What it is Like to Go to War (2 page)

That night when we hauled in the sturgeon, we still had plenty of room in the fish box, so we continued fishing. The sturgeon lay there, alive, its wet scales reflecting starlight. It seemed an ancient thing from before the dinosaurs, breathing there, too primitive and rugged to die quickly like the more complex and finely tuned salmon. I kept going over to watch it.

In—
Spiritus
. Out—
Sanctus
. Those were the words that came to me as I watched its gills pumping the alien air. In comes the spirit, out goes something holy, life perhaps, but I realized then that the “in” and the “out” are somehow the same thing and everything is touched by the holy when in the presence of death.

I watched Zoomer pumping air, hanging on to life with that same primitive doggedness of the sturgeon for all that night and most of the next day before the fog lifted enough to get in a medevac bird. Others died, like the salmon, but Zoomer kept pumping, enduring the shelling with the rest of us, waiting for the fog to clear, waiting for the helicopter that would take him home. It came. As the fog closed in again, just minutes after the helicopter got Zoomer out alive, I realized that the mystery of life and death had once again played out before me and that once again I was in a sacred space and, other than in my role as a walking weapons guidance system for the United States of America, totally unprepared to be there. The Marine Corps taught me how to kill but it didn’t teach me how to deal with killing.

I first became conscious of this wartime sacred space, this temple of Mars, several months before Zoomer won that race with death. It was Christmastime 1968. I was the commander of
a Marine rifle platoon. A rifle platoon at full strength consisted of forty-three Marines, but that winter we struggled against malaria, jungle rot, dysentery, and the North Vietnamese Army to keep our strength above thirty. Although I could radio in my position down to six grid points, I no longer knew where the hell I was spiritually. That more innocent, and certainly more spiritually connected, fourteen-year-old on his grandfather’s fishing boat hadn’t yet had his instinctive links to the spiritual world sawed away by eight years of high school and college and, finally, severed by military training.

Our company of three platoons had just secured the top of a mountain for a new artillery firebase, high in the cordillera where Laos met the old demilitarized zone that divided North Vietnam from South Vietnam. We were far from help and, after attrition from disease and firefights, my platoon was down to twenty-five. After nearly a month of continual moving through the jungle, eating only canned food, without the ability to wash properly or change clothes, some of the Marines were so covered with ringworm and jungle rot that they worked naked to lessen the discomfort. Rain and swirling fog delayed the hoped-for move of the artillery battery. Then, after only two of the normal complement of six 105mm howitzers had arrived, and a limited amount of ammunition, the rest of the regiment got into a fierce fight in the lowlands about 30 kilometers to our east and needed every-Marine, weapon, and helicopter they could get. The regimental commander took a calculated risk and ordered my single undermanned platoon and some volunteers to stay behind to guard the howitzers and their crews and sent the rest of the company to reinforce the lowlands operation.

I was left in charge of the firebase. I alone would make all the decisions and count my mistakes with lives and pain. With the
regiment stretched and the weather bad, there would be virtually no chance of reinforcements or resupply if the NVA attacked, for we were well inside the enemy’s traditional operating area and well outside our own. If I blew it, or our luck was bad, we’d probably be overrun before help could reach us. I was afraid I would die. I held the lives of others in my hands. I had entered the temple of Mars, where not only were humans sacrificed, including me, but I was also the priest. This priest, however, had only been to a seminary called the Basic School where he learned the ritual moves but none of the meaning.

We patrolled hard and ceaselessly in terrain so steep and difficult we often had to use ropes to get up and down the cliffs. On the radio we pretended to be a company so the enemy wouldn’t know how vulnerable we were to attack. At night no one slept longer than an hour at a time. We placed our nighttime listening posts far from the lines, well down the southern approach on a hill so steep I could stand facing it and touch dirt by putting my hand straight out in front of me. The north side was a 1,600-foot cliff. Given the difficulty of getting back to the lines at night, we all knew our listening posts would probably be sacrificed to warn the rest of us.

