ESSAY

By LANCE MORROW

The Pentagon ordered 16,099 body bags to be shipped to the Persian Gulf to bring home dead Americans. In the end, 15,773 of the bags were not necessary.

The Iraqi army would have needed -- what? One hundred thousand body bags? More? No one knows or will ever know. No one has counted the Iraqi corpses. Many of them were buried in the sand, without ceremony; some have been taken care of by vultures.

That so few soldiers in the coalition died somehow seemed to Americans a vindication. It was even a return of their shining self, of Buffalo Bill, who (e.e. cummings wrote) could "ride a watersmooth-silver stallion and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat ." The unspoken text was this: the nation had recovered its immunity, its divine favor, or anyway its gift for doing things right. The victory was as satisfying as anything Americans have done together since landing on the moon.

Would it be seemly to have a moment of silence for the Iraqi corpses?

It is not inconsequential to kill 100,000 people. That much life suddenly and violently extinguished must leave a ragged hole somewhere in the universe. One looks for special effects of a metaphysical kind to attend so much death -- the whoosh of all those souls departing. But many of them died ingloriously, like road kill, full of their disgrace, facedown with the loot scattered around them. The conquered often die ignominiously. The victors have not given them much thought.

Still, killing 100,000 people is a serious thing to do. It is not equivalent to shooting a rabid dog, which is, down deep, what Americans feel the war was all about, exterminating a beast with rabies. All those 100,000 men were not megalomaniacs, torturers and murderers. They did not all commit atrocities in Kuwait. They were ordinary people: peasants, truck drivers, students and so on. They had the love of their families, the dignity of their lives and work. They cared as little for politics, or less, than most people in the world. They were, precisely, not Saddam Hussein. Which means, since Saddam was the coalition's one true target in all of this, that those 100,000 corpses are, so to speak, collateral damage. The famous smart bombs did not find the one man they were seeking.

The secret of much murder and evildoing is to dehumanize the victim, to make him alien, to make him Other, a different species. When we have done that, we have prepared ourselves to kill him, for to kill the Other, to kill a snake, a roach, a pest, a Jew, a scorpion, a black, a centipede, a Palestinian, a hyena, an Iraqi, a wild dog, an Israeli . . . it's O.K.

If Saddam Hussein was a poisonous snake in the desert, and he had 1 million poisonous snakes arrayed around him, then it was good sense to drop bombs and kill 100,000 snakes and thus turn back the snake menace.

But, of course, the 100,000 Iraqis were not snakes.

To kill 100,000 people and to feel no pain at having done so may be dangerous to those who did the killing. It hints at an impaired humanity, a defect like a gate through which other deaths may enter, deaths no one had counted on. The unquiet dead have many ways of haunting -- particularly in the Middle East, which has been accumulating the grievances of the dead for thousands of years.

In any case, there is not, or there should not be, such a thing as killing without guilt -- especially not mass killings without guilt. When people kill without remorse, we call them insane. We call them maniacs, serial murderers.

Americans almost unconsciously regard the victory as a kind of moral cleansing: the right thing. But reality and horror have not been rescinded. All killing is unclean. It has upon it a stain that technology cannot annul or override. Americans are not omnipotent, not all virtuous, they should remind themselves, they do not bestride the world. Vainglory is one of the sillier postures: it invariably precedes the rude awakening. It is the sort of whooping glee that, in Daffy Duck cartoons, goeth before the fall.

Did the dead Iraqis need to be killed?

In the circumstances, yes.

Having killed them, how do the victors feel?

They feel great.

In Texas lore, there is a defense for murder that goes like this: "He needed killing." Is there anything wrong with feeling great about killing 100,000 Iraqis who needed killing?

There is nothing wrong with feeling relieved. It is not required, it is not human nature, to mourn the soldiers who were arrayed to kill you. Killing the Iraqis meant that Americans and their partners did not have to face them on the battlefield and maybe die. As it was, the Iraqis who were left in the field surrendered almost without a fight.

Like some martial equivalent of the Reagan years, the victory in the gulf makes Americans feel better about themselves. It was splendid and necessary but also unreal -- an action-adventure that, like most movies, was divided into three chapters, with decisive turning points: 1) the Iraqi invasion and the buildup of coalition forces; 2) the onset of the air war; and 3) the ground war and its denouement. The victory came with such merciless ease that on the winners' side, the deeper levels of experience (nobility, sacrifice, endurance and so on) were not engaged. The victors now celebrate mostly their relief that they have escaped what might have been. By the Fourth of July, the glorious moment will seem a long time ago.

The prospects going into the war were horrifying: the fourth largest army in the world, commanded by a thug whom we thought cunning at the time and even invested with satanic powers. Saddam was armed with chemical weapons and was working on the nuclear kind. All those dark possibilities gave the coalition, in effect, a license to kill. The killing was very well done. I hope it does not give us too much pleasure.