Change processes occurring within societies do not necessarily depend upon consciously articulated ideas. Just as the sacrificial mechanism that maintains society developed below the radar of human awareness, so may other mechanisms develop counteracting our need for and attraction to societal violence.

If sacrificial violence is inherent in the human relationship to society, so perhaps there are human desires acting to cause us to abandon our attraction to and embrace of violence. I hypothesize that a cultural phenomenon developed in the United States subsequent to the Vietnam War whose function precisely was to oppose or counter the sacrificial mechanism. I refer to the custom of televising the return from war of dead soldiers in body bags, which functioned to draw our attention to the victimage of the soldier.

Sacrificial violence depends on averting our eyes from the scapegoat or sacrificial victim—of not looking to closely at what happens to the body of the soldier. Now a ritual emerged that made it impossible to avoid knowing what happens to soldiers as a result of participating in battle. By pushing into our faces the body of the victim, television forced us to encounter the reality of the consequence of war.

On the basis of the custom of televising the return of body bags, that which was hidden could be hidden no more. If we wished to use the institution of war to maintain the unity of the nation and our sacred ideals, at least now we were compelled to know the cost. Body bags containing the remains of the dead soldiers functioned to drain war of its glory.

Prior to September 11, 2001, the United States had begun to develop a profoundly counter-sacrificial culture. In an October, 1994 article in Newsweek, written while the invasion of Haiti was being considered, Jacob Weisberg noted that only about 400 U. S. soldiers had been killed in action in the twenty years since the end of the Vietnam war. This meant that serving in the armed forces was a relatively safe job. Driving a truck was three times riskier than being in the military and driving a taxi six times riskier.

On the eve of an invasion that did not happen, Dick Cheney appeared on Meet the Press and stated that Haiti was “not worth American lives.” Senator John Glenn suggested that the case for intervention could not pass the “Dover Test,” the televised return of body bags from Port-au-Prince to the Air Force base in Dover, Delaware.

Indeed, before 9/11 United States policy was moving in the direction of believing that almost no international situation was worthy of American intervention if it meant that there was a possibility that even a single American soldier might die in battle. Americans had developed a zero tolerance for casualties.

Writing in the New York Times on July 16, 1995, Roger Cohen suggested that the unwillingness to intervene in Bosnia spelled the “death of Western honor.” Eric Gans noted on June 26, 1999 that the “model of heroism constituted by the sacrifice of the individual life for the sake of the collectivity is rapidly losing its viability.”

Another significant event in our evolving cultural perception of warfare was the movie Saving Private Ryan--depicting the landing of American soldiers on Omaha Beach in Normandy on June 6, 1944. David M. Hart, an authority on filmic descriptions of warfare, noted that this was the first time that the amphibious assault had been depicted accurately and in such graphic detail. Certainly in my own experience I had never before seen a battle in which Americans were involved depicted as something approaching slaughter.

The traditional war movie (prior to the post-Viet Nam era) tended to portray the American soldier as a thinking individual—an agent in control of his fate. Warfare in the American imagination was an activity where the will and intellect of the subject was seen to be intimately bound to the outcome of the battle.

Indeed, the fact that the United States was usually victorious in battle was linked to the American soldier’s individuality and capacity for personal initiative, as compared to the mental inclination of foreign soldiers to simply follow orders. American soldiers were shows as men capable of responding creatively to the requirements of the specific situations in which they found themselves.

What we learn from the famous twenty minute segment at the beginning of Saving Private Ryan is that in the early stages of the Battle of Normandy, there was no space for individual initiative. Rather, the soldier was thrown into battle as a helpless victim. The first, unlucky ones who got out of their boats were massacred.

Those who got out of their boats later had a slightly higher chance of survival. Carolyn Marvin states that those who had participated in the battle knew the totem secret: that they were being sacrificed. "We knew that we were considered to be expendable," recalled a participant in the D-Day invasion (who survived). “This was the price of doing it. I didn’t tell my mother I wasn’t coming home, but I knew I wasn’t coming home.”