What it is Like to Go to War (18 page)

In nations such as Baathist Iraq or Nazi Germany, the consequences of disobeying orders were extreme, like death by torture and strangulation from meat hooks—not only for the individual but for his family. I reiterate: identical moral choices can require far more personal courage in some instances than in others and those who do the right thing under such circumstances are very brave indeed. An individual in the military service of a Western democracy has considerable freedom to disobey orders. This is certainly true in the American military. Nonmilitary people will be surprised at how often, particularly in combat, you can work things around. For example, you can make a mistake. You can not understand. You can lose communication. You can even tell the idiot that you think he’s an ass, you won’t obey his stupid order, and you want a transfer. There are very few officers who want to have the question of whether or not they are stupid asses debated in a court-martial.

Even in circumstances where I could have very likely escaped punishment, however, I followed the “stupid” order. I even did it in circumstances where any possible punishment later compared with what I was being asked to do now looked trivial. Surely, the risk of death through a court-martial in 1968 was nearly nonexistent as compared with the extremely high risk of death through assaulting a hill. Why did I follow patently stupid orders to my own detriment and the detriment of my men? To whom or what did I give my loyalty? Obviously it wasn’t to my own men. They would pay as dearly as I would. Nor was it to myself, because good lieutenants in battle have even higher casualty rates than their men.

For me, my loyalty was to the mythic/historic/psychological projection called “the unit.” It has a thousand specific names. It’s the Marine Corps, the Legion, the 82nd Airborne, the Gordon Highlanders, and the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry. It’s all those flags, all that history, all that dying. We’d like to make it something simple, like an internalized parent whom we are used to obeying. Certainly this is part of it, but it is far more than that. Ignoring this mythic/historic/psychological projection ignores reality. You know that tens of thousands of people before you have listened to thousands of similar asses and still gotten the job done. You would be letting down all those bighearted ghosts who waded in and did the job in spite of the idiots. Because of them we alter our actions. Those ghosts are as real as the hill.

A warrior must learn to recognize that this intense feeling of loyalty to the unit comes from the warrior’s own psyche and nowhere else. What actually physically exists is mud, fire, mangled corpses, and anxious, frightened people. He must also learn that individuality must not be suppressed even though individual action is subordinated. One is very vulnerable when joining the
unit, whether military, corporate, charitable, or governmental, voluntarily surrendering individuality to a greater ideal and feeling wonderful for it.

Eric Hoffer, in
The True Believer
, had this pegged decades ago. This surrender is intoxicating. The more history, glory, and psychological resonance the unit has, the bigger you feel. The more glorious the mission, the more glorious you feel. You don’t need to join the Foreign Legion to understand what I mean. Think of it as playing for the Yankees. “The Yankees” isn’t just a group of overpaid athletes on the field today. It’s Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio, Micky Mantle, and titanic struggles with the Brooklyn Dodgers. All long gone—but yet so real.

There’s a dark side to this surrender, however. You impair, and in some cases lose altogether, your ability to make sound judgments as an individual, whether in the mud of war with all these frightened kids around you or in the battle for corporate survival.
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You are far more likely to engage in groupthink. You are far more likely to go along with the bad assumptions, the wrong perceptions of reality. The primary reason for this abandonment of the individual viewpoint is simply that with so much pain and grief going on, who would want to make individual judgments? This would entail taking responsibility for the pain. I certainly never wanted to feel responsible for all the death, misery, and destruction I was
in fact responsible for in Vietnam. That would entail coming to terms with just exactly why I was doing what I was doing, and in my case, in Vietnam, this presented some very ugly facts.

We are generally
delighted
to be cogs.

Nor is this entirely bad. I doubt the great cathedrals of Europe would have been built if individuals hadn’t given up their individuality and made the enormous sacrifices those buildings required. I also doubt that Europeans, and certainly doubt that Americans, could today do the equivalent. And this isn’t all bad either.

