What It Is Like to Go to War

by Karl Marlantes

  Still, we can’t let the Mikes of the world off the hook because of this lack of freedom at the time. This is because the threat of punishment for committing atrocities probably saves lots of prisoners’ lives. It provides just that much societal structure to help keep a wobbling ego from collapsing. And egos get pretty wobbly in warfare. But when we punish, the correct attitude should be not self-righteousness but sorrow. There, but for the grace of God, go I.

  The third kind of atrocity is the atrocity of the fallen standard. This doesn’t happen instantly, nor does it happen only under the stress of actual fighting. Remember, in my story about the no-quarter fight, we’d actually decided ahead of time not to take prisoners and not to let any of the enemy get away. I had even devised a plan for it. It was clearly premeditated.

  We didn’t decide this by vote. We didn’t talk about it. We just knew what we were going to do—shoot anything that moved that day until it stopped moving—and we did.

  Marines have traditionally engaged in fierce no-quarter combat. The very nature of their traditional mission, as shock troops against tough objectives, puts them in situations where the taking of prisoners is not even close to convenient and is usually downright dangerous.51 The Marines were the ones who primarily fought the so-called Banana Wars of the 1920s and ’30s. These “wars” were some of the first the United States conducted against guerrillas, excepting the American Indian wars. Guerrillas faced very probable death if captured, because they would be tried as traitors or criminals, not prisoners of war. Men in these circumstances are much less likely to surrender. The fighting, necessarily, gets more brutal for both sides. The war in the Pacific against the Japanese was an order of magnitude worse in this regard. The Japanese soldiers considered surrender to be shameful, while dying for the emperor was believed a great honor for them and their families. Not only did the Japanese not surrender; they would often commit suicide trying to take some of the enemy with them.52 Trusting the surrender signal, only to have the hidden hand grenade go off, soon led to not trusting surrender signals. It was also well known that surrender to the Japanese entailed a very high chance of death through starvation and brutality. This too was a far different circumstance from surrender to the Germans, no picnic but a situation with much higher survival rates.

  The Pacific theater fighting grew more brutal. New recruits had to be prepared for all of this. The wisdom of past mistakes got incorporated in the training and the culture, even though you’d be hard pressed ever to find a Marine, during World War II or in Vietnam, who would have said Marines don’t believe in taking prisoners. Don’t get me wrong. Marines do take prisoners. But, back then, in Vietnam, closer to World War II than it is to us today, with most of the very senior officers and noncommissioned officers having fought against the Japanese, the code of conduct concerning the taking of prisoners, at least in my unit, was “not very goddamn often.”

  When I arrived in-country I heard stories about previous operations where it was clear that no one took prisoners. The remarks seem callous now. Obviously many of the enemy soldiers were conscripted, as were ours. Surely, most of them must have wished they were back home, just as I did. I had nothing personal against these people. I actually admired them for their fighting abilities. It now seems obviously senseless and unnecessarily cruel to have continued to shoot at them when they wanted to quit or retreat.

  Yet our job was to kill as many as possible, retreating or not. Taking the hill was only secondary to the strategy of attrition and its measurement, the body count. No-quarter fighting fit perfectly with that disastrous and stupid notion of body count upon which all professional soldiers in Vietnam were judged. I remember the crisply starched major giving our bunch of brand-new lieutenants our first briefing on the division’s current operation, which we were about to join. “It’s a war of attrition, gentlemen. We’re here to kill the enemy, and kill him in far greater numbers than he kills us. Don’t ever forget that.”

  I didn’t forget.

  During the war we were constantly faced with the stark fact that taking prisoners entails risk to your own side. You are slowed down and divided in order to guard them. You risk your own helicopters and helicopter crews to fly them out. They can turn on you if you fall asleep.

  And I wanted to live too. I wanted to be the meanest motherfucker in the valley, and if I couldn’t be, then I wanted him on my side.

  No-quarter was floating around. I tuned in.

  Racism and pseudospeciation were also floating around. If you were a soldier during World War II and your own grandparents were German or Italian, or if people in your unit spoke German or Italian as a mother tongue, it was far more difficult to fall into thinking of the enemy as animals deserving of slaughter. If they stood up to surrender, you were a little more likely to see them as humans wanting to quit, just as you would want to quit under similar circumstances. But if someone is of a different color and a vastly different culture, as was the case with the Japanese, it gets a lot easier to pseudospeciate. And both sides did. On the Japanese side this was exacerbated by a government policy of isolation from foreign influences for years. On the American side this was furthered by government policy that directed second- or third-generation Japanese Americans away from fighting in the Pacific, making it even easier to dehumanize the Japanese, since no one on our side looked like them.53 Worse, the U.S. government officially condoned racism by sending innocent Japanese Americans to concentration camps, making the “Jap” scapegoat USDA approved.

