Chris Hedges: Augustine said that Hope has two beautiful daughters: Anger and Courage. Anger at the way things are, and Courage to see that they don’t remain the way they are.

[ communications between military troops over radio ]

C.H.: You can serve two sets of principles: privilege and power or justice and truth. The more you make compromises with those who serve privilege and power, the more you diminish the capacity for justice and truth. And I think that the rebel seeks to keep those who have power fearful.

C.H.: You want me to sit here?

DOP: Please, yeah.

C.H.: Ok.

C.H.: I don’t care what The New York Times thinks. I don’t care what anyone thinks, actually. I have complete freedom because of that.

I denounced the call to invade Iraq … publicly. The Times issued me a formal written reprimand, which is what you get before you’re fired under your union rules to stop speaking out against the war. I’d been the Middle East Bureau Chief. I mean, I’ve been in Iraq and seven years in the Middle East.

I know that the bombing of southern Iraq was devastating to civilians. I was in the uprising in Basra and then I was taken prisoner by the Iraqi Republican Guards, so I saw it. When I was in northern Iraq, I had a price on my head by Saddam Hussein. I had firefights in Central America where I had two bodyguards crossing fire so I could get out. You know especially having done it for 20 years, you know, it fucks you up.

We’ll define acts of murder and terror as legitimate forms of self-defense, or collateral damage, so that we’re not at all conscious of the terror we commit, which of course isolates us in the eyes of the rest of the world. I mean, in terms of moral terms, what’s the difference between an IED and a drone? There isn’t one. Or, you know, a suicide bombing and a cruise missile attack on a small village in Afghanistan. Much of the trauma that veterans face when they come back from places like Afghanistan, Iraq or Vietnam is not so much what they witnessed or what they endured, but what they did. PTSD is about being numb. You can’t feel. You don’t sleep. I mean, at night you revisit trauma, and so it tends, at least in my own case, to come in waves, so by the second, third day I haven’t slept, and you collapse into bed at 9 o’clock, and then you’re waking up, you know, two hours later, covered in sweat, your heart is racing, sometimes you can remember why, sometimes you can’t. But the effect is that pretty soon the simplest tasks become herculean: shaving, showering and dressing. And you can’t feel anything, even for the people you love the most. And the physical exhaustion means that, in the morning, you just sit there and wait for the light to come in through the shades. And it’s like you’re in the bottom of a big black pit, and you just got to crawl your way up to the top.

Dostoyevsky said: ‘Hell is the inability to love, and that’s what kills people.’ I fully get why people blow their brains out, I get it. It’s really hell. And I don’t use love like agape love. I’m not using love like that, I’m not using love as a kind of Hallmark schmaltzy, you know, ‘we all got to love each other’. I’m saying that it’s only … the only way you’re healed from those experiences is by reestablishing a connection with that kind of power, with another human being. And if you can’t do that, you don’t survive. And I have friends who couldn’t do it, and they’re not here anymore.

It’s, you know, the power of love to transcend time.