Choosing when to surrender and when to stand alone is an art. There is no science about it and unfortunately the military isn’t the greatest place to gain this sort of now-a-cog, now-not-a-cog wisdom. In fact, the military idealizes and strives to inculcate the surrender of individuality. It is equally tragic that too many of our national leaders are also the least experienced in living as individuals. The very essence of being a winning politician is to behave so that one’s actions are in accord with public opinion, the unit chosen by most politicians and precisely defined by their pollsters. There is an argument that by following the polls, politicians are only doing what the people want. It is after all a democracy. Where this breaks down is when the people want something stupid.

It is precisely because we have a choice about which unit to identify with that issues of loyalty and following orders cause such difficulties. This choice was at the heart of Nuremberg. Was your unit humanity, the German state, Aryans, the Gestapo? The more narrowly defined the unit, the more often one will get into situations of conflicting loyalties and murky ethical water. The smallest unit is the individual, and we’ve seen the consequences of this loyalty all too often, in business, politics, and war.

To be effective and moral fighters, we must not lose our individuality, our ability to stand alone, and yet, at the same time, we must owe our allegiance not to ourselves alone but to an entity so large as to be incomprehensible, namely humanity or God. As mere mortals who can’t grasp the incomprehensible, we limp along with allegiances to various stepped-down versions of the incomprehensible that seem to suit us, such as the Marine Corps, the family, France, the Baptist Church, or the Order of the Eastern Star. We must strive, however, always to see these smaller entities as only pieces of the larger one we’ll never comprehend. That is because when the moment comes for a tough decision, we
can
make it in light of the larger ghosts, even if we are scared to death in the mud with all those frightened kids around us.

It was monsoon time and we patrolled in perpetual twilight. Heavy gray clouds commingled with the trees. The jungle floor was wet from the constant dripping, and by the time the first ten Marines had passed it was changed into slippery and sucking mud. The company had been operating in these conditions alone in the mountains for weeks, constantly crossing or wading up roaring torrents in steep canyons. We often had to rope up to negotiate cliffs. Now, because of a screwup at battalion regarding our last possible resupply in a valley below the clouds, we had been several days without food and, this high in the clouds, resupply was impossible. Even more worrisome, so were medevacs and air support. No one could find us beneath that perpetual cloudy floor. It was as if the company had turned into a submarine, moving dark, deep, and silent beneath the monsoon clouds.

Battalion was constantly on the radio, pushing the skipper, who just one year earlier was president of his fraternity house at
USC, to make certain checkpoints selected from the maps that covered the bunker walls at headquarters. We weren’t told what the hurry was. One checkpoint was at the top of a mountain that we battled a full day to climb. After radioing in proudly that we’d done it, we were given another checkpoint down the other side and told we were falling behind schedule. This got old.

We were already moving very slowly because of the terrain and torrential rains, but we were now getting slower because of hunger. By the third day without food I had five very sick kids on my hands, dry-heaving and vomiting bile as we pulled them up behind us, because they’d eaten bark from the wrong kind of tree. In our weakened condition we all started worrying about accidents. The normal good-humored bitching turned to serious questions. “Is someone in trouble? Why the fucking rush?” Marines, like good troops of any service, will literally die trying if it’s for someone in trouble. But none of us could answer the question. It looked suspiciously like an exercise in making checkpoints on time.

Then what we had feared happened. An exhausted kid carrying a heavy mortar base plate lost his grip and fell off the ledge of a cliff. He took two others with him as he fell, never uttering a sound, the hundred-plus pounds of gear he was packing acting like some terrible silent bowling ball tearing through a line of pins strung out directly beneath him on precarious perches.

Standing with my back to the cliff on a small ledge myself, looking out across what I assumed to be a deep gorge but seeing nothing but constantly shifting fog and slashing rain, I still remember the feeling of helpless dread as I heard the corpsman’s report. One kid in great pain, not responding to questions and confused and disoriented from concussion, maybe with a broken back. One with a broken ankle. A third, woozy from having his
head beat around inside his helmet, was mostly just spitting mad. I remember thinking it would have been better if the kid with the broken back had died.

