Elaine Scarry contends that the content of a wounded soldier’s body on the field of battle constitutes the precious “ore of confirmation.” In war, the “incontestable reality of the body”—the body in pain, the body maimed, the body dead and hard to dispose of—is “conferred on an ideology.” The ideology thus achieves for a time the force and status of material “fact” by the “sheer weight of the multitudes of damaged and opened human bodies.” Warfare, in other words, is that cultural activity that seeks to produce dead and wounded soldiers in order to establish the truth of a society’s ideology.