* * *
Adidas army
Former Australian Army physical trainer, Captain David Sanders, has no time for grizzled old soldiers claiming things were tougher in their day. “Infantry training in the Aussie Army today is just like it always was—tough as nails,” he insists. “Route marches are just as hard, drills are just as tough, and sergeant-majors are the same as they always were—total bastards.” If anything, Sanders reckons, soldiers in the new millennium are getting better, because now (as opposed to the long post-Vietnam lull) they actually fight. There is one area in which he will admit modern soldiers fall short, however. “From the eighties onward we started seeing a lot of injuries like shin splints and stress fractures in the lower leg bones,” he muses. The reason? “In the old days kids used to walk around barefoot or in hard-soled leather shoes. It made their bones hard. From the eighties on they started wearing runners, so they all grew up with bones like chicken drumsticks.”
* * *
There was a reason ancient and primitive soldiers were so much fitter than slothful modern grunts: training. To make his soldiers fit, Shaka took them on grueling patrols ranging hundreds of miles—barefoot. When some complained of injury from “Devil’s Thorns”—long spines sharp enough to puncture tires—Shaka made them stamp for hours on a parade ground scattered with the thorns, killing any man who failed to dance. Wu dynasty soldiers in sixth-century BCE China trained with eighty-mile runs, without a break, wearing full armor and weaponry. Roman legionary recruits, similarly, trained by marching twenty-four miles in five hours, carrying their full armor and pack weight of up to one hundred pounds. They also sometimes constructed and tore down a complete legionary camp—a procedure which took three hours—three times in one day. The only modern soldiers who even come close to this are the elite and Special Forces units. U.S. Rangers, for example, undertake sixteen-mile training runs in four-and-a-half hours, wearing a forty-pound pack. Soldiers graduating from the U.S. Special Operations Command’s assessment program, the SFAS, likewise do training runs of eighteen miles in four-and-three-quarter hours, wearing a pack weighing fifty pounds. This is commendable, of course, but it just damns our ordinary soldiers even further—physically at least, every peasant grunt in the Roman army was a match for modern elite Special Forces.
Nor do we have a monopoly on actual Special Forces, either. A whole entertainment industry has grown up praising the virtues of modern special-operations soldiers: their physical toughness, lethality, bravery, and ability to operate in enemy environments. Yet, one thousand years ago, for example, the Middle East was stalked by a sect of shadow warriors who made Delta Force look like boy scouts on jamboree. These were the fida’is (“those who lay down their lives”): the secret agents of the heretical Assassin sect of the Shia Muslims. From the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries ce these fanatical warriors terrorized the orthodox Muslim world by secretly infiltrating the retinues of high officials and suddenly murdering them in brutal and highly public fashion. Among their numerous victims were a Prime Minister of Persia and the Crusader King of Jerusalem, Conrad (whom they assassinated while in the disguise of Christian monks). Even the mighty Muslim warrior Saladin suffered so many attempts on his life from fida’is that he began sleeping in a specially constructed wooden tower. A report from a fourteenth-century Crusader priest, Bocardus, records the general awe in which the fida’is’s infiltration skills were held:
…the Assassins, who are to be cursed and fled…are thirsty for human blood…by imitating the gestures, garments, languages, customs, and acts of various nations…thus, hidden in sheep’s clothing, they suffer death as soon as they are recognized…I cannot show how to recognize them by their customs or any other signs, for in these things they are unknown… 44
So practiced in the dark arts of secret war were the fida’is that orthodox Muslim rulers never quite knew when their most trusted retainers might turn out to be Assassins. Sharaf al-Mulk, the Prime Minister of the Khwarezmian Empire (modern Iran), for example, was appalled to discover in 1227 CE that no fewer than five fida’is had secretly infiltrated both his stable and his office of heralds. So terrified was he that others would remain undiscovered, he paid the Assassins’ religious leader 50,000 dinars’ blood money when the Sultan made him burn those five alive.
