What It Is Like to Go to War

by Karl Marlantes

  Was Great-Grandma a heroine or merely transcending tedium at the cost of her children? She was both. And her daughter, who did almost precisely the same thing to my mother, was both. Luckily for my brother and me, my mother tried consciously to break that pattern. Still, even I, three generations on, will every so often succumb to some leftover reverberation of that original pattern of neglecting what’s close to me in order to run off and prove my importance under the guise of doing good for the world.

  Unrecognized shadow can also haunt the person who stays at home to raise his or her kids. One couple I knew, horrified by the Vietnam War and active throughout in the peace movement, had firmly decided to raise their two children, a boy and a girl, without guns or violence of any kind. They saw no violent TV or movies; nor did they read any books of a violent nature. Even pointing a finger and saying bang was quickly put down. Friends who played that way were no longer invited over.

  One afternoon a mutual friend found the two children torturing insects in the backyard. Not one insect, not even one each, but a whole line of them, each one neatly pinned to a board waiting its turn.

  The more you deny the shadow warrior, the more vulnerable you become to it. We in America did a pretty good job of denial in the Vietnam War era and the decades following. During World War II, the warrior or soldier had a place of high regard in American society. Our boys in uniform were seen as heroes, the good guys, just a wholesome bunch of gum-chewing, Coke-drinking, jitterbugging amateurs who destroyed Japanese militarism and Nazi brutality. We idolized MacArthur. We liked Ike. We let the shadow warrior do the stuff we never wanted to consciously think about, such as firebombing Japanese civilians living in paper houses and destroying Dresden when we didn’t need to. Still in the grip of this white knight attitude, we spent most of the 1950s and ’60s pulling off dirty little capers justified because we were fighting the “evils of communism.” All this eventually led to, along with a host of other spurious reasons, President Lyndon Johnson telling us we were teaching that “little piss ant” Ho Chi Minh a lesson. Then we started seeing some hard-to-stomach reality on television. Rather than accept that this terrible reality was the result of our inflated ideas of being the good-guy soldiers we thought we were, and accept as well that we’d buried deeply our own despised Nazis and Tojos, it was easier to throw that darkness onto the people we asked to do the fighting. So the Vietnam veterans came home catching everyone’s shadow, portrayed as dope-shooting, coke-snuffing, baby-killing mercenaries. They were far from that. They fought their war, held jobs, and raised families no more and no less capably than did their veteran fathers. Rudyard Kipling’s “Tommy” isn’t a poem about gratitude; it’s a poem about attitude.

  So where’s the shadow now after the Iraq War? Try Abu Ghraib prison. However, it is always going to go underground, just as it did in Gulf I and World War II, unless we start getting conscious. We move from protecting food convoys in Somalia to “saving” Somalia from the evil warlords and the mission ends in bloody humiliation. We assume we’ll be cheered as white knights by the people of Iraq when we arrive with no plan for the occupation and self-righteously eliminate all agencies of law and order because their personnel were labeled Baathists, but we and the Iraqi people instead get years of bloody chaos. It’s not the activity itself that’s in question so much as the self-righteous attitude that one brings to the activity. This is where the danger lies. This nation should be less worried about putting the Vietnam syndrome behind us than restarting the World War II victory syndrome that resulted in the Vietnam syndrome in the first place. If you go to war singing “Onward Christian Soldiers” you’re going to raise the devil.

  Shadow issues come around and around. There is no defeating the shadow. We have to live with it. It is part of us. But having this shadow is neither bad nor good, although it is very troublesome. If I have lazy Sarge in there, smoking marijuana every day, lying on a couch, this hurts nobody. It’s when I start screaming at my kid because he is loafing on the couch, just the way I’d like to loaf myself, that someone gets hurt. Then what I’m doing, because of shadow, is bad. I’ll never get rid of Sarge. Calling Sarge bad and trying to stuff him even further down in my psychic baggage will only mean it’s more likely I’ll scream at my kid or anyone else, people on welfare, for example, who “catch” my Sarge when he pops out.

  We all have shit on our shoes. We’ve just got to realize it so we don’t track it into the house. This realization is one of the things we must work on in training society’s professional fighters: our soldiers, police, and bodyguards. We must take time to make these people aware of their particular shadows and have them clearly understand that they carry this shadow with them—always. This is so crucial to those involved in professions of violence because their job at times does indeed involve hurting or killing people. People holding these jobs cannot project their shadow sides onto “the enemy” or “the criminals” and hope to avoid excesses. Yet no one attempts to help soldiers or the police by dealing with this in their training. We prefer the easier route of casting our own darkness on them, braying “police brutality” whenever the excesses occur. This must change.

  It must change because we lose control when we project our shadows onto others, and losing control in war is far more serious than losing control next to the living room couch. We then kill unnecessarily and for no greater good, and a greater good is presumably the reason we went to war in the first place.

