What it is Like to Go to War (11 page)

Under ordinary circumstances the repressed and despised parts of our personalities manifest themselves as small human foibles or weaknesses in character that foster only petty acts with minor harmful consequences. In the crucible of war those same weaknesses and petty acts can lead to consequences of immense horror and evil. The warrior must recognize the moments when circumstances mirror the ugly unwanted parts of his or her psyche. This is the only way to minimize the evil consequences of ignoring these parts. To do this requires recognizing and accepting one’s own despised parts, a form of heroism not taught in boot camp
.

In 1968, while still in Vietnam, I recorded in my journal the first instance of a recurring nightmare that, along with similar dreams, took me over twenty years to lay to rest.

Somehow the gook
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and I were left isolated right next to the river. I had only my kabar
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and it looked as if he was unarmed. He saw me and we went at each other. My kabar was dull from chopping branches, so instead of slashing I tried to stab him in
the throat. I hit him someplace but didn’t stop him and then we were locked together and rolling into the muddy tepid water. I found out then he wasn’t unarmed. In his right hand were two razor blades. He got me right across the wrist in a slash, and in the warm water I could feel my blood draining, mixing with the warmth around it, robbing me of energy, of life. I stabbed him in the Adam’s apple and felt the hard resistance like a carrot. The knife was too dull to tear his throat, so I pulled it out and stabbed again and again in a mad race against the blood mixing, mixing in the warm brown water. Finally I could see no longer. My mind whirled. My body twisted and spun after my blood, joining it in a dance of entropy, cooling and spinning to the universal semi-warmth of the river.

The doc pulled me out and I awoke on the bank with an IV tube in my arm.

This dream is not about Vietnam. It’s about what got me to Vietnam. I’ve been fighting that “gook,” the enemy inside me, in one form or another, for most of my life. It represents the parts of me I despise. Not only don’t I want other people to see them; I also don’t want to see them myself. These are my weak parts, my indecisive parts, my violent parts, and probably a few parts so deeply buried I can’t name them. The enemy, however, pops up in various forms in dreams. Sometimes he’s a shiftless vagrant. Sometimes he’s a frightening murderer or a crazy person.

Sometimes real people, not just dreams, catch this enemy within, acting like an unrecognized reflection in a mirror. Rather than realize it’s my own reflection, I prefer to think that what I see is really them. This causes troubling encounters. For example, if I see fat people I immediately think badly of them. I myself was a bit fat as a child. I got over that through waging a fierce war against that fat little boy, training hard, running a lot, playing the
toughest sports. But I still like to eat ice cream and lie around, so the fat little boy is still with me, stuffed inside where I don’t have to think about him anymore. I can have a negative reaction to a fat person, but when I start to remember that fat little boy I used to be, my reaction becomes more neutral. Eventually it took certain painful war experiences, represented and played out in the repeating dream I just described, to finally make up a nightmare strong enough to get my attention and make me realize that something wasn’t altogether sound at home. There was indeed an enemy within.

Everyone has his or her equivalent of “the gook inside.” It’s what Carl Jung called the shadow. People who say they don’t have one have an even bigger one.

That NVA soldier and I were fighting by the Ben Hai River, the dividing line between North and South Vietnam. This is the dividing line between this world, the world where everyone, especially me, expects I’ll be good at football and get a powerful high-paying job, and the other world, the world where I hide, and then forget, the parts of me I despise.

Although we all have shadows, we all have different ones. My own shadow has many masks. I’m a strong man—my shadow is a weak effeminate whiner. I’m a hard worker—“Sarge” visits me in dreams, a lazy, marijuana-smoking deserter and lover. He’s got two sensuous sleek women friends. I’m not afraid to take on a challenge—my shadow constantly fears failing. What better way to fight these shadows than to join the Marines and prove to myself that they don’t exist? After I left the Marines, I found other similar things to do, over and over again. I made enough brilliant light to keep the shadows at bay and blind myself in the process.