Even the fida’is Assassins, however, couldn’t match the secret skills of the archetypal ancient special-operations soldiers: the ninja. These silent warriors were the scourge of Japan’s aristocracy between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, when their stealthy way of war frequently defeated the aristocrats’ samurai protectors. Ninja, or shinobi as they were more commonly called in medieval Japan, came from secret ninjutsu training schools in the wild Iga and Koga provinces. These schools had their origin in the wanderings of a defeated twelfth-century samurai, Daisuke, who met up with the Chinese warrior–monk Kain Doshi, himself a refugee from the collapsing Tang Dynasty in China, in the Iga Mountains. The military doctrine that emerged from Daisuke’s training at Kain Doshi’s feet emphasized deception, suppleness, speed, and surprise. Shinobi assassins (for assassins they usually were) used similar tactics to the Shia fida’is, disguising themselves as wandering Buddhist monks, washerwomen, or even itinerant puppeteers to get close to their targets. Their weaponry far outstripped the favored dagger of the fida’is, however. In addition to their fearsome unarmed combat techniques (which eventually gave rise to karate), and their shortened samurai swords, shinobi killers might carry powdered sand and pepper to blind their enemies. Their mouths might spit needles. Their hands and feet might feature tekken, banded metal claws that served equally well to climb a castle wall, catch a sword blow, or stab an opponent. Tucked into their belt might be the fearsome shinobi gama, a long chain flung at victims to immobilize them so they could be hacked to death with the razor-sharp sickle at its end. Shinobi also employed a bewildering array of climbing and mobility devices, including hooked ropes and collapsible climbing poles, and wooden flotation shoes that allowed them to cross moats. So murderous did shinobi activity become that some aristocrats found their only defense was to construct elaborate “ninja-proof” houses. One such was the famous Nijō Castle in Kyoto, which featured a “nightingale” floor whose specially sprung floorboards “sang” whenever a would-be assassin visited in the dead of night. Yet even these drastic measures failed to stop some shinobi killers. A ninja called Ishikawa Goemon, for example, is said to have penetrated the castle of the famous aristocrat Nobunaga and dripped poison down a thread into his mouth as he slept. Nobunaga, however, survived this attempt and sent his own shinobi to murder his rival, Kenshin—which the shinobi reportedly did by concealing himself in Kenshin’s lavatory sewage pit for several days until the chance came to kill the nobleman with a spear thrust to the anus.45
Without taking anything away from our many brave and dedicated modern special-ops soldiers, such feats make our bumbling search for Osama bin Laden look like a page straight out of Where’s Waldo?
Mention of bin Laden seems appropriate here, for his name is often cited by those who claim that another aggressive activity of Homo masculinus modernus, terrorism, has reached new, unparalleled heights of destruction. One post-9/11 academic work on terror, for example, pointed out that the 2,974 casualties in the September 11, 2001, attacks constituted an almost forty-fold increase in casualties over the 76 terrorist bombings recorded between 1950 and 2000.46 Yet the existence of the Shia Assassins—the historical terrorists par excellence—shows that terrorism was not unknown in the ancient world. Sun Tzu, the famous seventh-century BCE Chinese military strategist, even coined a proverb summarizing the primary aim of political terror: “To kill one and frighten ten thousand.” While there are obvious difficulties in comparing terrorism across vastly different times and cultures (not least because of different killing technologies), al Qaeda and bin Laden have themselves given us two standards by which to measure. Al Qaeda jihadists boast that their attacks will induce surrender of the West thro
ugh morale-shattering, spectacular, mass-casualty attacks. We are thus entitled to ask how well they have succeeded on two fronts: their number of casualties, and their achievement of those strategic goals. More importantly, for this book at least, we can also ask how well their efforts in both of these compare to those of ancient terrorists.