  How do we change? We should at least introduce all military people to the concepts of the shadow, to rage and repression, from the very start of their training. In addition, more individual time (here therapy and education become much the same) should be spent with NCOs and officers in combat units that operate directly with the enemy (infantry, armor, and Special Forces) or with prisoners (military police and shore patrol, intelligence interrogators). Even just a few sessions could save lives by reducing violent excesses. Almost by definition, atrocities result because people in authority let them happen. It would be exceedingly rare to see trained soldiers, even as we train them now, committing an atrocity if the commander on the scene, aware of his own shadow, said stop.

  I have come to understand that there are three basic categories or types of atrocity, and almost all atrocities will be one or a combination of these three. There is what I call the “white heat” atrocity, where logic reigns supreme with no feeling or empathy. There is the “red heat” atrocity, where just the opposite happens and emotion, usually rage, rules to the exclusion of all logic and rationality. Finally, there is the atrocity of the fallen standard, where there is a large gap between what is spoken of as a behavioral standard by society back home and what the immediate society in-country actually expects. I have come to this understanding because of direct experience with all three. I’m no monster. I didn’t participate in My Lai or anything close to it. But in combat we do dreadful things that are excused too easily. Had I been just a little more conscious at the time, I would not have done some of the things I did. More people would have lived and without any change to the outcome of the battle or the war.

  Evil floats all around us like a ghost or an unseen, poisonous mist. It arises as the result of many rather ordinary things such as history, culture, attitudes, and child-rearing practices. And it’s also manifest in the spiritual realm, a real but nonempirical potential. Good floats all around us too. It’s all intermingled in this potential state. What we humans do is turn this potential into reality. Like television sets, we tune in to one frequency or the other and bring that unseen, unmanifested, floating mist into full-spectrum stereophonic reality. We humans make evil and good concrete. In Vietnam I did both. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t done so, in war or in civilian life. It’s just that in war the results are terribly magnified.

  I participated in a white heat atrocity so common that it’s not even thought of as an atrocity by most veterans, but an atrocity it was. We were on Mutter’s Ridge, a long chain of hills running east-west jus
t south of the demilitarized zone. The Third Marine Division and the North Vietnamese 320th and 312th A “Steel” Divisions fought over that ridge constantly throughout the war. More worthy opponents would be difficult to find.

  We’d assaulted and taken one hill,39 suffering fifteen dead and about thirty wounded, whom we couldn’t medevac because of the monsoon clouds. The next day we were ordered to take the adjacent hill down the ridge. By this time in my tour I’d been moved up to company XO40 and was left behind with a small group to guard our dead and wounded from the first assault while the rest of the company took on the second hill. It was on this second assault that a significant death occurred.

  “Canada” was a big, good-looking kid from British Columbia.41 He was six-four and his jungle weight was over 200 pounds. He carried a stripped-down, sawed-off M-60 machine gun that was further modified by welding a wooden handle to the top of the barrel so he could control it without burning his hands. In addition he had an oddball arrangement of two metal machine-gun belt containers, called cans, that hung from straps he’d rigged around his neck and shoulders. He would feed the gun with a belt from either can. This was an incredible amount of weight. An M-60 machine gun is normally considered a crew-fired weapon, meaning two to three men are required to carry it and serve it with ammunition.

  One day, some months before the incident I am about to describe, we’d come in from the bush to guard an artillery battery. Some of the cannon cockers started making fun of Canada, not to his face but to some of the kids in our company, saying it was John Wayne bullshit. No one could be accurate with a handheld M-60, particularly firing it standing.42 The word reached Canada, as was probably intended, and Canada was not the type to let a challenge go unanswered. He slung the two extremely heavy ammo cans containing the carefully coiled machine-gun belts over his shoulders, securing them to his chest with the special straps he’d constructed. He then picked up the machine gun and walked up to where the artillerymen were sitting around their howitzers. People started gathering around to watch the fun. He stood by the group of artillerymen who’d issued the challenge and slid the cocking mechanism on the gun’s receiver back and forth. No one said anything about John Wayne.

  “I hear you think I can’t shoot this thing.”

  One of the cockier cannon cockers retorted, “Anyone can shoot it. We were wondering if you could hit anything.”

  “Let’s go see,” Canada said.

  He walked off the top of the hill down toward our perimeter, a small crowd now following him. When he reached the lines he slapped a belt from one of the cans that hung from his neck into the receiver and chambered the first round. He nodded to the nearest artilleryman and said, “Point at something.” People started scrambling for holes yelling, “Test fire! Test fire!”43 The artilleryman pointed at an empty box of C-rations about 30 meters off. Canada tore it apart on the first burst. Canada then himself pointed at a blasted tree even farther away. He again hit it on the first burst, then proceeded to chew it into splinters, standing firmly against the recoil of the gun, until he ran through the entire belt. When he stopped he cleared the gun and walked back to his own position without saying a word. He was as good at drama as he was at machine-gunning.

  Canada liked walking point,44 or at least he told us he did. In any case, he always took far more than his fair share of the point assignments. If he was ever out of the bush in the rear, you could always count on him to steal a case of long-rats45 and then give most of it away. Whenever we’d get back from an operation he’d occasionally disappear. Rumor was he had a wife in a Buru village. Whether he did or not, he inspired rumors like this. His occasional mysterious absences notwithstanding, he never missed a combat operation. He was always out in front with that incredible weapon few had the strength to use. Canada was the one you wanted on your side.

