In his book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning , war correspondent Chris Hedges tries to explain why he became so addicted to war that he could not live without being in a war.

War had quite simply captured his imagination, making it impossible for him to live "normally":

"I learned early on that war forms its own culture. The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug, one I ingested for many years. It is peddled by myth makers - historians, war correspondents, film makers, novelists, and the state - all of whom endow it with qualities it often does possess: excitement, exoticism, power, chances to rise above our small stations in life and a bizarre and fantastic universe that has a grotesque and dark beauty. It dominates culture, distorts memory, corrupts language, and infects everything around it, even humor, which becomes preoccupied with the grim perversities of smut and death ... The enduring attraction of war is this: Even with its destruction and carnage it can give us what we long for in life. It can give us purpose, meaning, a reason for living. Only when we are in the midst of conflict does the shallowness and vapidness of much of our lives become apparent. Trivia dominates our conversations and increasingly our airways. And war is an enticing elixir. It gives us resolve, a cause. It allows us to be noble."

According to Hedges, war makes the world coherent, understandable, because in war the world is construed as black and white, them and us. Moreover, Hedges notes that war creates a bond between combatants found almost nowhere else in our lives. War does so because soldiers at war are bound by suffering for the pursuit of a higher good. Through war we discover that though we may seek happiness, far more important is meaning. "And tragically war is sometimes the most powerful way in human society to achieve meaning."

The meaning often assumed to be given by participation in war, particularly in the West, draws on the close identification of the sacrifice required by war and the sacrifice of Christ. Allen Frantzen, in his extraordinary book Bloody Good: Chivalry, Sacrifice, and the Great War , calls attention to the continuing influence of the ideal of chivalry for how English and German soldiers in World War I understood their roles. He notes that development of chivalry depended on the sacralisation of violence so that the apparent conflict between piety and predatoriness simply disappeared. Instead the, great manuals of chivalry "closed the gap between piety - which required self-abnegation and self-sacrifice - and violence rooted in revenge. The most important presupposition of chivalry became the belief that one bloody death - Christ's - must be compensated by others like it."

Drawing on extensive pictorial evidence, Frantzen helps us see that the connection between Christ's death and those who die in war is at the heart of how the sacrifice of the English, Germans and Americans who died in World War I was understood.

Moreover, the language of sacrifice continues to play a central role in how war is understood, not only in World War II but in the Iraq War. I think the language of sacrifice is particularly important for societies like the United States in which war remains our most determinative common experience, because states like the United States depend on the story of our wars for our ability to narrate our history as a unified story. World War I was particularly important just to the extent that war represented the reintegration of the American South into the union called the United States.

Whatever one may think of Carl Schmitt's argument that all the legitimating concepts of the modern state - a state, according to Schmitt, that gains its moral intelligibility from war - are secularized theological concepts, I certainly think his analysis helps us understand much about America. For example, Carolyn Marvin and David Ingle begin their book Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Totem Rituals and the American Flag , by asking:

"What binds the nation together? How vulnerable to ethnic and religious antagonism is our sense of nationhood? What is the source of the malaise we have felt for so much of the post-World War II period? Above all, what moves citizens to put group interests ahead of their own, even to surrendering their lives? No strictly economic explanations, no great-man theory of history, no imminent group threat fully accounts for why members of enduring groups such as nations consent to sacrifice their immediate well being and that of their children to the group. Whatever does, tells us a great deal about what makes nation-states enduring and viable. This book argues that violent blood sacrifice makes enduring groups cohere, even though such a claim challenges our most deeply held notions of civilized behavior. The sacrificial system that binds American citizens has a sacred flag at its center. Patriotic rituals revere it as the embodiment of a bloodthirsty totem god who organizes killing energy."

Marvin and Ingle argue that self-sacrifice is the central theme of the American civil religion of patriotism and that nowhere is that better exemplified than in the American fetish of the flag. They provide extraordinarily rich and diverse iconographic and textual evidence to sustain their argument. For example, they call attention to a quote from Dwight D. Eisenhower's published account of his induction into West Point. Eisenhower begins by describing the rough first day of initiation into West Point at the end of which he confesses to being weary and resentful. Eisenhower writes, however:

"Toward evening we assembled outdoors and, with the American flag floating majestically above us, were sworn in as cadets of the United States Military Academy. It was an impressive ceremony. As I looked up at our national colors and swore my allegiance, I realized humbly that now I belonged to the flag. It is a moment I have never forgotten."

The crudity that often accompanies the identification of the flag with the sacrifice of war should not be used to dismiss sentiments like that expressed by Eisenhower, because I think there is something profoundly right that the flag should embody the moral logic of the sacrifice of war.

