What It Is Like to Go to War

by Karl Marlantes

  To get our pride back we again went up against those same bunkers and machine guns. Now we had the advantage of having destroyed the barbed wire on the first assault and knew the hill’s layout. As we’d lost all our platoon commanders but one, and he had been wounded, I had reorganized the remnants of two old platoons and some reinforcements into one platoon and taken charge of it. We emerged from the jungle, my large combined platoon on line with the second platoon under the remaining wounded platoon commander coming from another angle around the other side of a finger, onto the blasted open side of the steep hill, a muddy tangle of blown trees and torn-up ground.

  Our former company executive officer, who had been transferred back to a safe job in the rear to await orders home, had heard about our situation. He left his job without asking permission and joined the newly arrived reinforcements waiting nervously on that rainy LZ. He stayed with these frightened Marines three days in the rain, encouraging them, joking with them. When he reached us on the hill that night he took command of an ad hoc group, and while we assembled in the dark for the attack the next morning they cleared a nearby ridge of NVA infantry that would have taken our assault under fire from the rear. Semper fi.48

  Our assault bogged down as we came under machine-gun fire from the bunkers. People jumped behind blown logs and into shell and bomb craters. It was very clear to me that if we didn’t get around the bunkers with the machine guns, we’d never take the hill. We’d suffer terrible casualties trying to withdraw and terrible casualties trying to go forward. That is, of course, precisely why everyone was hunkered down on the ground. The entire platoon was rational too.

  I saw that one of my machine gunners, one of the brand-new replacements who just days earlier had been in America, had been hit. His right trouser leg was black with blood and clinging wetly to his calf. But I needed a machine gun. I had to have a way to keep one of the enemy machine guns under fire so I could maneuver a couple of fire teams up around the bunker to get at it from behind. I shouted at the gunner, motioning him up toward me. He started crawling, dragging his wounded leg behind him. I saw that blood was running down over his boot and flecks of it spattered on the ground as he crawled and crabbed his way toward me. I remember screaming at him because he wasn’t crawling fast enough. I didn’t care for a moment about how he felt, his pain, his fear, or anything except his function. I had to have that enemy machine gun taken under fire or I wouldn’t get the job done with the lowest casualties to my side and still stay alive.

  The machine gunner was a tall skinny black kid, all elbows, knees, and cool grace. He would have been in total control hot-dogging a basketball between his legs in front of a crowd. It was his first fight. For several seconds after I got him on target I watched him pump out bullets in short disciplined bursts, just as he’d been taught. As he did this, the blood from his leg wound was pumping out in short bursts onto the ground.

  Now I think all sorts of things and feel all sorts of emotions. Then, I remember thinking with satisfaction that he was a competent gunner and thank God someone at Camp Pendleton had done a decent training job on fire control. We were always short of machine-gun ammo to defend against the counterattack after a fight and firing too long bursts would burn out the barrel.

  I left him there, alone, with the enemy machine-gun bullets coming right back at him. The two opposing machine gunners locked on to each other, ours pumping blood and bullets, giving me time to figure out how to scream around trying to organize the taking of the bunker immediately in front of us, at the same time already trying to figure out what to do after we got that bunker, and...

  Thirty years later, while trying to write about this incident, I kept compulsively writing then these three NVA stood up in their hole. I was in a different frame of mind. I gunned them down. But this was a lie. I did no such thing. Yet through several drafts of the manuscript I kept writing this fictional ending of my story as if it were true. Something made me want to leave it in. It was only on the third or fourth draft that I finally threw it out and wrote the truth. What in the world was going on?

