What it is Like to Go to War (9 page)

The least acknowledged aspect of war, today, is how exhilarating it is. This aspect makes people very uncomfortable. Not only
is it politically incorrect; it goes against the morality taught in our schools and churches. The hard truth is that ever since I can remember I have loved thinking about war—and I wasn’t the only one. I played it in the woods with my friends. I read about it, and people wrote what I read. I saw it in movies, and people filmed what I saw. As a college student I played strategy board games—and people designed and sold those games. In Vietnam there were times when I swelled with pride at the immense destruction I could deal out. There is a deep savage joy in destruction, a joy beyond ego enhancement. Maybe it is loss of ego. I’m told it’s the same for religious ecstasy. It’s the child toppling the tower of blocks he’s spent so much time carefully constructing. It’s the lighting of the huge bonfire, the demolition of a building, the shattering of a clay pigeon. It’s firecrackers and destruction derbies on the Fourth of July. Part of us loves to destroy. Nietzsche says, “I am by nature warlike. To attack is among my instincts.”
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Richard Ellmann, the great biographer of Yeats, has the right answer. He says this feeling is just the other face of creativity, in Jungian terms, the shadow side of creativity. “The urge to destruction, like the urge to creation, is a defiance of limits; we transcend ourselves by refusing to accept completely anything that is human, and then indomitably we begin fabricating again.”
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What’s scary is that it is far easier to take the path of transcendence through destruction than to take the path of transcendence through creation. And the destructive path gets easier as technology improves, while positive creating, whether spiritual, artistic, or commercial, is just as hard as it ever was. Corporations that took decades to build can be “raided” and
“unbundled” in weeks. Books that take years of toil and sacrifice to bring to fruition can be burned in minutes.

The easier the path of destruction gets, the more likely we’ll be to take it. This is another reason why warriors, above all, must fundamentally be spiritual people, that is, people who are on a different path to start with. Kierkegaard says, “It is not good works that make a good person but the good person who does good works.”
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It’s probably why Bushido
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required the samurai to practice daily a meditative art form, such as the tea ceremony or writing haiku. It is through meditative practices that you observe your own mind. You can’t be a good person until you observe how bad you are. It is only when the evil is conscious that it can be countered. Torturers during the Inquisition thought they were doing good.

The poet Yeats wrote, “All things fall and are built again, and those that build them again are gay.”
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He failed to say that those who destroy them have a real good time too.

Transcendence through violence. I’ve experienced it. For some reason the incident I remember most seems hardly worth repeating. Perhaps because of its very banality, I remember my feelings of a godlike transcendence more vividly in this instance than in other, more spectacular circumstances.

I was temporarily commanding the company and had to reach a platoon of mine that was holding a key bridge on Route 9 in territory we didn’t control. It was about 12 kilometers from our company position. The platoon holding the bridge had been hit the night before and I had to get out there for purposes of
leadership and to assess for myself the morale of the platoon and its commander and whether they had what they needed to take another attack. I couldn’t get a chopper, and convoys weren’t running because of the attacks, so I decided to take a jeep and fill it with ammunition. In addition to the driver, to help me make it through I took one of the platoon sergeants and one other volunteer.

The driver, the son of a Marine colonel, had gone immediately after high school to Japan to study martial arts in a Zen monastery. After several years he joined the Marine Corps as an enlisted man. He was fiercely Zen, into not only the technical aspects of the martial arts but the spiritual as well. He would take notes of mistakes he made during the day, and then review them at night so as not to make the same mistakes in the future—things like assuming a strange rock on the path was safe without knowing for sure it wasn’t a booby trap. The platoon sergeant was a professional, one of those men who make the Marines so good at what they do, a hard background, a hard player on leave, and a hard fighter. He showed up with an M-60 machine gun that we rigged in the jeep, his own M-14 (he didn’t like M-16s in open terrain),
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several dozen LAAWs,
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and all the ammunition we could load on for the fight that night. The other Marine, a nineteen-year-old squad leader who’d been in-country for nearly ten months, and I
were competent and experienced. I was particularly good by this time in calling in artillery fire and I made sure I was in contact with all the artillery within range: a Marine 105mm howitzer battery just north of Camp Carroll and two Army batteries, one firing 155s and the other firing the even larger long-range 175s out of LZ Stud.

