What it is Like to Go to War (7 page)

My lessons in eternity weren’t over yet. That night, all was completely hidden in a creeping fog that you could feel but not see. We had our own ambush teams out on all the approaches, waiting in the cold darkness. I’d just relieved Doc Southern, one of our two platoon corpsmen, for radio watch. He hung around, obviously unable to sleep in that spooky atmosphere, wanting to talk, which suited me just fine. Our other corpsman, Brailier, was asleep in the captured bunker next to us. Brailier was a quiet kid, very near the end of his tour. Even though he was only twenty, I always sensed something very deep in him, deep and troubling perhaps. In the course of our quiet conversation that night I asked Southern about Brailier. Was he always this way?

Doc Southern looked out the opening of the bunker and started to talk, very quietly, his soft voice mixing with the fog that hung just outside the black hole.

“I was just new to the platoon,” he said, staring into the past. “We was out northwest of Con Thien. We’d been in the shit off
and on for a couple of days. There was this point-to-point firefight. No one got hurt but this one gook. He was a mess. M-79 shotgun round right in the stomach. You could hardly tell what pieces were what. The spine was pretty much gone, so he’d been a basket case for sure if he did live. But the problem was he was still alive. And we didn’t know if he’d be dead in twenty minutes, or two weeks, or two years.

“The louie
¹³
kept asking Brailier, ‘Is he going to die? Is he going to die?’ We was all anxious to get the fuck out of there. Shit was still happening and, like I said, we was in the middle of fucking nowhere and the company had to move on. It meant we’d have to leave a squad back to protect the LZ if we was going to medevac the gook. And believe me, no one wanted to be that squad, not no one, not then.”

I could well understand the lieutenant’s need to know if the NVA soldier was going to die anyway. If he was alive, then ethics said medevac him, but that risked losing the chopper crew and the squad protecting the zone, and for what? Death in a day or two anyway? A life as a basket case? It’s very hard to say when one becomes morally and legally responsible for a prisoner’s life, given that such decisions often involve risking the lives of your own people. Leaving him there to die, however, could mean days of agony for the wounded man, and that was really not much different from murder. But to murder a prisoner outright was certainly wrong and could send the lieutenant to jail for a long time.

Doc Southern was going on, still looking into the blackness. “I remember looking up at Brailier and the louie. I was holding in pieces of this gook’s pancreas and stomach, trying to get him ready for the chopper if that’s what they decided to do,
and trying to ease the pain. He was in a real bad way. You get to know when it really hurts, and this guy hurt, sir.

“There was this moment. You know. This moment. Then Brailier said, ‘He’s going to die.’

“That’s all the louie needed and he started rounding up the squads and moving them out and I packed up my gear and started off after them.” He stopped talking for a moment.

“Only Brailier went off by himself for a few minutes. I don’t know if he was praying or taking a piss, but he came back and shot the man right through the head.”

We didn’t say anything for a long time. I never asked Brailier about it.

So ask the now twenty-year-old combat veteran at the gas station how he felt about killing someone. His probable angry answer, if he’s honest: “Not a fucking thing.” Ask him when he’s sixty, and if he’s not too drunk to answer, it might come out very differently, but only by luck of circumstance—who was there to help him with the feelings during those four long decades after he came home from war. It is critical for young people who return from combat that someone
is
there to help them, before they turn to drugs, alcohol, and suicide. We cannot expect normal eighteen-year-olds to kill someone and contain it in a healthy way. They must be helped to sort out what will be healthy grief about taking a life because it is part of the sorrow of war. The drugs, alcohol, and suicides are ways of avoiding guilt and fear of grief. Grief itself is a healthy response.

War is the antithesis of the most fundamental rule of moral conduct we’ve been taught—do unto others as you would have others do unto you. When called upon to fight, we violate many codes of civilized behavior. To survive psychically in the proximity of Mars, one has to come to terms with stepping outside conventional moral conduct. This requires coming to terms with guilt over killing and maiming other people
.