  What actually happened, and what I wanted to leave out, was that the whole platoon was engaged in a no-quarter fight, one I had set up and planned. A no-quarter fight is a fight to the death where no one is allowed to surrender or run. Everyone on the losing side is killed. I didn’t kill three soldiers all by myself. Would that it had happened that way. Not only would I gain a little warrior glory for a hat trick but, more important, I wouldn’t have to own that the killing that followed Canada’s death was far more of a personal moral failing than I wanted to admit. Many more than those three were killed, most of whom, in retrospect, probably could have been allowed to surrender or allowed to retreat. We’d decided to kill them. They deserved it. It was “justice for Canada.” After that decision, it was just mechanics carrying out the sentence. Somebody had to do it.

  You can imagine, given how I was treating my own machine gunner, my state of mind when I saw any enemy stand up to surrender. It’s the prime example of how total rationality is an unbalanced and unhealthy state. Logic, devoid of empathy. If there was one tenth of 1 percent of a chance that one of those NVA was fooling, or maybe standing up to take a better shot, then a totally rational computer with my objective would ask, “What do I risk and what will it cost to make the odds of this particular situation 100 percent in my favor instead of 99.9 percent? No risk? The cost of the energy to pull the trigger and a few bullets? That’s easy. Do it.” It’s done. Furthermore, if I can kill them before they have a chance to demonstrate beyond any doubt that they do want to surrender, by waving a white cloth or something, then I won’t have to make a difficult moral decision that might endanger my life. Here is the rational mind of the individual doing absolutely everything to win the fight and throwing out any emotion that could get in the way.

  By compulsively writing the fabrication that all by myself I’d killed three men who were trying to surrender I, in a way, wanted to take on the whole of the responsibility, absolving my fellow platoon members from their own responsibility. I, after all, had sanctioned it. I felt bad about what happened. But part of taking on all responsibility in writing appears also to be from a need for self-aggrandizement. Self-aggrandizement? In not allowing them to surrender and killing them? How can I explain this?

  First of all, the criteria for being good are switched in combat. In the world of Vietnam, gunning down three gooks who stood up in their holes wouldn’t have been considered bad at all, and while I am writing narratives of my experiences I’m back in Vietnam. In fact, the badder you were as an individual, the more esteem you had in that community, as long as the badness didn’t spill over to those who were on your own side. There was an expression commonly seen scrawled on flak jackets saying, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil. Because I’m the meanest motherfucker in the valley.”

  However, soldiers and Marines are also subtly prepared by our society from early childhood to accept this switch in what is considered good and bad. Healthy children eventually rebel against dependency. However, boys, when I was growing up, seemed more often than girls to do so by being bad. Girls weren’t encouraged to do this. Girls were good. Therefore, if you were to prove you weren’t a girl, then... you had to be bad. And so many of us grew up with a mixed message.

  Add to this preconditioning the fact that in combat all-out total aggression will help save your life. When you’re truly in the valley of the shadow of death, then, if you can become the meanest motherfucker in the valley, you will indeed try. This is, appropriately, encouraged. So being bad helps give many males identity as men; it fills a need for esteem. Add to this that in war it helps us survive and you’ve got a very potent motivation system for doing the so-called bad thing. Evil is very ordinary. We don’t have to look far to see its causes. It’s the little things, such as being tired and not inspecting the mortar tripod closely enough, or not recycling the plastic, or letting kids eat j
unk food that abuses their health because the parents’ working or social life is more important than preparing a decent meal at home. It is not expressing horror at television violence. Cruelty in warfare is as mundane and common as cruelty in child rearing.

  When I first finished writing “I was in a different frame of mind. I gunned them down,” a long anguished cry broke through after all those years. Looking at the winter fields outside my window, I kept crying, “Oh, God. Oh God.” Asking for forgiveness, perhaps? The snot was dripping from my nose onto the keyboard. It was some time before I could continue writing. When I was able to focus again, I realized that something significant had been going on when I kept compulsively writing down a bad deed that was a fabrication, something I didn’t in fact do single-handedly. These three NVA soldiers were made-up images, icons for the sorrows of war. The true situation was Marines killing NVA without quarter wherever we could find them, with me doing no more or less than any of the others. That there were some NVA in groups of three I don’t doubt, but this particular group in my mind was invented.