We set off from the safety of our fortified position, weapons ready, eyes searching our assigned sectors of observation. As we sped down the dusty road into danger I had a most incredible feeling of power. It was like being in a chariot of the gods. We were armed and we were
good
. I actually wanted someone to try to stop us, just to see how bad we’d mess him up.

Luckily we reached the bridge without incident.

I’m asking the reader who has never experienced this feeling to try very hard to understand it and then balance it against the war feelings more legitimized by moral society, such as horror. I am well aware of the price of the feelings I’m talking about—dead friends, dead enemies, waste, pain, sorrow beyond imagining, sorrow even after forty years—and I see no end. In fact to remind myself of the sorrow and balance myself against this feeling of transcendent power I keep on my filing cabinet a picture of a fourteen-year-old girl from Mozambique, a stunted skeleton with drum-tight skin, hair gray, eyes swollen nearly shut, the starved result of war.

Yet it is exceedingly difficult to keep this image in my mind, even with all the moral weight of society behind it. The realm I enter now, the transcendent realm one reaches through violence, is one that society says it condemns but in fact celebrates everywhere, on film, on television, and in the news. It is because of this split that these feelings are so very dangerous. This split is like the wicked fairy who isn’t invited to the wedding but who will get
her due. It is the darkness that haunts the lynch mob that in the daytime is dispersed as lawyers, doctors, and church aldermen. But that darkness hovers ghostlike in the soft trees and shadowed alleys between the buildings. And at night it is all crazed power and torture, a thrill deeper than any ever imagined in the sleepy daytime.

The next time you’re with a group of around forty people, perhaps at a meeting, maybe on a city bus, imagine them all with the lean hard bodies of eighteen- to twenty-year-old men. Arm them all with automatic rifles, rockets, and grenades. Add three machine guns and a supply of bullets backed by the industrial might of America. Understand that these armed young men will do, without question, absolutely anything you ask. Now add the power to call in jet aircraft that shake the earth with engine noise alone and can spew jellied fire over entire football fields, make craters big enough to block freeways, and fire lead so thick and fast that it would pulp the body of a cow in an eyeblink. Add to this artillery with shells as thick as your waist and naval gunfire with shells the weight of Volkswagens. And you’re twenty-one or twenty-two and immortal. And no one will ever ask a single question.

This is just a platoon commander, the lowest-ranking officer in an infantry unit, which itself has the lowest level of sophistication in weaponry. In today’s combat environment this lowly lieutenant can call in bombs from B-52s flying so high they are unseen and Tomahawk missiles fired from some 500 miles at sea, all with the accuracy of a rifle at 200 yards.

Try to get into this frame of mind. Try, because the world needs you to. If you say you can’t, I will counter by saying you’re tragically cut off from a very deep part of yourself—tragic for all of us, not just you. I loved this power. I love it still. And it scares the hell out of me.

For those who don’t know it, but at least suspect they might love it, I have hope. Those who won’t know it, those I fear. They are the ones who will kill a commie for Christ, even an eight-year-old. They are the ones who will spit on a veteran, even a medic. They are the ones who will send letter bombs to bankers, even the fathers of small children. They are the ones who will kill their sons’ spirits and drive this immense energy so deep in their sons that when it returns, as it must, it will be in such a great rage that the gates of reason will be shattered like a boot going through a pane of glass.

When I returned from the war I would wake up at night trying to understand how I, this person who did want to be a good and decent person, and who really tried, could at the same time love an activity that hurt people so much. The easy path was to just say I hated it over there and be done with it, which is a posture I often took with no intellectual or social qualms. But the honest answer was that I hated only parts of it. Knowing I loved it
and
hated it, I concluded I was mildly psychotic, just another little something to hide from everyone, sort of like shell shock.