With which historical terrorists should al Qaeda be compared? Perhaps the best fit would be the medieval Mongols. This north-Asian tribe of ferocious horsemen was, like al Qaeda, an ethnically based group that aimed to forge a universal empire. The Mongols also, again like al Qaeda, employed explicit terrorism in that quest. The main difference between the two is how phenomenally successful, by comparison, the Mongols were. (Successful, in this case, does not necessarily mean admirable.) Under their ferocious leader, Genghis Khan, the Mongol tribe, which numbered at most 850,000 people in 1260 CE, went on to control a Eurasian empire of over 100 million souls. In fact, the latter number would have been even higher if the Mongols hadn’t killed so many, often slaughtering the entire population of cities they conquered. At Merv in Turkmenistan, for example (the largest city in the world at that time), Genghis Khan’s son Tolui killed every single inhabitant except a handful of artisans, whom he enslaved. Exact figures are unclear (estimates range from 400,000 to 1.3 million), but this was clearly an incredible feat of extermination, considering it all had to be done by hand and took five days (Tolui apparently assigned 300 to 400 victims to each Mongol warrior for decapitation). The same fate befell Iran’s Nishapur (whose citizens had unwisely killed Genghis’s son-in-law, Tokuchar), where separate pyramids of men’s, women’s, and children’s skulls were piled up outside the city walls.47 (This atrocity was, unbelievably, exceeded by the later Turkish conqueror Timur, who constructed a tower of living victims, each cemented in place, after his conquest of the city of Sebsewar.) The Mongols were so thorough that they often returned to such cities days later to kill any refugees who had managed to avoid the first massacre. It was by means such as this that the Mongols killed somewhere between 30 and 60 million people over the 90-year period of their major conquests. Al Qaeda and its affiliates, by comparison, succeeded in killing 14,602 people worldwide in 2005 (the rate has since dropped).48 Multiplied by 90 years, even this high figure would result in 1,314,180 casualties, considerably less than the Mongols.
Then there is the question of aims. Al Qaeda’s strategic aim has demonstrably failed, resulting, in fact, in a ferocious renewal of the Western will to fight—to wit, the war on terror. Mongol terrorism, by contrast, was devastatingly effective. Several ancient sources record the paralyzing effect Mongol atrocities had on future victims, frequently leading whole cities to surrender without a fight. Arab historian Ibn al-Athir, to quote one, wrote:
Stories have been related to me…which the hearer can scarcely credit, as to the terror of them [the Mongols]…so that it is said a single one of them would enter a village…wherein were many people, and would continue to slay them one after the other, none daring to stretch forth his hand…I have heard that one of them took a man captive but had not any weapon wherewith to kill him; and he said to his prisoner, “Lay your head on the ground and do not move” and he did so and the Tartar went and fetched his sword and slew him therewith.49
Without making light of the evil that modern Islamic jihadists have inflicted on the world, comparisons like these make it plain that Osama bin Laden wouldn’t have even made noyan (“captain”) in the army of Genghis Khan.
Fortunately, this means most of us in the Western world will never suffer terrorist violence. Instead, any lethal violence we do suffer will probably be individual, criminally motivated homicide. This type of violence is universally a male domain: U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics figures for 2005 show that men committed 88 percent of murders in the United States, and were victims in 74.9 percent. Despite the marked decline in homicide rates in the United States over the past fifteen years (total murders in the United States were 24,526 in 1993, and only 16,692 in 2005), we often assume aggressive male homicide is a disease peculiar to modern life. Yet how accurate is this? Consider gang violence, for example. In 1996, the Los Angeles County Gang Information Bureau estimated the county’s gang population at 150,000 members; that same year the number of gang members killed in intergang violence was just 803, making for an annual rate of 0.53 percent. This is considerably below the average death rate from violence recorded by archeologist Lawrence Keeley for prehistoric societies. Even the baddest-assed Crip from the meanest street of South-Central L.A., it seems, stands less chance of being capped than an ancient or tribal male did of being shanked with a flint, bronze, or sharpened bone blade.