  I realize now that what I did was make up a story in order to get back into my feelings, feelings I’d suppressed and ignored all that long day, and many long days and years before and following. I was too defended against regaining feeling from a factual account. Through the story I could take myself by surprise because I didn’t have my defenses up. It’s one reason why storytelling is so important. In gradually regaining those lost and suppressed feelings I began to heal myself, and I have come to accept the tragedy I participated in.

  I can now tell the story truthfully. We all shot anybody we saw, never offering a chance for surrender. Finally the NVA started pulling back from their positions, firing at us, covering their retreat. I knew that we had them on the run and that now was the time to pour it on.49

  I’d carefully studied the map and thought about the assault the whole night before. I’d anticipated this break. I knew, if we succeeded in pushing them off the hill, they’d be forced down a small ridge because of the way the terrain and our own forces would funnel them once they started withdrawing. I had ordered one squad with a machine gun through the jungle to set up there to wipe them out as they came hurrying off the hill.

  The squad leader, Isle, was my former radio operator. He and I had already shared an entire lifetime, shivering together to avoid hypothermia under the same poncho liner; sharing our last meals, our last package of freeze-dried coffee; sharing our letters, the sad ones and the glad ones. Sharing the decisions and the anguish. More than once we had shared what could have been our last moments alive.

  Isle was smart. Even though he was only a lance corporal and nineteen, because we’d lost so many squad leaders during the previous fighting, I had put him in charge of a squad and taken on a new radio operator.

  I remember screaming at Isle over the radio. “Move it! I want you there and I want you there now!” The enemy was doing just as I’d planned, but Isle wasn’t in position yet. “They’re starting to break! Get that gun set up! They’re going to get away, goddammit! Move!”

  I’d gone over some edge. This was blood lust. I was moving from white heat to red heat. My assigned objective, winning the hill, was ensured. I was no longer thinking how to accomplish my objective with the lowest loss of life to my side. I just wanted to keep killing gooks.

  I loved Isle like a younger brother, and Isle, like any younger brother perhaps, wanted to do well by his older brother. In any case, he’d do virtually anything to please me. He broke from the cover and safety of the jungle, the reason for the slow progress, and sprinted with the squad across exposed ground to set up the gun. Two rockets flashed out from the hill we were assaulting. Isle’s close friend Tennessee, a kid I’d often talked with as he was visiting Isle, was packing Isle’s radio. Both were killed. P-Dog, the machine gunner, took over the squad. He pulled the squad and the two bodies back to the safety of the jungle.

  The squad rejoined us after it was all over. I was so exhausted, and there was so little light because of smoke from burning napalm and thick clouds, that I always remember the scene as being near evening. It was, however, only eight or nine in the morning. I watched P-Dog climb wearily past all the smashed holes and bunkers, past the bodies. Isle was slung over his shoulders. When he reached me he just looked at me with a sad, sad look. Then he dumped Isle’s body to the ground at my feet.

  I didn’t know what to say.

  Another kid arrived with Tennessee slung over his shoulders and dumped him next to Isle.

  I asked P-Dog how it happened. P-Dog told me.

  When P-Dog left I went through Isle’s and Tennessee’s pockets. Isle had a letter from his mother saying, “Don’t you worry, Chip, you’ll be home in just seventeen more days.” I never knew, until that moment, that his nickname back home had been Chip.

  A week before he was due to go home my friend Mike committed a real read-about-it-with-horror-in-the-papers red heat atrocity. Mike was a good steady combat-experienced lance corporal in my company who was transferred to a CAG50 squad toward the end of his tour. After more than a year in Vietnam he’d seen a lot of combat and lost friends. Mike’s squad had been assigned to protect a small village. One day he captured a Viet Cong guerrilla near a village where just a week earlier Mike had lost several friends to land mines. The prisoner, like Mike, was around eighteen or twenty. He had been captured loaded with land mines. There was no doubt about his, or his unit’s, intentions. When you step directly on a land mine the explosion often kills you by going up between your legs. The survivors have to look around for missing pieces and make sure they get thrown into the poncho with the body so you get all of your pieces buried in the same place.

