What it is Like to Go to War (27 page)

Veterans need to boast more. Everyone needs to boast more. We simply need to learn where and when it’s appropriate, as opposed to what we learn now—that all boasting is inappropriate. I used to love listening to Muhammad Ali when I was in high school. He was having fun. Boasting is the same as a peacock spreading his feathers. It’s a natural act. Why shame it? It can even be an art form. Listen to how Mark Twain captured the wonderful bragging of the old-time flatboat men.

“I’m the old original iron-jawed, brass-mounted, copper-bellied corpse-maker from the wilds of Arkansaw! I’m the man they call Sudden Death and General Desolation! Sired by a hurricane, dam’d by an earthquake, half-brother to the cholera, nearly related to the small-pox on the mother’s side! I split the everlasting rocks with my glance and I squouch the thunder when I speak!”
⁸⁷

Boasting like this would be put down today as testosterone poisoning. Suppose when my daughters, Laurel, Sophia, and Devon, were young that they had gone whirling around the living room twirling their skirts, giddy with their beauty and joy and budding sexuality, and we called it estrogen poisoning. Warrior energy is fierce and wild. It upsets men who don’t have it, and women who are afraid of it, primarily because the only form of
it they know is the negative one that is a result of repression. And this negative side comes booming out unconsciously in the glorification of warfare and violence in books, TV, and movies, the authors of most of which aren’t members of the Club themselves.

How do we bring some balance to the way the Club is perceived? What do we do when, in an honest moment, the former pilot looks right into your eyes, completely vulnerable, and says in a near whisper, “I loved it. I lit up the entire fucking valley.”

One honest reaction is to be appalled. The chances are pretty good that if he lit up the entire fucking valley he probably maimed and killed a lot of innocent people along with the ones who were trying to kill him and he most certainly did vast damage to the natural habitat. But should we condemn him for speaking the truth? At one level, and one he’s admitting, he certainly loved it. So did I. At another level he did what his society had asked him to do, and he did so with skill, courage, and even élan. Should that same society now cut him off at the throat or, worse, at the balls?

The appropriate response is to get him to keep talking about it. It may just be a bit shocking to find your friend has a wild and savage side that did a lot of harm. And it won’t hurt him to find out that you think he did something very harmful and destructive, as long as at the same time he finds out that you won’t love him any less for it. This is his great fear, that he won’t be accepted back in. So he joins the conspiracy of silence. So do we all.

Society needs veterans to express all sides of their experience, the guilt and sorrow
and
the pride. Cut off one and you cut off the others. Veterans’ organizations such as the VFW and the American Legion go a long way toward helping with the pride side and also providing a safe place for veterans to talk about experiences. These organizations are also enablers in numbing. They are filled with men drinking and smoking cigarettes. The
Department of Veterans Affairs has successfully organized groups of veterans who talk to one another about war with the help of a trained therapist. This has helped many veterans to express all sides of the war experience. The problem is simply one of numbers—too few good therapists, too few veterans willing to attend—and one of audience: it is only veterans talking with veterans. In both cases, the problem is that the veterans’ experiences and feelings remain quarantined from their families and communities. They go to the dark bar at the Legion Club, where children and nonveterans are not allowed. They disappear once a week into the VA outpatient clinic to be “cured.” They aren’t talking to friends and family; they’re talking to bar buddies and therapists.

The grief that is expressed at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., and it is the grief that most people focus on, would not be possible if it weren’t for the fact that the very building of the memorial was itself an act of recognition and pride on the part of veterans who took it upon themselves to get the project done. The memorial was not built by a grateful nation; self-respecting veterans built it and had to fight to have it placed where it is.

The combat veteran experience is still not out in the open where the whole of culture can benefit from the sorrow and the pride and society’s attitude toward war and fighting can mature psychologically and spiritually. No nation will ever reach maturity, or make sensible foreign policy, until its warriors, its people, and its leaders can talk about all sides of war with equal feeling. “I lit up the whole valley”
and
“I’ve grieved, crying for the little ones like my own children.” Without integration of the positive and negative sides of the war, the experience isn’t transmitted in any practical and meaningful sense, and we will continue to seek the glory of war unchecked by wisdom about all the costs of war.

I speak with some nervousness of relating to the war god Mars. Who am I to suggest any human can relate to this terrifying yet justifying god? Mars is the underlying organizing power that creates and sustains those physical and terrible aspects of war that seem beyond the comprehension of our small psyches. How does one relate to Gettysburg, or Stalingrad, or Hiroshima? Yet we must, or similar events will happen again. In the face of this seemingly overwhelming power I am going to evoke the name of Mars to stand for those war-making aspects of our own psyches that love war and hate war simultaneously, aspects over which we can exercise control. I do this because I believe that this area of conscious control can continually increase. We waged war far less destructively in Iraq than we did in World War II. I personally relate to war differently today than I did when I was twenty. This gives me hope for humanity
.

Throughout this book I have attempted to honestly share my experiences of combat with an eye toward how I might have managed those experiences with more wisdom and psychological, spiritual, and ethical maturity. I have argued that had I been more conscious when I was fighting in Vietnam, I would have contributed just as effectively, or even more effectively, to the war aims of those in power. I would have wreaked less havoc and less pain and still gotten the job done. In this chapter, in the
now shared context of my combat experience, I will touch on a few more general aspects of war fighting that I consider areas in which we can improve our relationship with Mars but which are more societally oriented than personally oriented.

Terry Waite, the special envoy for the archbishop of Canterbury, went to Lebanon in 1987 to negotiate for the release of hostages. While there, he was taken hostage as well. Day after day, for five years, he feared for his life. He was kept constantly blindfolded and chained, often for weeks at a time in a fetal position. He was tortured. If ever a person had good reasons for making an escape, Terry Waite had them.