One night, small teams of NVA soldiers tried infiltrating past our listening posts to probe our main defenses for weak points and determine the layout of our lines. One of those teams blundered right into a listening post and the three Marines called in fire from the two 60mm mortars that had been left to us by the company commander. On the second volley one round fell short, wounding all three kids in the listening post. Nine Marines and a Navy corpsman volunteered to go get them, six to carry the wounded and four to fight. I waited by the radio, sick with dread, as the rescue team stumbled through the dark jungle dragging
the wounded back up the muddy slopes. One of the wounded Marines kept screaming obscenities until someone gagged him with a sock. When they were safely inside the lines I saw bits of his brain spattered on the inside of his jungle hat. If we were lucky enough to get them all out alive, I knew at least one kid would never function normally again.

We did get the wounded out alive because of the heroism of a helicopter crew from Marine Air Group 29 who flew through the mountains in total darkness as we guided them in over the radio by the sound of their engines and blades. They burst into sight only feet from us, barely avoiding crashing, our enlisted forward air controller, whom we called FAC-man, screaming over the radio that they were right on top of us. We had outlined the landing zone on top of the mountain by putting lighted heat tabs in our helmets. The zone was so small the CH-47 could get only its rear wheels on the ground, with the front of the bird hovering over the edge of the cliff.

The bird left us in the dark and we immediately sent out new listening posts. The next morning the ceaseless patrolling continued, as did the fog, both from the monsoon and from the endless ache for sleep. I, however, was dealing with a lot more than lack of sleep. I had come upon, for the first time and, sadly, not even close to the last time, the terrible feeling of responsibility and guilt for the death and wounds of my men. The mortars, like everything else on the hill, were under my command. When I examined the mortars the next morning, I discovered one of them had a slightly loose tripod leg that I should have discovered in my routine weapons inspections beforehand. It had probably shifted after the recoil of the first round, causing the next round to fall short. In combat, inattention to details can kill people.

No other birds got in after that brave medical evacuation because the monsoon had shut down all flying in the mountains. Two days before Christmas the fog lifted just enough to allow a single chopper to work its way up to us, a dangerous journey, squeezing beneath the cloud ceiling just a few feet above the jungle-covered ridges. Along with food, water, mail, and ammunition came the battalion chaplain.

He had brought with him several bottles of Southern Comfort and some new dirty jokes. I accepted the Southern Comfort, thanked him, laughed at the jokes, and had a drink with him. Merry Christmas.

Inside I was seething. I thought I’d gone a little nuts. How could I be angry with a guy who had just put his life at risk to cheer me up? And didn’t the Southern Comfort feel good on that rain-raked mountaintop? Years later I understood. I was engaged in killing and maybe being killed. I felt responsible for the lives and deaths of my companions. I was struggling with a situation approaching the sacred in its terror and contact with the infinite, and he was trying to numb me to it. I needed help with the existential terror of my own death and responsibility for the death of others, enemies and friends, not Southern Comfort. I needed a spiritual guide.

Many will argue that there is nothing remotely spiritual in combat. Consider this. Mystical or religious experiences have four common components: constant awareness of one’s own inevitable death, total focus on the present moment, the valuing of other people’s lives above one’s own, and being part of a larger religious community such as the
Sangha, ummah
, or church. All four of these exist in combat. The big difference is that the mystic sees heaven
and the warrior sees hell. Whether combat is the dark side of the same vision, or only something equivalent in intensity, I simply don’t know. I do know that at age fifteen I had a mystical experience that scared the hell out of me and both it and combat put me into a different relationship with ordinary life and eternity.

Most of us, including me, would
prefer
to think of a sacred space as some light-filled wondrous place where we can feel good and find a way to shore up our psyches against death. We don’t want to think that something as ugly and brutal as combat could be involved in any way with the spiritual. However, would any practicing Christian say that Calvary Hill was not a sacred space? Witness the demons of Tibetan Buddhism, ritual torture practiced by certain Native American tribes, the darker side of voodoo, or the cruel martyrdom of saints of all religions. Ritual torture or martyrdom can be either meaningless and terrible suffering or a profound religious experience, depending upon what the
sufferer
brings to the situation. The horror remains the same.

