What it is Like to Go to War (3 page)

I remember the drill instructor standing in front of me on his fourth trip back, eyeball to eyeball, looking right inside me. This time he didn’t ask me if I wanted to quit. After a while there was an almost imperceptible change in his eyes. His head nodded just a fraction. Then he ordered me back into my clothes, shouting at me for being so stupid as to stand naked in a swamp filled with mosquitoes.

From that moment on I knew that this frightening black man had accepted me into his group, which he often referred to as “my Marine Corps.” From that moment on I started thinking of myself differently. I felt proud. I was a Marine. I still feel proud to be a Marine. But there was one very critical issue that was missing from this particular passage of mine—the spiritual. I did connect with something larger than myself, the Marine Corps, but that is a long way from connecting with something larger than myself such as humanity or God.
¹
My loyalty was to the U.S. Marines, and to Marine ancestors, not the ancestors of my people, who in the modern world are all people.

The uninitiated often think that Marine boot camp is stupid or even sadistic. Clearly, getting bitten on the testicles by mosquitoes wasn’t training me to shoot straighter or attack smarter. But before society sends high school kids to do our killing in battle, those kids have to transform the way they think of themselves, or they are not going to be very effective killers. Worse, they will be more likely to endanger others. Lacking discipline on an ambush or losing concentration on a listening post by slapping a mosquito,
or even scratching a mosquito bite, can get you and everyone else killed. At the very least, lack of discipline under extremity will make the whole organization less effective at killing. And killing is what we are asking these kids to do. This isn’t done without a major psychological transformation, unless we’re already dealing with a criminal mind, and it has to be done quickly. Our society invented boot camp to do this. Boot camp doesn’t turn young men into killers. It removes the societal restraints on the savage part of us that has made us the top animal in the food chain.

Part of my own spiritual initiation was that awareness of death on Axel’s fishing boat, but spiritual initiation got a major booster shot the last weekend before graduation from boot camp. This was the first time we were allowed liberty; we got twelve hours to go off base. Most of us were headed for Washington, D.C., the nearest big city.

Come Saturday morning we weren’t just feeling cocky; we felt invincible. We were fifteen pounds heavier and lean as snakes. We were Marines. My particular invincible band left Quantico for Washington on the noon bus: four of us, including Perkins. Perkins was a wiry kid, cocksure and quick and with a short fuse. We’d been in town a couple of hours, bathing ourselves in the air-conditioning in Benny’s Rebel Room and drinking cold beer, the result of very poetic interpretations of the birth dates on our driver’s licenses, when Perkins said, “Let’s go over to the Cap ’n’ Guys.” I looked at my two other friends. They looked at their beers. The Cap ’n’ Guys was reputed to be the toughest bar in D.C. No one, however, wanted to tell Perkins no. So we all went out into the blinding afternoon and walked the several blocks to the Cap ’n’ Guys.

Three very sour-looking guys wheeled on their bar stools when we pushed in through the glass door, rattling the dirty venetian blinds. Two other guys were talking at a back table. They were all in their late twenties or early thirties, a little overweight, old men to our nineteen-year-old minds, some even starting to show beer bellies. Shit. This didn’t look like such a tough bar.

We ordered four pitchers of beer and took them with us to a back booth where the condensation puddled on the Formica tabletop, making our glasses stick just slightly every time we lifted them to drink.

We had about half-emptied the pitchers when Perkins walked down to the jukebox and punched up a dollar’s worth of music. He was walking back to our booth when one of the sour-looking trio at the bar turned on his stool and said, “I don’t like nigger music.”

Perkins, white and southern, said quietly, “It ain’t nigger music. I’m playing it.” He slid into the booth next to me. I started to hear the dim sound of warning bells through the fine alcoholic haze.

“I said I don’t like nigger music, jarhead.” The man’s two friends were now turned our way, as well as the two guys at the back table. Jarhead was what you called Marines if you didn’t want to be friendly.

The warning bells were now going full blast. I cut in and said, “It’s only a dollar’s worth. Sorry.”