The battle for Pork Chop Hill in the Korean War nicely illustrates the moral logic at the heart of war. Pork Chop Hill was a strategic point that controlled access to the Inchon Valley. In the course of the war Pork Chop Hill had changed hands many times. Late in the war the hill had been retaken by American troops, but at a terrible cost. By the end of the battle, fewer than a dozen Americans were left on the top of the hill.

This was in the last stages of the peace talks and the Americans were afraid if they withdrew the dozen men left on Pork Chop Hill, such a retreat could be interpreted as a loss of the will to fight and could, therefore, prolong the war. They were sure the enemy would counter-attack and the dozen left would be killed. Yet if the Americans reinforced the men left at the top of the hill, more than the twelve would be killed. There was a debate at division headquarters with the result that the twelve were reinforced. The justification for the decision to reinforce was if they had not done so, it would have dishonoured the memory of all the men who had died on Pork Chop Hill. The more sacrificed to honour past sacrifices, the more the moral stakes for which the war (or battle) has been fought often must be raised.

In his book He Came Preaching Peace, John Howard Yoder wonders why it is so hard for political leaders to admit mistakes, to confess they were wrong. He asks, for instance, if it was necessary to withdraw American soldiers from Vietnam in 1975, or from Beirut in 1983. "Why can it not be admitted that it was wrong to send them there in the first place? Why can the statesman not afford to advocate peace without saying it must be 'with honor'? Why must the willingness to end the war be dulled or perhaps even denied by the demand that we must still seem to have won it?" I think the answer to Yoder's perfectly sensible questions is quite simple: to acknowledge a policy or a strategy was mistaken is thought to betray the sacrifices made by those who as a result of the policy died.

It is often observed that the first casualty of war is truth, but how do you tell the truth without betraying the sacrifice of those who accepted the terms of battle? War is a sacrificial system that creates its own justification. Hedges is right that war creates its own culture, but that it does so indicates the moral power of war. No doubt war creates a comradeship seldom found in other forms of life, but it does so because war subjects lives to sacrifices otherwise unavailable.

War as the sacrifice of our refusal to kill

I think it is a mistake to focus - as we most often do - only on the sacrifice of life that war requires. War also requires that we sacrifice our normal unwillingness to kill. It may seem odd to call the sacrifice of our unwillingness to kill "a sacrifice," but this sacrifice often renders the lives of those who make it unintelligible. The sacrifice of our unwillingness to kill is but the dark side of the willingness in war to be killed. I am not suggesting that every person who has killed in war suffers from having killed. But I do believe that those who have killed without the killing troubling their lives should not have been in the business of killing in the first place.

In On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, Lt. Col. Dave Grossman reports on General S.L.A. Marshall's study of men in battle in World War II. Marshall discovered that of every hundred men along a line of fire during a battle, only 15 to 20 would take part by firing their weapons. This led Marshall to conclude that the average or healthy individual, that is, the person who could endure combat, "still has such an inner and usually unrealized resistance toward killing a fellow man that he will not of his own volition take life if it is possible to turn away from that responsibility." Lt. Col. Grossman observes that to study killing in combat is very much like the study of sex: "Killing is a private, intimate occurrence of tremendous intensity, in which the destructive act becomes psychologically very much like the procreative act."

What, therefore, leads men to kill? Grossman suggests that what leads soldiers to kill is not the force of self-preservation but the power of another form of intimacy, that is, the accountability they feel with their comrades. Thus Richard Gabriel observes that "in military writings on unit cohesion, one consistently finds the assertion that the bonds combat soldiers form with one another are stronger than the bonds most men have with their wives." As a result Grossman found it was very difficult to get soldiers to talk about having killed. Many would take refuge in the impersonality of modern war, attributing most deaths to artillery or bombing.

The same process seems to be working in the attempt to depersonalize the enemy. Soldiers are often criticized for denying the humanity of the enemy by calling the enemy names such as kraut, Jap, reb, gook, Yank, dink, slant, slope, or haji. Moreover, the enemy is not "killed" but knocked over, wasted, greased, taken out, mopped up, or lit up. But surely these attempts to depersonalize the enemy as well as rename the process of killing should be understood as a desperate attempt to preserve the humanity of those who must kill. As Grossman observes, the dead take their misery with them, but the man who killed another must forever live and die with the one he killed:

"The lesson becomes increasingly clear: Killing is what war is all about, and killing in combat, by its very nature, causes deep wounds of pain and guilt. The language of war helps us to deny what war is really about, and in doing so it makes war more palatable."

Grossman's book reports conversations and interviews he has had with veterans who have killed. Often these reports include at first a euphoria that they have survived followed by an overwhelming guilt at what has happened, that is, they have killed another human being. Often this guilt is so strong that the one who has killed is wracked by physical revulsion and vomiting.