A wonderful teacher, John Mackie, my philosophy tutor at Oxford, evaporated the problem for me by asking me one day why I assumed there was only one person inside me. I remember bicycling up the Woodstock Road breaking into laughter every so often with the sheer relief of it all. Thinking you might be crazy can drive you crazy.

About a week after this tutorial with Mackie, Vicki, one of my housemates, lent me a book about Carl Jung, which I stayed up the whole night to read. We are legion, says the Bible. We have a shadow, says Jung. There’s a part of me that just loves maiming, killing, and torturing. This part of me isn’t
all
of me. I have other elements that indeed are just the opposite, of which I am proud.
So am I a killer? No, but part of me is. Am I a torturer? No, but part of me is. Do I feel horror and sadness when I read in the newspapers of an abused child? Yes. But am I fascinated? I read the whole article, every gruesome detail.

I’ve seen myself mildly bullying my own children just for the hell of it. My own children! We call it teasing, all good fun. Except to the child. After all,
I’m
not crazy.
I
wouldn’t want to bully my kids. But that crazy part of me just loved purposefully baffling them sometimes or loved to keep them just a little bit longer in a wrestling hold when they wanted to stop.

Once we recognize our shadow’s existence we must resist the enticing step of going with its flow. This is the way of Charles Manson and terrorist cells. This is also the way of filmmakers who suddenly get into its dark power and splatter it all over the screen in slow motion. This is the wrong way to relate to it. In the Grail legend, Parzival meets his dark and powerful half brother Feirefiz in battle and is unable to beat him. When they take off their helmets they decide to join forces rather than keep fighting. Parzival had many years earlier been kicked out of the Grail castle because he didn’t ask the terribly wounded fisher king the question of compassion, “What ails you Uncle?” Now, after years of trial trying to find his way back, he takes Feirefiz with him to return to the castle and the healing of the kingdom. He doesn’t join with Feirefiz, misusing their combined power to go off killing every knight within sight, to win glory and riches. But oh could they.

I was attending an event where we were encouraged to recite poetry that was meaningful to us. I was all full of this tenth-century Viking warrior poet Egil Skallagrimsson, who wrote about something with which I could identify. I waited eagerly to recite the poem. Late one evening I jumped up and let it go.

My mother told me men
must and would buy me a good
fast ship and finest oars
to fight with Viking men;
to stand tall in the prow,
to steer the vessel well,
to hold for harbour and
hack down man after man.
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Robert Bly was there. When I finished he looked down at the floor. Then he asked me to say it again. I said it louder and more forcefully. He asked me to say it again, only softly. I did. Then he said, “How sad.”

I was crushed. I said, weakly, “It’s about shadow,” but I knew that something had gone wrong. I was reveling in that power, instead of recognizing it, knowing it, and using it consciously. Bly’s comment snapped me into recognition of this. I had done the same thing that day long ago in the jeep, identifying with the power. It is probably why my psyche has stayed with this image so long.

Even tenth-century Vikings talked about and took pride in weapons technology. That poem I recited is seven-eighths about boats and one-eighth about hacking people down. What we saw on television during the two Gulf wars was the same, psychologically, as “a good fast ship with finest oars.” The “finest” means I’m better than you are. Technology in weapons makes us feel superior to that rejected “other” that I projected onto the poor sonsabitches I was itching to cream if they dared ambush me on the road that day.
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Weapons are tools. Tools are an extension of ourselves. Tools make you more effective. They are ego enhancing. Ask any good carpenter how he feels about a really good tool. We enhance our feelings of self-worth if we have good tools. This probably accounts for a great deal of the sale of tools to guys who work all day at desks. How often is the household vacuum cleaner some cheap old wreck but in constant use, usually by the wife, while outside in the shop is the husband’s $1,300, three-horsepower table saw that’s used once or twice a year? If a fine tool is little used I have to assume it was bought to shore up the buyer’s low self-esteem. If a crummy inadequate tool is used constantly I have to assume it’s because of low esteem for the job. This is one reason why our cities are falling to pieces, physically and socially, while we have military hardware that glows in the dark and does handsprings.