  Pseudospeciation happened in Vietnam, as in all wars. Most Americans were big and black or big and white compared with most Vietnamese, who were small and sort of brownish. The Americans had very few small brownish people on their side to remind them that small brownish people are people too. We had no Asian Americans in my particular unit, and they were rare in the Marine Corps in general. I don’t know why. Perhaps a lingering suspicion of racism in the Marine Corps steered them toward other services. Perhaps their culture didn’t send young men into volunteer military organizations during the Vietnam War as blindly as did other cultures.54

  Fallen-standard atrocities don’t occur just around taking prisoners. Another example of an atrocity of the fallen standard was the time several of the kids in my platoon cut off ears from the bodies of the NVA that they’d killed. They did this as a way of gathering a sort of trophy. I don’t believe they actually thought for a moment in any conscious way about desecrating or dishonoring the dead soldiers—no more than a hunter would think about taking the antlers from an elk to hang over the barn door. The ears went into rubber bands on their helmets or were hung by string around their necks. “I killed this many. Look at me. Seven with one blow.” It’s similar to the psychology that lies behind letter jackets. It’s just that these eighteen-year-olds weren’t playing high school basketball.

  After all the horror I’d seen already, this particular act actually didn’t bother me at all. I could easily have let it go. I pretended to be angry, but they probably saw through it. It goes back to Lawrence’s comment: “What now looks wanton or sadic seemed in the field inevitable, or just unimportant routine.” The ordinary dead body in Vietnam was usually a mess. Whether it had an ear or not was nothing. One might just as well have taken belt buckles, as we often did. We could trade them for socks and beer with the guys in the rear areas. Ears could also be traded. One pair was worth about a case of beer.

  The ear cutters were surprised when I disciplined them by making them throw away the ears and then go outside our lines and bury the bodies, hard hot work in an environment definitely lacking OSHA approval. I should have had them bury the ears with the bodies, but it didn’t occur to me then.

  We have an idea of what is right or wrong. And we can debate moral issues as ideas. But moral standards are not ideas; they exist in the form of observable measurable behavior. What one sees, hears, and feels every day, by observing how people around one behave, inculcates such standards of behavior. Take standards of excellenc
e in companies. Everyone knows what perfect quality is. That’s an idea. But if every day a worker trashes some 3 percent of the production through carelessness, and no one says anything, pretty soon the standard is a 3 percent error rate, even though the ideal is perfect. Three percent was pretty well accepted as an American standard in the manufacture of memory devices in the early 1980s. Then along came Japanese memory-component manufacturers. These people would get very exercised about even one mistake—one—not 1 percent. They would fly a vice president over to apologize if it happened. You can imagine what got said to the employees involved.

  Both sides of the ocean had the same ideal. They both knew what “meets specifications” was. But the Japanese behaved differently. Behavior sets standards, not ideals. So the Japanese ate American market share like park bears going through picnic baskets.

  We talk about moral ideas. We operate on standards. It’s the same in war, where cruelty not only is allowable but often is encouraged.

  The answer to fallen-standard kinds of atrocities is quite simply to never allow behavior to differ from what is stated publicly. We do this by very quickly punishing even small lapses. We punish with compassion and understanding. War is cruel. People crack under its pressure. But we punish—and we try to help the one who failed to unravel the complex feelings afterward. The instant any excess in cruelty occurs it must be noted and screamed about. Not only did few scream about taking ears; many commanders actually encouraged it “to confirm the body count.” It was as if we were back in the days of my childhood in Oregon shooting crows for bounty, cutting the feet off and turning them in to the Department of Fish and Wildlife for fifteen cents a pair.

  6

  LYING

  One of the greatest tests of character is telling the truth when it hurts the teller. The Vietnam War will be infamous for the way those who perpetrated it lied to those who fought and paid for it. Lies in the Vietnam War were more prevalent because that war was fought without meaning. Death, destruction, and sorrow need to be constantly justified in the absence of some overarching meaning for the suffering. Lack of this overarching meaning encourages making things up, lying, to fill the gap in meaning.

  People lie. They lie in business, they lie in universities, they lie in marriages, and they lie in the military. Lying, however, is usually considered not normal, an exception. In Vietnam lying became the norm and I did my part. In Vietnam, lying became so much part of the system that sometimes not lying seemed immoral.

  Kill ratios and body counts were the prime example of how “normal” became abnormal in Vietnam. Or was it vice versa? Take a typical squad-level firefight on a routine security patrol, Lance Corporal Smithers in charge. All sorts of shit breaks loose. Teenagers get killed and maimed. The radio nets go crazy with artillery missions, sit-reps, mortar missions, anxious platoon commander, anxious company commander, anxious battalion commander, S-3, S-2—all wanting to know what’s happening. Good communication is definitely a two-edged sword. When the shooting stops, the pressure begins for the most important piece of information, the sole justification in the Vietnam War for all this sorrow: the body count. Smithers, what’s the score?