For example, William Manchester, the novelist and World War II veteran, describes his assault on a sniper in a fishing shack who was one by one picking off the Marines in his company. Manchester was terrified by fear, but he broke into the shack and found himself in an empty room. There was a door to another room he also broke down, but feared in doing so the sniper would kill him. But it turned out the sniper was in a sniper harness so he could not turn around fast enough. "He was entangled in the harness so I shot him with a 45 and I felt remorse and shame. I can remember whispering foolishly, 'I'm sorry' and then just throwing up ... I threw up all over myself. It was a betrayal of what I'd been taught since a child."

Particularly agonizing are the occasions when the enemy has been shot but does not instantly die. Harry Steward, a Ranger and United States Army Master Sergeant, tells of a remarkable incident during the Tet Offensive in 1968. He and his men suddenly found themselves confronted by a "guy" firing right at them. Steward was wounded in the arm, but the men on each side of him were killed. Steward charged with his M-16, mortally wounding the enemy. He was still alive but would soon die. Steward reports he can still see his eyes looking at him with hate.

Later as the flies were beginning to swarm over the dying man, Steward covered him with a blanket and rubbed water onto his lips. The hard stare started to leave his eyes. He tried to talk, but he was too far gone. "I lit a cigarette, took a few puffs, and put it to his lips. He could barely puff. We each had a few drags and that hard look had left his eyes before he died."

The pathos of such reports is how the very character of what is told isolates the teller. Killing creates a world of silence isolating those who have killed. One of the most poignant conversations Grossman reports took place in a VFW hall in Florida in 1989. A Vietnam vet named Roger was talking about his experience in Vietnam. It was early in the afternoon, but down the bar an older woman began to attack him.

"'You got no right to snivel about your little pish-ant war. World War Two was a real war. Were you even alive then? Huh? I lost a brother in World War Two.' We tried to ignore her; she was only a local character. But finally Roger had had enough. He looked at her and calmly, coldly said: 'Have you ever had to kill anyone?' 'Well no!' she answered belligerently. 'Then what right have you got to tell me anything?' There was a long, painful silence throughout the VFW hall, as would occur in a home where a guest had just witnessed an embarrassing family argument. Then I asked quietly, 'Roger, when you got pushed just now, you came back with the fact that you had to kill in Vietnam. Was that the worst of it for you?' 'Yeah', he said. 'That's half of it.' I waited for a very long time, but he didn't go on. He only stared into his beer. Finally I had to ask, 'What was the other half?' 'The other half was that when we got home, nobody understood.'"

Grossman observes that if soldiers like Roger are to regain some sense of normality they need to be reintegrated into society. Rituals of re-entry, therefore, become extremely important. Grossman suggests that those who have killed need to have constant praise and assurance from peers and superiors that they did the right thing.

Awarding of medals becomes particularly important. Medals gesture to the soldier that what he did was right and the community for which he fought is grateful. Medals mark that his community of sane and normal people, people who do not normally kill, welcome him back into "normality." Grossman calls attention to Richard Gabriel's observation that "primitive societies" often require soldiers to perform purification rights before letting them rejoin the community. Such rites often involve washing or other forms of cleaning. Gabriel suggest the long voyage home on troop ships in World War II served to give soldiers time to tell to one another their stories and to receive support from one another.

This process was reinforced by their being welcomed home by parades and other forms of celebration. Yet soldiers returning from Vietnam were flown home often within days and sometimes hours of their last combat. There were no fellow soldiers to greet them. There was no one to convince them of their own sanity. Unable to purge their guilt or to be assured they had acted rightly, they turned their emotions inward.

I think it is a well attested fact that war veterans seldom want to talk about the experience of battle. No doubt the complex emotions of fear, the exhilaration danger produces, and the bonding between comrades, make speaking of battle difficult. But how do you explain to another human being that you have killed? No doubt there are mechanisms that allow some to create an emotional distance between themselves and what they have done. But, at least if Grossman is right, men often remain haunted by their experience of having killed in a manner that can have - sometimes years later - destructive results.

To kill, in war or in any circumstance, creates a silence. It is right that silence should surround the taking of life. After all, the life taken is not ours to take. Those who kill, even when such killing is assumed to be legitimate, bear the burden that what they have done makes them "different." How do you tell the story of having killed? Killing shatters speech, ends communication, isolating us into different worlds whose difference we cannot even acknowledge. No sacrifice is more dramatic than the sacrifice asked of those sent to war - that is, the sacrifice of their unwillingness to kill. Even more cruelly, we expect those who have killed to return to "normality."

