This book may contain language, sexual content, and themes of grief and loss, which may be challenging for some readers. Reader caution advised.
The Universal Irony of War
by Marjory Hall
Hi from Goodwell, in the Oklahoma panhandle! I’m Marjory Hall with a BookByte for our 2025 Fall Read. I imagine that war has been a topic of philosophical consideration for as long as there has been war. American Mother by Colum McCann and Diane Foley is a meditation of a woman coming to terms with war and the loss of her son, a civilian noncombatant, in war.
Diane Foley has the unusual opportunity to meet face-to-face with Alexanda Kotey, one of the men responsible for her son’s death. At the end of their first meeting, Foley looks Kotey in the eye and says to him, “In another life [. . .] you and Jim might have been friends” (29). For me, Foley has explicated the universal irony of war—people who have a great deal in common killing one another.
In 1902, Thomas Hardy wrote, in his poem “The Man He Killed”:
"Had he and I but met
By some old ancient inn,
We should have sat us down to wet
Right many a nipperkin!
"But ranged as infantry,
And staring face to face,
I shot at him as he at me,
And killed him in his place.
"I shot him dead because —
Because he was my foe,
Just so: my foe of course he was;
That's clear enough; although
"He thought he'd 'list, perhaps,
Off-hand like — just as I —
Was out of work — had sold his traps —
No other reason why.
"Yes; quaint and curious war is!
You shoot a fellow down
You'd treat if met where any bar is,
Or help to half-a-crown."
In war, most of the people killing and dying have never met one another and probably have no quarrel with one another beyond the dogma fueling the war. In the 21st century, this truth is captured in time; the men who executed Jim Foley recorded the event and posted it on the internet for all to see. Whereas ISIS published the video to demonstrate their fearlessness, instead the video makes that face-to-face confrontation a public matter that underlines the similarities between the killer and his victim, revealing no heroic stand for ideals, just the terrible waste of young lives.
Kotey finds his way to the same recognition in his repeated viewings of The James Foley Story. He admits “with no shame” that the documentary made him cry (218). He was “moved by compassion and sympathy for [their] collective anguish and grief as a family, whilst also feeling a sense of guilt for [his] role in what was inflicted” (218). In a letter to Diane, Kotey addresses himself to Jim Foley, saying that “[w]e do what we do in conflict and war,” and that he regrets not exercising justice when he and his cohorts “burdened [Jim’s] family, and those of the other captives, with the sins of the U.S. government” (219).
Kotey recognizes, exactly 120 years after Hardy published his poem, that combatants following orders in war, moved around and lost like chess pieces by the organizers of the war, are really just young men with hopes and dreams that will never be fulfilled.
Even a noncombatant like Jim Foley can be drawn into the hungry jaws of war and devoured. In the “quaint and curious” setting of war, though, survival requires that humanity be set aside. Soldiers must either kill or be killed. While the powerful who dictate the terms of war can think of warriors as pieces in a game, in the hearts of Diane Foley and all of the other mothers of fallen soldiers, the loss of their children’s humanity will always be at the center of their grief.
I’m Marjory Hall from Goodwell, Oklahoma, with a BookByte for Fall, 2025.
REFERENCES
Hardy, Thomas. “The Man He Killed.” Poetry Foundation.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44329/the-man-he-killed.
McCann, Colum and Diane Foley. American Mother. Etruscan, 2023.
