What it is Like to Go to War (28 page)

We have often limited our strategic first-strike options in the past without serious harm. In many cases, by so doing, we have avoided harm not only to innocent people but also to ourselves. Take the tacit agreement between the belligerents of World War II not to use poison gas. Take the tacit agreement between the Soviet Union and the NATO powers not to use first-strike nuclear force, even though for years neither side would publicly give up this option. The strategies of mutually assured destruction, in this light, were not only practical, in that nuclear war was never waged, but moral. The problem is that a strategy of mutually assured destruction works only with opponents who have essentially the same value system. It will not work against suicidal terrorists or suicidal governments. Such people obviously value some things more highly than their own lives. This does not make these people irrational.

In the case of the suicidal opponent, there is a further problem. Deciding just when someone has broken Waite’s dictum (violence is not the answer) and when to invoke the warrior’s response is hardly ever a black-and-white case. Unfortunately, in terms of moral clarity, but fortunately in terms of misery, history hands us few clear-cut scenarios. Judging when to resort to violence, when to enter the warrior mode, is almost always done with limited information and under extreme duress. This means making decisions when our instinctual save-the-organism side is roaring to the fore and threatening to obliterate our feeble consciousness.

Once a decision is made, however, to commit our warriors to violence, the moral restraint of waiting for the enemy’s next move should be removed. We should commit totally to the offensive, what Robert E. Lee called “taking the aggressive.” The warrior should hold back force or offensive operations only when the other side stops using violence—period. The warrior stops fighting with every ethical means at his or her disposal only when one side quits. Being unclear about the warrior’s dictum can get us into moral hot water with first-strike policies. Being unclear about taking the aggressive has embroiled us in the “gentle surgeons make stinking wounds” kind of fighting we have been involved in too many times since World War II. Escalation, the strategy used in Vietnam, didn’t work. Just because game theory can be applied to war does not mean war is a game.

If we are unable to take sides against a clear opponent, and unable to use violence with every means at our disposal to force that opponent to stop using violence against our side, then we should not go to war. We should use other means to either encourage or coerce people to do what we want. The world community helped end apartheid in South Africa through a whole lot of pressure other than military force.

Finally, there is the very real problem that the people who make the decisions to send in the warriors often fail to adopt the warrior mode consciously themselves. It is as if they are deciding to involve someone else in a war. They “send our youth into harm’s way.” I do not doubt that most of our leaders take their responsibilities very seriously, but only if they see that
they
are actually doing the killing can they make a more conscious decision. Ideally, they should know ahead of time that
they
will have to face nightmares the rest of their lives over the killing. It will make for better decisions.

I have often heard, and have agreed with, people who bemoan the fact that our political leaders, once they declare war, don’t get up on their horses like the chieftains of old, draw their swords, and lead the charge. That role is rightly outdated because the modern war chief must marshal and direct economic, political, and diplomatic as well as military resources and it is ineffective to do so from a horse. However, this distancing from the action should not preclude the leaders’ use of their imagination so that they can get into the correct relationship with the decision to wage war. Without this leap of imagination, modern political leaders will not be prepared to think and behave like ethical warriors.

In a decision to make war, leaders must stop thinking of themselves as policy makers. The policy makers’ fundamental decision is whether or not to enter the warrior mode themselves. First, they must choose sides. This is something good political leaders do or should do as a matter of course. The more problematic decision is the second step. Killing people with Marines is ethically no different from killing people with hatchets. Only the distance from the spurting blood differs. So when a politician sends in the Marines, the politician uses violence every bit
as much as the Marines themselves. The decision maker must imagine that sending warriors into harm’s way is the equivalent of charging the enemy with a sword with his own hide at stake. When a president or member of Congress decides to go to war, he or she must do so as a warrior, not a policy maker. It is the leaders who are choosing sides and using violence to stop violence, the very definition of a warrior. It remains a reason why the electorate should value military experience in its leadership.

Completely taking the aggressive does not mean “no holds barred.” I am constantly told, usually by people who have never been to war and who apply varying degrees of simplistic reasoning, that all is fair in love and war, that having rules of war is total nonsense. This is simply not true. To sink to the position that fair play and the impulses of good character have no place in modern war, taking some sort of tough-guy realpolitik stance, is something the ethical warrior must never do. As I have said, warriors must wage war totally, without holding back, until the enemy stops using violence. Waging war fully, committing every ounce of force at one’s disposal, however, is different from waging war unethically. Entering the boxing ring with one hand tied behind your back is entirely different from agreeing not to hit below the belt. Is the veterinarian who however reluctantly kills the mad dog with sodium pentathol any less effective than the enraged man who kills it with a rifle or poisoned bait?

I can think of no finer examples of strength of character and fair play in war than those described by Hans von Luck, one of the most highly decorated of Erwin Rommel’s young panzer
commanders.
⁸⁸
Luck joined the German Army in 1929 at the age of eighteen and became one of Rommel’s favorite line officers. He saw action on the Eastern Front and in North Africa, France, and Germany. He was captured by the Russians in the final days of fighting before Berlin and spent five years in a Russian labor camp, returning eventually to Germany to become a coffee importer.

In North Africa Luck led an armored reconnaissance battalion. Armored reconnaissance units were constantly at the extremes of the main battle areas, screening, probing. Thus he was very often in contact with his British counterparts, the Royal Dragoons and the Eleventh Hussars. In a treeless desert, with no landmarks and no satellite fixes, it was impossible for units to find their way back to base in the dark. To light a signal would betray their position to artillery fire. So for both sides all activity ceased at evening.

