“Body-Bags:” the Evolution of a Counter-Sacrificial Culture

Richard A. Koenigsberg

Is there no escape from the victimage mechanism: the need to sacrifice human beings to maintain the sacred community? Girard suggests that just as societies created the scapegoat mechanism, so forces evolved in opposition to this mechanism. Girard focused upon historic trends acting to generate greater awareness of the victim and of the victim’s innocence. To the extent that attention is brought to bear upon the innocence of the victim so does the efficacy of the scapegoating mechanism diminish.

How does a society go about bringing greater attention to victims? I suggest that the United States developed a counter-scapegoating mechanism during the Vietnam by focusing on reports of dead soldiers returning in "body bags" from battle. These reports made it more difficult for people to “avert their eyes” from the victim.

The return of dead soldiers in body bags correlated with the development of a counter-sacrificial culture in American society. For a long time after the Viet Nam war (up until September 11, 2001), there was virtually no international situation that was considered worthy of American military intervention if it meant that even a single soldier might die in battle. Americans developed a zero tolerance for casualties.

In an October 1994 article in Newsweek written while the invasion of Haiti was being considered, Jacob Weisberg noted that only about 400 US 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; driving a taxi six times riskier.

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

Writing in the New York Times on July 16, 1995, Roger Cohen stated that 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 was “rapidly losing its viability.”

Another milestone or turning point in the American experience of war was the release of the movie Saving Private Ryan (July 24, 1998), an unflinching depiction of the landing of American soldiers on Omaha Beach in Normandy on June 6, 1944. This was the first time, according to military authority David M. Hart, that the viciousness and brutality of an amphibious assault under fire by modern weapons had been depicted in such graphic detail. For me—and I’m sure for many others—this was the first time I’d seen a movie portraying battle as unrelenting slaughter.

While movies about the Second World War often depict the soldier as an individual possessing a substantial degree of agency—capable of shaping the course of battle—what we see in the famous first half-hour of Saving Private Ryan is how helpless soldiers were; how narrow their capacity for choice or agency. What occurred, essentially, was that soldiers jumped off boats into the ocean, where they faced a barrage of machine-guns and artillery shelling. Many soldiers drowned while others immediately were massacred.

Luckier soldiers made it to the beach intact, although continuing to be subject to attack and often killed on shore. Among other horrors, the movie shows body parts floating in the ocean and strewn upon the beach. Carolyn Marvin states that many who participated in the D-Day invasion (but survived to talk about it) sensed that they were being sacrificed. “We knew that we were considered to be expendable,” recalled a participant who survived the D-Day invasion. “That was the price of doing it.”