  In the early part of the assault on the second hill he was badly wounded trying to break through a series of bunkers and fighting holes. The corpsmen had him in a shell hole with IV tubes46 taped into his arm to keep him from going into shock when the word got passed back that a key machine-gun emplacement had pinned down his platoon. The assault had stalled and a real mess was developing. He ripped the IV tubes from the plasma bottle, grabbed an M-16 from another of the wounded, and ran up the hill. He charged the machine gun, rubber tubes dangling from where they were still taped to his arm, and killed the crew. This one-man charge provided the critical breakthrough. The company took the hill.

  In giving us that victory, though, Canada was hit several times more. Although he was not killed instantly, this was too much damage even for his remarkable body. The corpsmen couldn’t save him. His heart stopped about ten minutes after the hill was cleared. The corpsman radioed news of the death to the skipper. On the first hill, my own radio operator turned to me with anguish on his face and repeated the message he’d just heard. “The big C is dead.” I was told later that the same message, “The big C is dead,” was relayed back through the entire regiment.

  We still have champions. As with the death of Hector, this death of a champion asked for revenge. Hector, the Trojan champion in the Iliad, killed the best friend of Achilles, the Greek champion. Achilles later killed Hector and took revenge by dragging his body around the walls of Troy behind a chariot, defacing and mutilating it in full view of Hector’s family and friends. The Trojans, in turn, thirsted for revenge against the Greeks because of this dishonorable revenge. But no dishonor had been done to Canada. He had not been dragged by the heels around the walls of Troy. He had died honorably, as fine a war death as one can imagine.47 We survivors, however, let his death be one more reason to get even for what turned out to be a particularly bad time for us.

  The North Vietnamese counterattacked with 82mm mortars located in four different positions. The company was getting pasted in two places now, with me and my little group protecting the wounded on the first hill and the rest of the company up on the second hill. After we got shellacked, I didn’t have enough healthy people to carry our dead and wounded to the new hill and the rest of the company no longer had enough healthy people to man the second hill’s larger perimeter. The skipper chose to abandon the second hill and consolidate forces with my group.

  In one of the bravest medevac operations I ever saw we managed to fly out the dead and severely wounded from the second hill before we retreated. Twin-rotor CH-46s from Marine Air Group 29 came straining up the hillsides just above the trees because the cloud cover was so low they couldn’t find the hilltop otherwise. Not only did they brave the usual dangers of crashing on the mountainsides, but they took considerable fire from small arms and automatic weapons all the way up, knowing that when they did arrive on top of the hill it was being plastered with mortar shells. From my hilltop position, taking quick looks between explosions from the mortar shells, I watched the first platoon radio operator, a kid who had been a fire-team leader when I had the platoon, standing fully exposed on top of that hill guiding the birds in while the shells exploded all around him. He had taken over from his lieutenant, who had gone down with an earlier shell. I could see Marines carrying the dead and wounded from their holes through that fire into each waiting chopper. My most vivid memory is seeing the dark body of some Marine who I learned later was one of my old squad leaders fall through the sky from the closing tailgate of one of the already airborne choppers. He’d been hauling his severely wounded platoon leader aboard when the pilot gunned the CH-46 out of the zone. He chose to jump to rejoin his squad back on the ground.

  As soon as the last body was out, the company retreated back to my position with anyone who could still walk. There, we were shelled for three days, unable to move our wounded and dead out by air because the weather had closed in completely, and unable to move them out by carrying them to lower ground because the enemy was all around us. We had no food, had no sleep, and ended up sharing the IV fluid for water. Luckily, the clouds lifted on day four just enough to let us see the peaks of the ridge beneath the hea
vy gray ceiling. Reinforcements, which had been waiting for three days in the rain at a landing zone down in the lowlands for just such a brief opportunity, were rushed in with all the ammunition and water they could carry. We were ordered to retake the hill to “get our pride back.” The hill was considered our company’s. We’d lost it; it was up to us to get it back. The Marine Corps is funny this way.

  On this second assault we were in a different state of mind than we had been on the first.

  There are many different states of mind. Contrary to the popular conception, when one is in the fury of battle I don’t think one is very often in an irrational frenzy. The “heat of battle” is used to somehow conjure up a moment of irrationality, a moment overwhelmed by passions. This, of course, is a possible state to find oneself in, as I’ll relate, but I was more apt to experience “irrational frenzy” when the pressure was off and I was in the rear. For example, one day while I was waiting to go back out to the bush some bureaucratic tangle set me off and I unsheathed my kabar and attacked a large bush. I slashed it to splinters, screaming with rage at it. I ended up on my knees, stabbing the splintered pieces of wood in a frenzy, while people gathered around watching me. This is a moment of irrationality and overwhelming passion.

  When I was fighting, though, I was usually in a white heat of total rationality, completely devoid of passion. I had a single overwhelming concern, to get the job done with minimal casualties to my side and stay alive doing it. Once I got up my nerve to cross the final line of departure before an assault, it was as if I’d turned into a computer that was going so fast you would be afraid it’d burn itself up.