T. E. Lawrence wrote in
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
:
¹⁴

Some of the evil of my tale may have been inherent in our circumstances. For years we lived anyhow with one another in the naked desert, under the indifferent heaven. By day the hot sun fermented us; and we were dizzied by the beating wind... The everlasting battle stripped from us care of our own lives or of others’. We had ropes about our necks, and on our heads prices which showed that the enemy intended hideous tortures for us if we were caught. Each day some of us passed; and the living knew themselves just sentient puppets on God’s stage... The weak envied those tired enough to die... Gusts of cruelty, perversions, lusts ran lightly over the surface without troubling us; for the moral
laws which had seemed to hedge about these silly accidents must be yet fainter words. We had learned that there were pangs too sharp, griefs too deep, ecstasies too high for our finite selves to register. When emotion reached this pitch the mind choked; and memory went white till the circumstances were humdrum once more.

What now looks wanton or sadic seemed in the field inevitable, or just unimportant routine.

When I was in Vietnam killing people, I never felt evil or guilty of sin—and I was raised a Lutheran, so I definitely would have known a guilty feeling when I had one. However, when I returned to the States I got the message.
Somebody
had done something quite bad in Vietnam and it must have been us, since we were the only ones there.

One day my wife talked me into attending a fairly typical 1970s encounter group therapy weekend. This was mostly because I wouldn’t talk about
anything
emotionally laden, not just the war. At the retreat I was asked to role-play talking to the mother and sister of the NVA soldier I’d killed when he threw the hand grenade at me. You’ll recall our eyes had locked. I recognized he was human. I was conscious, right then, that he was young and terrified—like me. Then he tried to kill me and I killed him. I know today that I did far worse things, burning men with napalm, shelling men with “Willy Pete,” shells that spewed burning white phosphorous that was impossible to put out and that burned deep holes right through men’s bodies. But this one was the tough one because most of my other kills were made when I was in the frame of mind that I was killing someone from another species. It was more like killing animals, bad enough, but not horribly guilt provoking. They were the enemy. This time I killed a human.

I was asked by the leader of the therapy group to apologize to this imagined mother and daughter for killing their son and brother. Part of me was angry that I was asked to do this in front of a group of near strangers. Of course, I could have declined, but I didn’t; once a Marine always a Marine. Within a minute of starting the apology I broke down wailing like a frightened child. Out came a torrent of terrible memories and remorse. This was the first time I felt any emotion about having killed. It was about ten years after the action. I sobbed and ran snot for hours that day, walking and running alone in the woods, my childhood place of solace. My ribs ached. The crying started again the next day, and would start again days and even weeks afterward and go on for hours at a time. Even at work the faces of dead friends and mutilated bodies on both sides would come unbidden to mind. I’d have to make excuses to go outside where no one could see me shaking, throat aching to hold back the sobs, walking down a city street or hiding in some corner of a parking garage. It went on like this for months, until I quit my job. I got into something new and everything went away, until next time. This pattern went on for nearly three decades.

The group was well intentioned but woefully ignorant, as was I, of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. I never joined another therapy group again. Although the exercise got me “in touch with my feelings,” it was a damaging experience because no one was there to help me figure out how to handle those feelings in a healthy manner. It not only triggered extreme PTSD emotional symptoms, such as constant unstoppable crying, but also crystallized one of my enduring problems with the war, guilt. Did I really need to apologize?

About five years and two jobs later, still groping, I was fortunate enough to have dinner with the lecturer and mythologist
Joseph Campbell. I’d seen him in the bar of the hotel where we were both staying and, overcoming my fears of rebuff, I asked if I could buy him a whiskey. Although he was certainly well known to people interested in the study of mythology, this was long before he became a popular figure, so my offer perhaps wasn’t the intrusion it might have been later. He said how could any good Irishman refuse a whiskey.

What followed was dinner, more whiskey, and lots of wonderful talk. We got into the Vietnam War. I talked about my feelings of guilt.