Perkins gave me a “What the hell are you doing?” look. I poured him some beer. The three guys turned back to their drinking, apparently mollified.

We tried to resume talking, but this unanswered threat in the air inhibited us. Finally, I said in a low voice, “Let’s go back to the Rebel Room.”

“They’re a bunch of fat turds,” Perkins hissed. “You going to let them run us out of here?”

“They’re not running us out. We’re just leaving.”

I gulped the rest of my beer and set the glass down firmly. Three of us got up, but I had to climb over Perkins, who scowled at the Formica. We were squinting in the bright light again when he pushed out through the door onto the street. There, Perkins talked about pride. He persuaded my two friends to go back inside with him. I headed for Benny’s Rebel Room alone, feeling bad about my lack of pride.

I hadn’t even sat down with my onion rings when one of the guys who had stayed with Perkins came running into Benny’s saying Perkins had been beaten up. Perkins had gone back inside and punched up another dollar’s worth of “nigger music.” He had then ordered two more pitchers of beer and, when he walked over to the bar to wait for them, had apparently deliberately chosen to be sloppy with his elbow. The one who didn’t like nigger music said some more unkind things about Marines. Perkins said something back, not very original, and picked up the two pitchers from the bar. The man started pushing Perkins lightly with his fingers on his chest, backing him across the floor, slopping bits of beer from the pitchers onto Perkins’s freshly ironed civilian shirt.

It was Death Before Dishonor time for Perkins. Pure ego. He threw the beer in the guy’s face. Lack of recognition of his own mortality.

Fighting on television lasts long enough to entertain people. Fighting in bars doesn’t have the same purpose. Perkins was on the floor in about two seconds, writhing in agony from kicks to his kidneys, blood streaming from his face where the guy had stomped him. The other two guys had trapped my two friends in the booth. One of them had a switchblade out.

The Marines surrendered.

We got Perkins into a cab, and as I sat in the back with his bloody head on my lap on the way to Quantico I had a feeling of anxiety and foreboding. Even Marines can get hurt, even if we’re in better shape than our opponents. Suddenly the war we were training for got real. I kept watching the trees go by outside the cab window and the grass on the median strip. Grief welled up in me. I knew I had strong odds of never seeing trees and grass again, just ordinary grass on a freeway median strip—so extraordinarily beautiful. Even today, when I walk on grass I feel as if I’m walking on someone’s skin.

We were just able to get Perkins cleaned up enough to stand formation that evening. The drill instructor looked into his pulpy face long and hard. “You lost, didn’t you, maggot.”

“Yes, sir!” roared Perkins.

That night, while other platoons had the evening free in their squad bays to get ready for Sunday’s graduation, clean gear, write letters, our whole platoon was out running and doing push-ups, punishment for losing. We ended up on the obstacle course sometime near midnight doing push-ups in the dark until, one by one, we dropped from exhaustion. I remember lying in the dust, gasping for air, when the brilliantly polished boot of the drill instructor toed me over. “Get on your feet and tell me what happened.”

I told him.

“Jesus Christ, the Cap ’n’ Guys. Perkins I can understand, but I thought you had more brains. And you let him go in there? Shee-it, Marlantes.” He assigned me fire watch that night (no sleep) for being stupid and for not keeping Perkins out of trouble.

At the level of turning boys into shock troops for American society, the drill instructor had to teach the lesson that no matter how tough things got, there was more in you. You never quit.
He also had to teach that if one is hurt, all are hurt; so Perkins ran with us the whole time. We had to help him, but he made it through, and we all felt that Marine pride again. I learned about thinking
before
I got into a fight. I also learned that smart people, no matter how fit, don’t go looking for fights with seasoned bar fighters.

The drill instructor did his job well. We soon forgot all about the Cap ’n’ Guys and were once more invincible shock troops knowing that there were no defeats, just temporary setbacks, and no pain too great to keep you from winning. These are critical lessons that any reasonable society would want to inculcate in its shock troops and also a large part of the reason society uses eighteen- to twenty-two-year-olds to do its fighting. This age group combined with these societal initiation rites produces good fighters. Months later, in Vietnam, I was in situations where any reasonable person would have quit, but I had become a Marine and Marines aren’t reasonable people. Quitting is unthinkable and pain is just weakness leaving the body.