At one point in his captivity his guard took him, blindfolded as usual, to the toilet. After Terry was let into the tiny room he removed his blindfold, and there, left accidentally on top of the toilet, was a fully loaded automatic rifle. His guard was the only guard around, just outside the door, unsuspecting. Waite walked out of the room and handed the rifle to the guard.

In an interview after his release Waite said he had no doubt that he could have killed the guard and escaped. He handed the rifle to the guard because for years he had been telling his captors and other terrorists that violence was not the way to settle disputes, and that he wasn’t on one side or the other of this particular dispute. If he killed this man to escape, he felt it would have devalued everything he stood for. He said, “Other than to protect someone, I could not use that weapon.”

Is Terry Waite the warrior of the future or just crazy?

He is neither. He is a brave man. Not all brave people are warriors. But in that interview Waite helped define what a warrior is when he said he would not choose sides and would not use a weapon, i.e., violence, other than to protect someone. In contrast to Waite, a warrior
does
choose sides. Choosing sides is the fundamental first choice that a warrior must make. Like Waite, a warrior is also willing to protect someone against violence, but Waite was talking about violence that is immediately being applied. The second fundamental choice of the warrior is to be willing to use violence to protect someone against even intended or implied violence. This second fundamental choice engenders an additional choice, which is accepting the risk of death and maiming that usually results from the decision to use violence against violence. To become a warrior requires making these two fundamental choices and accepting the risks entailed. Doing the above eliminates any need to use the adjective “ethical” in front of the noun “warrior.” A warrior, by my definition, acts ethically. Using violence other than to protect makes a person a bully or a murderer.

The first decision, choosing sides, means taking on the warrior spirit. People who take on the warrior spirit become
metaphorical
warriors. They are
like
warriors in certain aspects, but they are not warriors. This choice is serious enough, often entailing commitments of great personal sacrifice. A prime example is a government or corporate whistle-blower. The second decision, however, choosing to use violence to protect someone else against actual and intended violence, a choice that usually also entails danger to the lives and psyches of the people who choose the violent path, moves one from being a metaphorical warrior to being a warrior in deed. Warriors are prepared to kill people.

Because warriors make these two fundamental choices that Waite does not, warriors operate under a moral code that is grounded on different principles from Waite’s. At the base of Terry Waite’s moral philosophy is what I call Waite’s dictum: “Violence is not the way to solve problems.” But Waite himself said in the same interview that he would have used a weapon to protect someone. This is the warrior’s dictum: “No violence except to protect someone from violence.”

These two seemingly incompatible positions invite wonderful moral philosophical debate. I can’t say that Waite’s position is more or less moral than the warrior’s. I can say that the position of the conscious warrior will decrease the suffering of political violence in an imperfect world while the position of Terry Waite will eliminate the suffering of political violence only in a perfect world. One of
my
axioms of faith is that we don’t live in a perfect world.

In order for a moral code to be of any practical value, that moral code must be applicable in the world in which we live. I unabashedly take a utilitarian stand that any moral code must help reduce suffering. This view invites the criticism that war itself causes more suffering than not going to war. The answer lies in the relative value one places on nonphysical suffering—for example, living under a dictator—and that gets us back into basic belief structures.

Although the world would definitely be less violent and therefore a better place if everyone acted like Waite, we happen to live in a world where people abandon Waite’s nonviolent position regularly. When they do, they inflict injustice and suffering on innocent people. The warrior steps in and persuades them, by threatening or inflicting pain and death, to put an end to their harmful behavior.

The warrior’s dictum is, however, oddly dependent philosophically on Waite’s dictum. In order to adhere to the warrior’s dictum the ethical warrior acts only when and if others use violence first. That is, someone else must have already abandoned Waite’s position—the philosophical necessity required for the ethical application of the warrior’s power. Accepting this means accepting that a moral nation’s first use of its warrior power will always be defensive because preemptive strikes are immoral.

Like capital punishment, once done, a preemptive strike cannot be undone, and the nation struck could be innocent. Look at how badly the United States botched the intelligence, or botched the conclusions drawn from what intelligence it did possess, leading up to the 2003 Iraq war, namely that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction it was about to use against the United States. The United States got it wrong. Based on that justification alone, the United States was in the same position as a vigilante mob hanging an innocent man. There were more ethical justifications that should have been used and that were already well proved, namely a brutal dictator killing and torturing his own people who were powerless to stop him. The United Nations should have put a stop to it. It did not. The United States, Britain, and other states of the coalition did. Unfortunately they botched the occupation badly, setting back return to rule of law for years.

Preemptive strikes also put the nation’s warriors into an untenable moral position. It’s all well and good for the president to get tough and say we’re going to bomb some country because he thinks it is fixing to bomb us. He, however, doesn’t do the killing. Some pilot has to pickle the load on some human being, and if that human being’s government never intended to strike the United States, then the pilot kills an innocent person. A warrior cannot
commit to combat tentatively. Flawed as our response to Pearl Harbor was by racism and ignorance, it was not flawed by doubt about Japan’s intentions. Our guys went to war with everything they had. Imagine the Roosevelt administration telling Patton he couldn’t pursue the German Army south of the Loire for fear of upsetting the Vichy government.

Of course a no-preemptive-strike policy limits options and confines strategy and makes less philosophic warriors moan in frustration. Since the ethical warrior’s position requires someone to break Waite’s dictum, in some ultimate sense, the ethical warrior always plays defense. More traditional fighters will call this approach impractical. What they mean by “impractical” is that they are initially placed in a vulnerable position. This presents real practical problems for the warrior that should not be minimized. The point is to plan with this constraint in mind, not to abandon the principle.