This dream soldier is slashing my wrists with a razor blade, an image of suicide. The more I try to kill him, the more my own
blood drains out of me. When I returned from Vietnam I lost some old and dear friends and one woman I loved. I lost them because they said I had become cold. When asked how I was, I’d answer, “I’m cool.” And I was. I was holding down a full colonel’s billet at Headquarters Marine Corps
³⁷
and had enough medals to excuse any wayward behavior, and I took full advantage of the situation. Everything looked fine. But I’d died inside.

So to feel more alive and simultaneously avoid the pain of confronting the darkness and dark deeds I now carried with me, I came up with a creative and individual solution. I got into drugs, drinking, and sex. It never got too heavy. I could still hold down my job, and on occasion I did this literally. After a night of doing drugs I would sometimes have to hang on to my desk chair at work the next day while I watched the Key Bridge undulate like a sine wave over the Potomac or used my eyes like zoom lenses, alternating from close-up to distance, close-up to distance. Sometimes the walls would change colors. But Lieutenant Marlantes was “cool.”
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I made friends with a Marine chopper pilot who, ever since his Vietnam tour, was such a serious alcoholic that often I’d have to go over to his apartment to get him into his uniform for work in the morning. We’d go to parties where everyone was too numb to talk and too high to care. I woke up one Sunday morning after one of these parties to answer the telephone. It was the airline-pilot husband of the woman lying next to me. He was calling to see if she was going to church with the kids. I tried to pretend I was the cool lover as I watched her get dressed to go. But I felt so sad and
wrong inside. I felt her humiliation. I noticed her skin starting to go loose and dry on her face, and she noticed that I noticed. That was the last time I made love to someone I didn’t know.

You don’t need to go to war to find people fleeing from or fighting their shadows and getting their wrists slashed. I got my act together, got married, stopped the drugs, managed to climb to the top of a smallish heap—large income, first-class hotels, jets to Europe and the Far East. On the surface it was like an ad for Rolex watches—but something was missing.

One evening after dinner at a party in Singapore I joined the men, all corporate leaders of varying nationalities, men whom I still respect for the many corporate hills they’ve charged and taken. We were talking about issues that were important to us at the time. Maggie Thatcher was doing this. Lee Kuan Yew was doing that. The deutsche mark was doing such and such. We were responding this way and that way, all of us intelligent, responsible, powerful in our spheres.

Laughter from across the room pulled my attention away from the conversation. I turned and saw that a group of the wives had gathered around one end of the hostess’s large dining table. Color jumped at me, the mauve and fuchsia of two Indian women in their saris and a Chinese woman in a green silk dress, her face animated as she listened to a French woman whose hands flashed light as she talked. I looked back at my group, powerful and successful but bloodless.

The first messages are gentle. Ignore them and the volume gets turned up, sometimes painfully high, sometimes to the point where it destroys your sense of hearing. I traveled constantly for about a year after this party. One night I came home from Indonesia around two o’clock one morning and found my ten-year-old son curled up asleep with a photograph of me held against his
stomach. The picture was one of me laughing and holding him up over my head when he was about nine months old. He’d taken a ballpoint pen and stabbed out my face.

If you don’t recognize your shadow sides, you’ll be likely to cause a lot of damage trying to do your heroic deeds. How often we see the do-gooder politicians, the community boosters, the heads of charities with ruinous family lives. My own grandmother was an idealistic communist, IWW member, and labor organizer. The longest she ever lived with my mother was something like four months. My mother has carried the consequences of that neglect all her life. I used to condemn my grandmother for this. Then one day I found that my grandmother’s mother was a famous midwife in her part of Finland. She was constantly away as well. When briefly at home, she was constantly irritable, yelling at and slapping her kids in her tiredness and frustration. Yet no matter how tired or how desperately needy were her own children, if there was any difficult case within several days’ journey, she went. So my grandmother, and every one of her siblings, went too, to America. Great-Grandma never saw her children again.

Was Great-Grandma a heroine or merely transcending tedium at the cost of her children? She was both. And her daughter, who did almost precisely the same thing to my mother, was both. Luckily for my brother and me, my mother tried consciously to break that pattern. Still, even I, three generations on, will every so often succumb to some leftover reverberation of that original pattern of neglecting what’s close to me in order to run off and prove my importance under the guise of doing good for the world.