The sacrifice of Christ and the sacrifices of war

In Blood Sacrifice and the Nation , Marvin and Ingle claim that their book is a book about religion - specifically, the religion of American patriotism. They acknowledge that nationalism is not usually considered a religion, but they claim that nationalism shares with sectarian religions the worship of a killing authority, which they argue is central to religious practice and belief. That is why religions flourish when they are powerless and persecuted:

"In the religiously plural society of the United States, sectarian faith is optional for citizens, as everyone knows. Americans have rarely bled, sacrificed or died for Christianity or any other sectarian faith. Americans have often bled, sacrificed and died for their country. This fact is an important clue to its religious power. Though denominations are permitted to exist in the United States, they are not permitted to kill, for their beliefs are not officially true. What is really true in any society is what is worth killing for, and what citizens may be compelled to sacrifice their lives for."

This is a sobering judgment, but one that cannot be ignored if Christians are to speak truthfully to ourselves and our neighbours about war. I think, however, Christians must insist that what is true is not what a society thinks is worth killing for, but rather that for which they think it worth dying. Indeed, I sometimes think that Christians became such energetic killers because we were first so willing to die rather than betray our faith. Yet the value of Marvin's and Ingle's claim that truth is to be found in that for which you are willing to kill is how it helps us see that the Christian alternative to war is not to have a more adequate "ethic" for conducting war.

No, the Christian alternative to war is worship. I am well known for the claim that the first task of the church is not to make the world more just, but to make the world the world. That claim is but a correlate of the assertion that the church does not have a social ethic. Rather the church is a social ethic. I am quite aware that such claims can lead to misunderstandings, but I think they are particularly useful in this context. The church does not so much have a plan or a policy to make war less horrible or to end war. Rather the church is the alternative to the sacrifice of war in a war-weary world. The church is the end of war. For example, consider these words from St. Augustine:

"It is we ourselves - we, his City - who are his best, his most glorious sacrifice. The mystic symbol of this sacrifice is celebrated in our oblations, familiar to the faithful ... It follows that justice is found where God, the one supreme God, rules an obedient City according to his grace, forbidding sacrifice to any being save himself alone; and where in consequence the soul rules the body in all men who belong to this City and obey God, and the reason faithfully rules the vices in a lawful system of subordination so that just as the individual righteous man lives on the basis of faith which is active in love, so the association, or people, of righteous men lives on the same basis of faith, active in love, the love with which a man loves God as God ought to be loved, and loves his neighbour as himself. But where this justice does not exist, there is certainly no 'association of men united by a common sense of right and by a community of interest'. Therefore there is no commonwealth; for where there is no 'people', there is no 'weal of the people'."

The sacrifices of war are undeniable. But in the cross of Christ, the Father has forever ended our attempts to sacrifice to God in terms set by the city of man. We - that is, we Christians - have now been incorporated into Christ's sacrifice for the world so that the world no longer needs to make sacrifices for tribe or state, or even humanity. Constituted by the body and blood of Christ we participate in God's Kingdom so that the world may know that we, the church of Jesus Christ, are the end of sacrifice. If Christians leave the Eucharistic table ready to kill one another, we not only eat and drink judgment on ourselves, but we rob the world of the witness necessary for the world to know there is an alternative to the sacrifices of war.

The silence that surrounds the taking of life in war is surely an indication, a judgment, that we were created to be at peace with one another and God. We were not created to kill one another. We were created to be in communion with one another. There is no more basic natural law than the prohibition against killing. When we kill, even when we kill in a so-called just war, our bodies rebel.

Yet that rebellion is a marker of hope. Christ has shattered the silence that surrounds those who have killed, because we believe that the sacrifice of the Son makes possible the overwhelming of our killing so that we might be restored to a life of peace. Indeed, we believe that it remains possible that those who have killed can be reconciled with those they have killed. This is no sentimental bonding represented by the comradeship of battle, but rather this is the reconciliation made possible by the hard wood of the cross.

War is a mighty practice, a power that destroys those ennobled by the force of war. We are fated to kill and be killed because we know no other way to live. But through the forgiveness made possible by the cross of Jesus we are no longer condemned to kill. A people have been created who refuse to resort to the sword that they and those they love might survive. They seek not to survive, but to live in the light of Christ's resurrection.

The sacrifices of war are no longer necessary. We are now free to live free of the necessity of violence and killing. War and the sacrifices of war have come to an end. War has been abolished.

Stanley Hauerwas is Gilbert T. Rowe Professor Emeritus of Divinity and Law at Duke University Divinity School. His most recent books are Approaching the End: Eschatological Reflections on Church, Politics and Life and War and the American Difference: Theological Reflections on Violence and National Identity.