  Mike decided not to turn the prisoner over to the usual authorities, the South Vietnamese military, no paragons of human rights. He kept the prisoner to interrogate himself. The rational purpose for this so-called interrogation was to find out where the prisoner’s unit was and where they were setting booby traps or perhaps ambushes in order to avoid any more casualties to Mike’s squad. But, as Mike told me later, he “simply lost it.” He was “filled with rage.”

  Mike kept the kid for a day, beating him until he grew too tired to beat him further. He would then rest up, fly into another rage, and beat him some more. In Mike’s own words, “I beat him to a pulp.” He then hung the kid upside down from a flagpole, hoisting him in view of the entire village, to “let the village know what Marines did to VC who killed Marines.”

  The prisoner was seen hanging from the flagpole by an American Army unit who got him out of Mike’s hands. Fortunately, for both of them, the prisoner lived. Mike was tried, busted back to private, and discharged without honor. He has had to live with the fact that after months of honorable and difficult service he certainly had lost it, and this was his sad return to America.

  Mike now has a wife, kids, and a steady job in the upper management levels of a large corporation. When he told the story to me and a small group of veterans his eyes flickered from our faces to the floor and back again. I could see how desperately he wanted us to understand about the brutal and ugly way his friends had died, about his state of mind at the time. I could see his nervousness, even fear, that in admitting such an act he’d lose our respect. That he told this story is witness to his basic integrity. We didn’t condemn Mike, but many of us, thinking we’d seen and heard it all, were still shocked.

  This act haunts Mike still. He did it. It happened.

  I search my soul for whether or not I could have done what Mike did—or worse. I say no, but where is that “I” after months of killing, no sleep, and sheer horror? What, indeed, is the last straw when that “I,” facing the longest, most terrible storm of its life and fearing the loss of all hands, finally abandons ship, leaving only the primal split-off core, a core in too many of us that is a primitive enraged child?

  What pushes the few over the edge into perpetrating something like My Lai, or what Mike did, I don’t know.
But with my war experiences behind me, and five kids, I can only say I no longer make hard and fast judgments. What amount of pressure is reasonable before one checks out and lets the rage take over? How do you judge another human on this level?

  In the My Lai massacre Calley, Medina, and a bunch of others all lost it one day, just like Mike, just like me. The degree to which we each lost it varied. Suppose we all sat in a nice comfortable living room and watched a videotape of me shooting people who probably could have been taken prisoner and screaming at Isle to kill the fleeing enemy or, even harder, watched Mike hanging a body beaten to a pulp upside down from a flagpole. It will be close to impossible for people who have never experienced anything like these circumstances to reconcile the person on the video with this seemingly normal individual sitting next to them. Even I have a lot of difficulty. We veterans know this. We may wish it weren’t true, we may resent it, but deny it we cannot. This is yet another factor that drives us into silence.

  Suppose Mike had killed that kid? Mike would have been no different, his motives no different, his “red heat” no different. Should he have been sent to prison for life because he happened to be placed in that particular circumstance and the cumulative effects of months of warfare finally caused his particular ego to crack, to lose it? I become very uncomfortable when I’m around people with a superior and self-righteous attitude—a conviction that they could never have done such a thing as Mike did. True enough, perhaps, but if they had been in Mike’s skin from day zero, with Mike’s genetic makeup, specific childhood culture, and experiences of evil and of Vietnam, could they have acted any differently? Could they have had the “power and the freedom to do otherwise”? When we meet the next test, we can meet it only with the character we have at the time, and in this way we aren’t free. Our freedom lies in the fact that we can continually work to improve our character.