Combat is precisely such a situation.

Our young warriors are raised in possibly the only culture on the planet that thinks death is an option. Given this, it is no surprise that not only they but many of their ostensible religious guides, like the chaplain with the booze, enter the temple of Mars unprepared. Not only is such comfort too often delusional; it tends to numb one to spiritual reality and growth. Far worse, it has serious psychological and behavioral consequences.

To avoid, or at least mitigate, these consequences, warriors have to be able to bring meaning to this chaotic experience, i.e., an understanding of their situation at a deeper level than proficiency in killing. It can help get them through combat with their sanity relatively intact. It can help keep them from doing more harm than they need to do. It is also a critical component in their
ability to adjust when they return home. This “adjustment” is akin to asking Saint John of the Cross to be happy flipping burgers at McDonald’s after he’s left the monastery. When one includes drug and alcohol overdoses, single-person car crashes, fights in bars, and a whole host of other self-destructive behaviors in addition to so-called normal suicides, the number of veterans who have killed themselves at home after the war was over is disturbingly large—and largely ignored.

You can’t force consciousness or spiritual maturity. Teenage warriors like to fight, drink, screw, and rock and roll. You can, however, put people in situations where consciousness and spiritual maturity can grow rapidly, if those people know what to look for. It’s called initiation.

Joseph Henderson, who died in 2007 at the age of 104, was one of the pioneers of Jungian analysis and a world authority on initiations. He once explained to me that there are two broad categories of initiation experiences. The first kind prepares the individual to fulfill an adult role in his or her society. Traditionally it was where the boys learned to accept the danger and responsibility involved in hunting and the girls learned to accept the danger and responsibility involved in childbirth. The second kind goes beyond societal roles and is of a spiritual nature. It is about accepting one’s mortality. It is about facing death. To fully mature as individuals we need to undergo both kinds. In our culture individuals now must do initiatory rites on their own. Some do and some don’t. A lot of people in our culture simply never grow up.

There is no longer one simple initiation rite of the kinds with which we are most familiar, those of the hunter-gatherer cultures such as the hunger and terrifying dreams of the Native American vision quest or the pain inflicted on young Aboriginal boys and the terrifying sounds of the bullroarers, secret ritual instruments
forbidden, upon pain of death, for the noninitiated even to hear. In our culture we mostly undergo a series of partial initiations and we undergo them unconsciously and without guidance.

Boot camp was an initiation of the first kind, societal. I arrived at Quantico, Virginia, on a bus from the Port Authority in New York, to be met by screaming drill instructors in the middle of a muggy June night. There I was run through a succession of supply huts collecting gear, sweating in my civilian clothes, got my hair cut off, and finally fell exhausted into bed. In what seemed like five minutes I was shocked awake by sudden glaring lights splitting the humid darkness, a crashing metal garbage can being kicked down the squad bay by a rampaging madman, people being dumped—thin mattresses and all—onto the clammy concrete floor, and bewildering shouting and cursing as we desperately tried to pee, shave, shit, and get dressed in far too little time.

I survived the hazing and harassment, the drills and the spills, but the incident that actually altered my consciousness, that prepared me for the societal role of a Marine instead of a high school kid, occurred because I slapped at a mosquito during a talk by the drill instructor while we were out on a night field problem. He had me strip down to my shorts and marched me into a nearby swamp where he ordered me to stand at attention. My unprotected body was soon covered with mosquitoes.

The drill instructor would return to check on me periodically, asking if I’d had enough. I’d shout out the requisite “No, sir!” and he’d leave. By the time a half hour had gone by, it hurt. After around forty-five minutes I was covered with red welts. I could feel blood trickling down my body. I could feel the mosquitoes inside my shorts biting my testicles. But I had decided this was a test I wasn’t going to fail.