He said, “Look, you just found yourself on one side of the world of opposites. You think the other guy’s side was all right and yours all wrong?”

I had to admit both sides were no angels.

“Don’t you see the other guy’s fate put him on the opposite side from you?”

I nodded.

“So there you are. Now, what you had to do was fill out your side of the bargain with a noble heart. It’s your intentions and your nobility in how you conduct yourself in this world of opposites that you’ve got to think about. Did you
intend
right?”

My eyes teared. I could only nod my head in assent.

“Then, phew.” He dismissed my problem with a wave of his hand. Absolution.

Reconciling the moral conduct we are taught as children with the brutal actions of war has been a problem for warriors of good conscience for centuries. The
Mahabharata
, the classic Indian epic, which was written down and first preserved around AD 400 but has its roots centuries earlier in the mythologies of the Indo-Aryan invaders and the people they conquered, speaks directly to this dilemma. Much of it takes the form of a beautifully written poetic dialogue called the Bhagavad Gita between
Arjuna, a human warrior, and Krishna, a god who has taken the human form of Arjuna’s charioteer.
¹⁵
Arjuna, the warrior hero of the myth, is drawn up in his chariot before the enemy hosts. The battle is impending. On the enemy side he sees his own relatives and many friends. No one wants to fight kith and kin, and any conscious warrior of the future is going to be a person who sees all humanity as brothers and sisters.

Arjuna cast his eyes on the grand spectacle. He saw the heroes ready for battle, and he saw there all those who were dear to him. They were grandfathers, teachers, uncles, brothers, sons, dear friends, comrades. He was overcome with compassion for all of them. His voice shook with grief and he said: “Krishna, I feel an awful weakness stealing over me... Krishna, my head is reeling and I feel faint. My limbs refuse to bear me up... I look at all these who are my kinsmen and I feel that I cannot fight with them... I do not want to win this war... For the passing pleasure of ruling this world why should I kill the sons of Dhritarashtra? They have been greedy, evil, avaricious, covetous. I grant all that. But the fact remains that they are my cousins and it is a sin to kill one’s own kinsmen. I would rather turn away from the war. It will even be better if I am killed by Duryodhana. I do not want to fight.” Arjuna collapsed on the seat of his chariot. He had thrown away his bow and arrows and was overcome by grief.

At first Krishna tries to buck up Arjuna by appealing to his reason, explaining how critical the situation is. This fails. Then he appeals to pride, chiding Arjuna for letting his feelings get the better of him. This fails too. Finally, Krishna taunts Arjuna about his manhood. This is, traditionally, where most men rose to the challenge, at least prior to Vietnam and the women’s movement. Arjuna is not swayed.

“How can I aim my arrows at Bhishma and Drona?” Arjuna asks Krishna. “I cannot do it. Krishna, you know that I am not a coward. This is not weakness. It is compassion for the enemy.” Arjuna sat silent, refusing to fight.

Even two thousand years ago it was understood that appeals to manhood and social duties were not sufficient to kill our brothers on the other side. Krishna presses forward, this time appealing to religion, usually a surefire persuader. “Believe me,” Krishna says, “the eternal soul is imperishable. No one can comprehend it... You do not kill and your victim is not killed... Weapons cannot hurt the soul; fire cannot burn it; water cannot wet it. It is eternal and it is the same forever. Once you realize this truth there is no need for you to grieve.”

Religion of course is still exploited to get men to kill their brothers. But saying it’s okay to kill my own brother because, just maybe, the universe is a vast recycling plant had about the same effect on Arjuna that it would on any of us today—none.

Realizing that this whole line of argument will go nowhere with Arjuna, Krishna finally gets down to what I consider to be the only argument and what is, indeed, the point of the whole story. He appeals to the fact that we humans are caught in existence and we must make choices. That is, when we are confronted by the very real existence of forces for good or for evil, we must choose sides. Krishna states in the
Mahabharata
, “It is not right to stand by
and watch an injustice being done. There are times when active interference is necessary.”
¹⁶