated gases enter the body, they suck in the atomised fragments of cloth and material the bullet has hit before entering the victim; tiny fragments of car door and cinder block, wood, glass and earth, dead tissue from other casualties nearby; the lingering, ever-present bacilli found in soil. A passage of dead and dying tissue is created in the body, into which is sucked the filth of our environment by the vacuum behind the projectile travelling at supersonic speed. It is often more dangerous than the damage caused by the destructive energy than the round itself.

And in conflict, it is not always the fact of the fighting – the fact of invasion and offensives, skirmishes and battles – that actually destroys societies. It is what is sucked into the necrotic cavities war creates – into the dead spaces – that weakens and overpowers resistance to the violence itself. In the Iraq of the aftermath of the invasion, of after the “cure”, of after the experiment in democratisation of a brutal regime by illegal force, it begins with the looting, with resistance to occupation, and with al-Qaeda’s suicide bombings. It ends with sectarian extermination and a collapsing state.

The extract is reproduced with permission from Random House UK