An Orchestrated Attack

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At the public library I found photos from books on World War II: bombers in flight, bombs falling in a cluster, aerial views of the majestic city of Dresden. I found photos of the city on fire; photos of the smoldering, wrecked buildings; and, finally, photos of a wooden cart piled with scorched black corpses.

The audiovisual director made the photos into slides and I sequenced them to the music, so the image of bombers corresponded to the droning of the trombones, the falling bombs corresponded to the whistling of the flutes, and so on.

On the night of the performance, I stood behind the heavy black curtain at the rear of the stage with my finger on the button of the slide projector. I began with a picture of the city before the bombing and then toggled back and forth between the image of the bombers in flight and the cluster of bombs falling toward the earth in order to give the sensation of many bombers dropping many bombs.

I felt powerful, like the Great Oz, proud to be inspiring fear in this audience of parents and school administrators, perhaps disturbing their pat notions of war and its costs. In some ways I've been trying to get back to that feeling ever since-trying to find moments when what I'm hearing and what I'm seeing come together to reveal a disturbing truth.

I must confess, however, that at no point as I stood behind that curtain was I consciously thinking of the war in Iraq. Dresden was different, I told myself. Dresden was butchery, barbarity. The bombing of Iraq, as I saw on television every night for a few months, was clean, efficient, just.

David Griffith lives in South Bend, Indiana, and teaches writing at the University of Notre Dame and Saint Mary's College. A Good War Is Hard to Find: The Art of Violence in America (2006) is published by Soft Skull Press, an eclectic independent publisher; www.softskull.com.

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