Back when the Islamic State was still regularly going viral with videos of death and horror, the great novelist Joyce Carol Oates observed on social media, “All we hear of ISIS is puritanical & punitive; is there nothing celebratory & joyous?” The post caused widespread bafflement; “ISIS” and “joyous” seemed odd bedfellows after the Islamic State’s murderous rampage. But for a particular sort of person, the joyousness and the punitive murderousness went hand in hand. Sure, ISIS leaders might have put out messages of how they’d restore Islamic greatness, but the people they really wanted in their ranks were those titillated by televised death.
These days if I open social media and inadvertently stumble on a video of people being killed, it’s more likely to be from my own government. The administration has posted dozens of videos of boats blowing up in the Caribbean and airstrikes in the Middle East that they cease to shock, even when they’re accompanied by A.I.-generated imagery celebrating the slaughter. We seem to be encouraged to think of killing not simply as military policy, but as entertainment.
Now, Pete Hegseth has announced that the public will be able to watch the Dec. 3 firing squad execution of Nidal Hasan, who killed 13 people and injured 32 others when he opened fire at Fort Hood in 2009. The Pentagon has said it is planning to livestream the event.
According to Mr. Hegseth, “People need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things,” a message that will supposedly be underlined by seeing high-velocity bullets rip through human flesh. Everyday citizens might not take the lesson he wants to impart.
When the father of the philosopher Albert Camus witnessed the public execution of a child-murderer in 1914, his reaction was to rush home, take to his bed and vomit. “He had just discovered the reality hidden under the noble phrases with which it was masked,” Camus wrote. “Instead of thinking of the slaughtered children, he could think of nothing but that quivering body that had just been dropped onto a board to have its head cut off.” Clearly, the secretary of defense is banking on a more sadistic public.
Lawmakers from both parties have opposed the Pentagon’s plan to livestream the execution and Vice President JD Vance has said that he would not watch it.
I doubt questions of justice are Mr. Hegseth’s real motivation. His career has long mixed celebrations of violence with disturbingly little concern for whether the people we kill are enemies. As a pundit, he advocated pardoning war criminals such as Clint Lorance, who ordered fire on Afghan civilians and was quickly turned in by his combat-tested platoon. As the secretary of defense, he gutted institutional checks to prevent the killing of civilians, cutting more than 80 percent of the Pentagon employees who focus on harm mitigation, and broadcast an apparent willingness to commit war crimes, as in his statement that we will give “no quarter” to our enemies.
Sometimes he mixes religion with his taste for savagery. At a March 25 service, he quoted Psalm 3, praying for God to “break the teeth of the ungodly,” and asking him to aid soldiers with “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.”
Mr. Hegseth justifies his bombast as necessary for restoring America’s “warrior culture,” which was lost, he alleges, when we prioritized the elevation of women and people of color, loosened standards and accepted transgender people in the ranks. “The ideological clowns are out,” he recently declared. “The patriotic cowboys are in.”
All the while, he’s displayed a curious incuriosity about the challenges of 21st-century warfare. To watch his televised addresses laying out his vision to military commanders in 2025 and company-grade officers in 2026, you would think that the failures of America in its recent wars were a result of “weirdos,” “beardos,” “wimps” and transgender people. That is, to put it mildly, a peculiar diagnosis of the limits of, say, the surge that President Barack Obama ordered in Afghanistan.
Mr. Hegseth’s record as a leader has hardly suggested that violent videos ensure strategic success. Despite his March 4 claim that Iran was “toast” and we were winning “without mercy,” the war drags on, with obvious costs to American national security and citizens and no clear path to decisive victory.
A public execution and social media toughness cannot long distract from strategic failure. Men with real accomplishments on the battlefield don’t tend to talk this way. George Washington thought war a “plague” he wished “banished from the earth.” Ulysses S. Grant complained that “I am called a man of war, but I never was a man of war,” and said, “I never went into the Army without regret and never retired without pleasure.” Dwight Eisenhower declared, “I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.” None of these men would fit into the “warrior culture” Mr. Hegseth models, because they took the horror and the moral stakes of war seriously.
It’s hard to confront the two decades we devoted to a failed war in Afghanistan. What is the human cost of what we wrought? What, practically, do we need to change so that we never do that again? Answering those questions truthfully takes courage, especially if you’re the sort of soldier for whom the war’s failure wasn’t just a human tragedy, but a personal humiliation. Not everyone can rise to the challenge, not when you can take refuge in a humiliated nationalism which insists, without much evidence, that all your problems would be solved with more cruelty, more celebrations of violence.
Now we’re being offered live-streamed death, something easier to imagine in the abstract than to actually see. When the human body is penetrated by a high-velocity bullet, the bullet begins to tumble. Imagine a speedboat making a sharp turn, sending waves rippling outward. The bullet punches holes in soft tissue and shatters bone in its direct path, but the wake of the bullet does its own damage. It can sever muscles and pulp organs.
At the medical facility on the base where I served in Iraq, I occasionally saw people with those injuries. On one occasion, I peeked in on a pair of captured enemy fighters. I didn’t know what I was supposed to feel, looking at them, laid out as they were. A sense of triumph? Of justice? It’s difficult to feel such emotions as you gaze at a ravaged human body.
And that’s where I think the secretary of defense has miscalculated. The various forms of televised death the administration has put out to this point have been abstract. A video feed of a building or boat and then an explosion. They don’t show us the bodies of our fellow human beings as their lives are snuffed out.
When Nidal Hasan, who was paralyzed from the waist down after being shot during his killing spree, is wheeled out and set before the cameras, Americans will experience a very different face of death. One that stares back. One that jerks and twists as the bullets do their work. Do we really want to see?
Phil Klay, a novelist and a Marine Corps veteran of the Iraq war, is the author of the essay collection “Uncertain Ground: Citizenship in an Age of Endless, Invisible War.” He directs the creative writing M.F.A. program at Fairfield University.
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