Clearly, very few modern males really have the fight stuff. So why then do we aspire to it? Why have so many young American males taken up training for MMA, or ultimate fighting, that the U.S. Army now runs a championship tournament out of Fort Benning simply to cash in and swing recruits its way? The simple answer is: it’s written in our genes. However feeble we are now, modern-male bodies still bear the physical stamp of the fighters we once were. Consider, for example, our sexual dimorphism: the degree to which male Homo sapiens’s bodies differ from those of female Homo sapiens. Men are, on average, 9 percent taller than women worldwide. They also weigh 20 percent more, with much of the gain attributable to that 50 percent increase in upper-body muscle that men have over women. As in most mammal species that show a sex-based difference in size, there is a simple reason for this: fighting.50 The evidence of our bodies, therefore, is that male-on-male violence has been a part of our lineage for a very long time. Several other features of the male physique also seem to be adaptations to fighting. True, the fact that men have a 30 percent greater aerobic capacity than women could just as easily be an adaptation to hunting as to mano-a-mano combat. It is hard, though, to see the fact that men’s blood carries higher levels of coagulation factors such as thrombin and vitamin K (which promote wound healing and reduce pain sensitivity) as anything other than an adaptation to those times when two ancient male hominins decided there was nothing for it but to take it outside and let their fists do the talking.
Then there is the emotional machinery we have inherited. Many a woman has shaken her head at the tendency of her man to react with extreme aggression and violence to seemingly trivial insults. On the surface, of course, she’s right: a study of male-on-male homicide in Victoria, Australia, found that a large number were confrontational killings arising from insignificant slights to the aggressor’s “honor” such as jostling or staring.51 It’s easy to write this off as male stupidity, but the truth seems to be that this short fuse is actually hardwired into the male brain—and for good reason. More than one anthropologist has pointed out that it is only the threat of massively disproportionate violence in response to minor infringements that guarantees social order among men in tribal societies, which have no central government to dispense justice. Only through a balance of terror can every man’s drive to deceive and take advantage of his fellows be deterred. Thus, as in any system of mutually assured devastation, a tribal male who tries to opt out by refusing to fight to the death at the drop of a headdress will soon find himself losing out to his more aggressive brothers.
But what, exactly, can he lose? What, in other words, is he fighting for?
The short answer, as any evolutionary psychologist (or bartender, for that matter) can tell you, is: women. The struggle to transmit genes to the next generation can be, for tribal males, a brutal, winner-takes-all contest well worth fighting and dying for. (Females, in contrast, suffer no such pressure—almost every fertile tribal woman is virtually guaranteed to have children, providing she stays alive.) True, some masculine über-violence is clearly aimed simply at personal, rather than reproductive, survival. A survey of homicides among ancient Scottish and Icelandic Vikings, for example, shows that victims’ families were almost seven times less likely to attempt a revenge killing if the murderer was known to be a dangerous berserker. But this itself
could be looked at as a reproductive strategy—another study found berserkers also fathered significantly more children than other Viking warriors.
Again, the secret sexual drivers of male-on-male violence can probably be more clearly studied in our closest relatives, the chimps. One survey of a chimp troop in Tanzania, for instance, revealed that the three top males only ever fought when their surrounding females were in season. The reproductive consequences of these fights were also striking: the sexual share of the alpha male, Kasonta, plummeted from 85.66 percent of matings to just 12.99 percent when he was overthrown by the beta male, Sobonga. (Interestingly, just as in the case of de Waal’s chimp, Yeroen, the next-best place to be, after alpha, was the gamma, or third, position. Kamenafu, the weaker gamma chimp who played Kasonta and Sobonga off against one another, was at one stage able to sneak in 51.4 percent of the sexual encounters as the price of his support.) Even the violence of male chimps against other troops of males, which is far more lethal than their intragroup fighting, seems to have a sexual function. This is somewhat obscured by the fact that male chimps on war patrol also attack foreign females, unless they are in season, but a study by the Jane Goodall Institute’s Center for Primate Studies found that aggressive troops of males, by extending their ranges and increasing food availability, boosted both the reproductive rates of their resident females and their own number of sexual contacts with them.
Manthropology Page 10