Unrecognized shadow can also haunt the person who stays at home to raise his or her kids. One couple I knew, horrified by the Vietnam War and active throughout in the peace movement, had firmly decided to raise their two children, a boy and a girl,
without guns or violence of any kind. They saw no violent TV or movies; nor did they read any books of a violent nature. Even pointing a finger and saying
bang
was quickly put down. Friends who played that way were no longer invited over.

One afternoon a mutual friend found the two children torturing insects in the backyard. Not one insect, not even one each, but a whole line of them, each one neatly pinned to a board waiting its turn.

The more you deny the shadow warrior, the more vulnerable you become to it. We in America did a pretty good job of denial in the Vietnam War era and the decades following. During World War II, the warrior or soldier had a place of high regard in American society. Our boys in uniform were seen as heroes, the good guys, just a wholesome bunch of gum-chewing, Coke-drinking, jitterbugging amateurs who destroyed Japanese militarism and Nazi brutality. We idolized MacArthur. We liked Ike. We let the shadow warrior do the stuff we never wanted to consciously think about, such as firebombing Japanese civilians living in paper houses and destroying Dresden when we didn’t need to. Still in the grip of this white knight attitude, we spent most of the 1950s and ’60s pulling off dirty little capers justified because we were fighting the “evils of communism.” All this eventually led to, along with a host of other spurious reasons, President Lyndon Johnson telling us we were teaching that “little piss ant” Ho Chi Minh a lesson. Then we started seeing some hard-to-stomach reality on television. Rather than accept that this terrible reality was the result of our inflated ideas of being the good-guy soldiers we thought we were, and accept as well that we’d buried deeply our own despised Nazis and Tojos, it was easier to throw that darkness onto the people we asked to do the fighting. So the Vietnam veterans came home catching everyone’s shadow, portrayed as dope-shooting,
coke-snuffing, baby-killing mercenaries. They were far from that. They fought their war, held jobs, and raised families no more and no less capably than did their veteran fathers. Rudyard Kipling’s “Tommy” isn’t a poem about gratitude; it’s a poem about attitude.

So where’s the shadow now after the Iraq War? Try Abu Ghraib prison. However, it is always going to go underground, just as it did in Gulf I and World War II, unless we start getting conscious. We move from protecting food convoys in Somalia to “saving” Somalia from the evil warlords and the mission ends in bloody humiliation. We assume we’ll be cheered as white knights by the people of Iraq when we arrive with no plan for the occupation and self-righteously eliminate all agencies of law and order because their personnel were labeled Baathists, but we and the Iraqi people instead get years of bloody chaos. It’s not the activity itself that’s in question so much as the self-righteous attitude that one brings to the activity. This is where the danger lies. This nation should be less worried about putting the Vietnam syndrome behind us than restarting the World War II victory syndrome that resulted in the Vietnam syndrome in the first place. If you go to war singing “Onward Christian Soldiers” you’re going to raise the devil.

Shadow issues come around and around. There is no defeating the shadow. We have to live with it. It is part of us. But having this shadow is neither bad nor good, although it
is
very troublesome. If I have lazy Sarge in there, smoking marijuana every day, lying on a couch, this hurts nobody. It’s when I start screaming at my kid because he is loafing on the couch, just the way I’d like to loaf myself, that someone gets hurt. Then what I’m doing, because of shadow, is bad. I’ll never get rid of Sarge. Calling Sarge bad and trying to stuff
him even further down in my psychic baggage will only mean it’s more likely I’ll scream at my kid or anyone else, people on welfare, for example, who “catch” my Sarge when he pops out.

We all have shit on our shoes. We’ve just got to realize it so we don’t track it into the house. This realization is one of the things we must work on in training society’s professional fighters: our soldiers, police, and bodyguards. We must take time to make these people aware of their particular shadows and have them clearly understand that they carry this shadow with them—always. This is so crucial to those involved in professions of violence because their job at times does indeed involve hurting or killing people. People holding these jobs cannot project their shadow sides onto “the enemy” or “the criminals” and hope to avoid excesses. Yet no one attempts to help soldiers or the police by dealing with this in their training. We prefer the easier route of casting our own darkness on them, braying “police brutality” whenever the excesses occur. This must change.