One night Luck received a call from the Royal Dragoons.

“Hallo, Royal Dragoons here. I know it’s unusual to make radio contact with you, but Lieutenant Smith and his scouting party have been missing since this evening. Is he with you, and if so, how are things with him and his men?”

“Yes, he is with us. All of them are unhurt and send greetings to their families and friends.” Then came the brainstorm: “Can we call you, or the Eleventh Hussars, if we have anyone missing?” I asked.

“Sure,” he replied. “Your calls are always welcome.”

It was only a matter of days before we arrived at a gentleman’s agreement: At 5 p.m. precisely, all hostilities
would be suspended. We called it “tea time.” At 5:05 p.m. we would make open contact with the British to exchange “news” about prisoners, etc. From a distance of about fifteen kilometers, we could often see the British get out their Primus stoves to make their tea.

One night Luck’s doctor went outside the perimeter to relieve himself and never came back. He was indispensable to Luck and it was a major blow. Finally Luck called the British. Yes, they had him. Then the British made a suggestion. They were suffering badly from malaria. Their quinine from the Far East had been cut off. Could they exchange the doctor for some of the German synthetic Atabrine?

The moral issue was whether to continue to weaken the British by refusing them Atabrine or to get his doctor back. As Luck put it, “I quickly made up my mind.” He exchanged the Atabrine for the doctor.

Once a Royal Air Force reconnaissance plane on a long-range patrol discovered Luck’s small column. There was no place to hide on that merciless flat plain. Within an hour the fighters, Hurricanes and Spitfires, came roaring over the horizon. They concentrated all their fire on his antiaircraft platoon, eliminating it. They were back within an hour and eliminated his artillery platoon. Now he was completely defenseless, so he scattered his men away from the tanks and reconnaissance vehicles and watched helplessly as the planes roared in for the third time to shoot up all the tanks.

The only one to remain in his vehicle was my radio operator, who was sending off my messages. Next to the vehicle stood my intelligence officer, who passed on to the operator what I shouted across to him. Then a machine—I thought I
recognized the Canadian emblem—approached for a low-flying attack on the armored radio station. At twenty yards, I could clearly see the pilot’s face under his helmet. But instead of shooting, he signaled with his hand for the radio officer to clear off, and pulled his machine up into a great curve.

“Get the operator out of the vehicle,” I shouted to the intelligence officer, “and take cover, the pair of you!”

The machine had turned and now came at us out of the sun for the second time. This time he fired his rockets and hit the radio car...

This attitude of the pilot, whether he was Canadian or British, became for me
the
example of fairness in this merciless war. I shall never forget the pilot’s face or the gesture of his hand.

Small incidents like this were numerous. When the end finally came, Luck, who thought he was in a place where no one could find him, received the following letter, handed to him by a bedouin.

From C.O.
Royal Dragoons
Dear Major von Luck,

We have had other tasks and so were unable to keep in touch with you. The war in Africa has been decided, I’m glad to say, not in your favor.

I should like, therefore, to thank you and all your people, in the name of my officers and men, for the fair play with which we have fought against each other on both sides.

I and my Battalion hope that all of you will come out of the war safe and sound and that we may find the opportunity to meet again sometime, in more favorable circumstances.

With greatest respect.

I’m not trying to say that throughout the Second World War the Germans and the British didn’t do horrible things to each other. They did. But there were these incidents when they did not. As Luck puts it, “The prevailing atmosphere was one of respect: We ‘understood’ each other.” The word
respect
is notable. For some reason, these particular men did not pseudospeciate each other. They remembered their common humanity and controlled the beast that lies within us all. Remembering our common humanity and controlling the beast that wants to obliterate that memory is the task for all conscious warriors of the future.

Basic training is oriented toward eliminating the enemy’s humanity. I am well aware that this presents us with a very difficult question. Will our young people carry out our war policies if they can’t overcome the fact that they are killing a person just like themselves? Will increased consciousness decrease effectiveness?

I think not.

If a young warrior falls into killing from a rage or killing while thinking of the enemy as less than human, then, with some prior warning, some prior understanding, there is the chance for quick recognition of what is happening when the killing stops. It’s like catching cancer early. There’s a better chance for a cure if it isn’t allowed to grow unnoticed. I do not doubt that warriors will invariably switch into and out of consciousness and on occasion kill from rage. Warriors will almost always kill with the
conviction, at the time of killing, that the enemy is not human. Our goal should be to strive not to do so and, when we do, to get back to consciousness as soon as we are out of immediate danger. Training for such a goal will not be likely to perfect us, but it will move us forward.

I shall probably never be as thrilled as I was that one moment I left a safe position to join my old platoon in the assault where I ended up trying to pull Utter from underneath the machine gun. I ran toward the fighting with the same excitement, trembling, and thrill as a lover rushing to the beloved in the spiritual love poetry of the mystics. Perhaps these are identical transcendent psychological states. But I don’t ever want to do it again. It is also a dangerous inflated state of being.

The transcendent state is a major reason warfare is an intractable human problem and so difficult to put a stop to. It offers us raw life: vibrant, terrifying, and full blast. We are lifted into something larger than ourselves. If it were all bad, there would be much less of it, but war simply isn’t all bad. Why do kids play war games? Why do adults enter professions such as ambulance driver, search and rescue, firefighter? Because these activities lift you from your limited world.

To teach the children who will become the warriors of the future about the dangers of this kind of power, each of us must know it and be able to draw on this energy when appropriate.