These, however, are societal, not spiritual, lessons; a drill instructor’s job isn’t spiritual guidance. What had hit me in the cab going back to Quantico was beyond the initiatory rites for which a drill instructor is responsible. So when the shit hit the fan I wasn’t spiritually prepared. When I did eventually face death—the death of those I killed and those killed around me—I had no framework or guidance to help me put combat’s terror, exhilaration, horror, guilt, and pain into some larger framework that would have helped me find some meaning in them later. Maybe if the right person had shown up for me that Christmas in Vietnam, he might have started me on an inner journey that could have saved me and my family a lot of grief. It would have been a relief to me to talk about my terror. That particular visitation by the chaplain was like somebody
visiting a dying friend and talking about the weather. We don’t talk about death in our society. Even the chaplains. Even when it’s all around us.

War, however, blows away the illusion of safety from death. Some random projectile can kill you no matter how good a soldier you are. Escaping death and injury in modern warfare is much more a matter of luck—or grace—than skill, and this is a significant difference from primitive warfare. In a combat situation you wake up from sleep instantly aware that this could be the last time you awake, simultaneously grateful you’re alive and scared shitless because you are still in the same situation. Most combat veterans keep this awareness—that death is just around the corner. We know that when we drive the freeway to work we could be dead within the next hour. It’s just that the odds have changed greatly in our favor from when we were in combat. It’s the difference in the odds of getting killed that makes combat a noticeable experience of one’s mortality and going to work on the freeway an unnoticed one.

Noticing
is another word for awareness or consciousness. Understanding that combat will be a dark and terrible initiation
before
one goes into combat will help provide some structure and meaning to this soul-battering experience. A large part of treating PTSD is simply getting the veteran to remember and talk about what happened to him. The more psychic structure or framing that is brought to the experience of combat, the easier it will be to cope with the experience afterward. It can help provide a bit of meaning in an often meaningless situation. As it is, young warriors’ minds and souls are going to be battered and overwhelmed. Killing someone
will
affect you. Part of you
will
think you’ve done something wrong. It’s drilled in from babyhood. If, however, you’re prepared ahead of time for it, you’ll suffer less because this
knowledge and structure will add a thin layer of armor. Why put on the armor after the war? This is what I did.

I remember, even five years after I got home, laughing with combat veteran friends about all this bullshit about bad dreams and weird behavior as a result of combat. I was just fine. This is because I’d shoved the whole experience deep into my unconscious. Funny how I just did high-adrenaline jobs for years, constantly on the move. My oldest daughter has pointed out to me, more than once, that in one eight-year period she attended twelve different schools.

It is bad enough that we send our youth off to fight our wars ill prepared for the spiritual and psychological consequences of entering combat. Add to this the fact that combat is becoming increasingly intermingled with the ordinary civilian world. With cell phones, Facebook, Twitter, air travel, and remote-control weaponry, the battlefield is less clearly defined and the bloody consequences of what modern weapons do can be completely masked. Consider the bomber crews that fly from the United States and back to bomb Iraq or Libya, telling their spouses and kids they’ll be gone a little longer than usual that day; or the young woman pushing a button to launch a cruise missile from a naval vessel on a serene sea hundreds of miles from the “target,” known to his mother as Alim; or the pilots doing nine-to-five jobs at computer consoles in Nevada killing people in Iraq and Afghanistan with drones and commuting to and from their homes like any other commuters. Imagine the psychic split that must ensue from bringing in death and destruction from the sky on a group of terrorists—young men who have mothers and a misplaced idealism that has led them into horrible criminal acts, but nevertheless young and brave
men—and then driving home from the base to dinner with the spouse and kids. “Have a nice day at the office, hon?”

Death becomes an abstraction, except for those at the receiving end. We must come to grips with
consciously
trying to set straight this imbalance of modern warfare. What is at stake is not only the psyche of each young fighter but our humanity.