It turned out that his back wasn’t broken. He could be moved supported by two others, but in great pain. The corpsman splinted the other one’s ankle and loaded up both the injured with as much Darvon as they could take and remain conscious, and we hauled them up the cliff by rope, distributed their gear, and continued. Even if a chopper could have found us, it could not have set down without smashing its blades against the cliff. We had to find flat ground.

That night we sat in a wet steaming circle on a small hilltop covered with jungle. We were waiting for the skipper to start the daily meeting with his platoon commanders. I was shivering constantly from cold and lack of calories. I remember the steam rising from our wet clothes, and another platoon commander and the executive officer bargaining over a can of peaches, the only food left in the company, because the wiser and more experienced executive officer had refused to eat it. He still wouldn’t sell it at $35, around $120 in today’s money.

The skipper said quietly, “I’m thinking of disobeying the last order.”

This was, well, mutiny. The bantering stopped.

We’d been ordered to another checkpoint, which, if we were to reach it when we were ordered to, meant we’d have to move at night at an impossible speed and still with the two injured Marines. The risks were tenfold we’d kill somebody falling off a cliff in the dark. We still had been given no reasons for the haste. We’d asked several times what the hurry was, only to get rude and exasperated comments, but no answers. It made sense that no one wanted to broadcast what we were about, but this could
have been gotten around by encoding the message. Instead, we got uncoded messages like “Do I have to fly out there and kick your butts for you?” Leadership at its best.

Much later, I was able to piece together some idea of what was going on. Like most situations, it was part circumstance and part human failure, in this case arrogance, ignorance, and very likely alcoholism. We launched on this particular nightmare to follow up on a fight between another company and an unknown-sized force of NVA. That company had uncovered an ammunition dump but had run short of ammunition in the firefight to capture it and, more important, had also run out of explosives with which to blow the dump.
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They had to be pulled out, since they were out of food and exhausted and too high in the monsoon-shrouded mountains for resupply. Our company had to be dropped at a low enough altitude to get under the cloud cover and then climb up to them. They were to walk out to the same place we inserted to get lifted out.

We met them just outside the landing zone. They were pasty with waterlogged skin, gray with exhaustion, carrying their dead slung on bamboo poles, hanging from tied wrists and ankles like slain animals. Their wounded they carried on their backs. We offered them some of our own food supply. Semper fi. They took some for the wounded and some cigarettes to fight the cold and gloom, but no more, knowing we’d need the food more than they and that they would soon be getting out. Semper fi back. The ghosts of acts of kindness like these haunt all fighting units.

A second company had been lifted from a fire support base to follow in our trace in such a hurry that they did so with insufficient rations for an operation. We were ordered to leave half of our rations for them in a cache.

After two days of slogging we had run short of food. But no one was worried; in fact, our spirits were pretty good. We had had only one small skirmish with nobody injured, we had reached the ammo dump and blown it sky high to the great amusement of everyone, and we knew that we’d be down and lifted out by the next day or so. We had actually started back down toward the landing zone when an order came asking us to stop and wait for further orders. We waited half a day, the bitching starting to mount. Being hungry just naturally increases irritability. Unknown to us, someone in Da Nang or Saigon was putting the final touches on a plan that called for the opening of a new firebase on top of a certain mountain located in the area.

Now, “in the area” is relative. To someone in Da Nang or Saigon, with large-scale maps, one fingerwidth covers a lot of ground, and our company was only a few fingerwidths from the objective, practically next door. For us in the jungle with smaller-scale maps we were
sixteen
fingerwidths, as the crow flies. And we weren’t crows. In one day, humping from dawn to dark, we made about two and a half fingerwidths. It is impossible to convey to a staff officer who has never had to watch his hands blister away from having to hack his way through thick jungle with a machete just how slowly you move. Most North Americans have seen wild blackberry patches that stand well above head height. They would consider it madness to try to enter one of these. This is the kind of thick I mean by thick jungle. Add to this the fact that every chop sends a precise signal of where you are and, by the way, you’re
working uphill at about a forty-five-degree angle. Oh, and you haven’t eaten for two days.