  The teenage adrenaline-drained patrol leader has to call in the score so analysts, newspaper reporters, and politicians back in Washington have something to do. Never mind that Smithers and his squad may have stopped a developing attack planned to hit the company that night, saving scores of lives and maintaining control over a piece of ground. All they’ll be judged on, and all their superiors have to be judged on, is the kill ratio.

  Smithers’s best friend has just been killed. Two other friends are missing pieces of their bodies and are going into shock. No one in the squad knows if the enemy is 15 meters away waiting to open up again or running. Smithers is tired and has a lot of other things on his mind. With scorekeepers often 25 kilometers away, no one is going to check on the score. In short, Smithers has a great incentive to lie.

  He also has a great need to lie. His best friend is dead. “Why?” he asks himself. This is where the lying in Vietnam all began. It had to fill the long silence following Smithers’s anguished “Why?”

  So it starts. “Nelson, how many did you get?” Smithers asks.

  PFC Nelson looks up from crying over the body of his friend Katz and says, “How the fuck do I know?”

  His friend Smithers says, “Well, did you get that bastard that came around the dogleg after Katz threw the Mike-26?”

  Nelson looks down at Katz’s face, hardening and turning yellow like tallow. “You’re goddamn right I got him,” he almost whispers. It’s all he can offer his dead friend.

  “There’s no body.”

  “They drug the fucker away. I tell you I got him!” Nelson is no longer whispering.

  “We can call it a probable,” says Smithers.

  “Do what you fucking like, but I tell you I got him. I saw him jump. Half a fucking magazine. He’s dead. He’s greased. Now fuck off.”

  The patrol leader doesn’t have a body, but what are the odds that he’s going to call his friend a liar or, even more difficult, make Katz’s death meaningless, given that the only meaning now lies in this one statistic? No one is congratulating him for exposing the enemy, keeping them screened from the main body, which is the purpose of security patrols.

  He calls in one confirmed kill.

  Just then PFC Schroeder comes crawling over with Kool-Aid stains all around his mouth and says, “I think I got one, right by the dogleg of the trail after Katz threw the grenade.”

  “Yeah, we called that one in.”

  “No, it ain’t the one Nelson got. I tell you I got another one.”

  Smithers thinks it was the same one but he’s not about to have PFC Schroeder feeling bad, particularly after they’ve all seen their squadmate die. Then there’s still the problem of getting them all out alive, and who the fuck cares if it was the same one, and he’s on the radio about the medevac anyway, so. “Wait one, Delta. I got another probable here. Now, I copy, the bird can pick up our Coors and Pabst55 at Pall Mall plus two point two, Winston minus...” The last thing on Smithers’s mind is the integrity of meaningless numbers.

  The message gets relayed to the battalion commander. He’s just taken two wounded and one dead. All he has to report is one confirmed, one probable. This won’t look good. Bad ratio. He knows all sorts of bullets were flying all over the place. It was a point-to-point contact, so no ambush, so the stinkin’ thinkin’ goes round and round, so the probable had to be a kill. But really if we got two confirmed kills, there was probably a probable. I mean, what’s the definition of probable if it isn’t probable to get one? What the hell, two kills, two probables.

  Our side is now ahead. Victory is just around the corner.

  Then the artillery commander calls in. “How many kills did we get in support of that firefight?” The infantry commander knows how important the kill ratio is to the artillery commander’s career, and here he has only two kills and two probables to share out. But you don’t want the artillery to feel demotivated, and maybe you played football together at West Point or Quantico. There’s only one decent thing to do. Give the artillery credit for a kill. (But really, the infantry did do the killing, so why change the infantry numbers?)

  So a kill goes up from the artillery battery, through the artillery regiment. One kill, and... What’s this? One probable. It only makes sense. After all, we were dropping in 105mm high explosives with timed air bursts and that new cluster round with the flechettes, and, man, that combination is some kind of lethal and, besides, you know how the sneaky bastards haul their dead away to fuck up our damage assessments. We, of course, do it to properly bury our dead.

  By the time all this shit piles up at the briefing in Saigon, we’ve won the war.

  Imagine the scene in ancient Greece if the Greeks had the same attitude. Word has just reached Greek headquarters that Leonidas and the three hundred Spartans have all died defending the pass at Thermopylae.


  “Good Zeus! They’re all dead? What was the body count? What do you mean you didn’t think it was important? If you think I’m going to take this news to Themistocles with nothing to show for it but a bunch of dead Spartans, you’d better think again. Now either I want this goddamn thing hushed up quick or you get your ass back up to that pass and get me a body count we can take to Athens. I don’t care if you have to include Persian chickens...”

  Why don’t decent people stand up and scream? It’s because there’s nothing in it for them. They’re in a system in which they wish to survive. Assume you’re a decent soldier, like me. You and I are decent, aren’t we? You know there’s a bunch of lying bastards, the other guys, who will do anything to get ahead and who aren’t decent at all. If you naively turn in only one probable, when you know that under similar circumstances the other sobs are going to turn in at least five of one kind or the other, well, who’s going to end up running the place? A bunch of lying bastards. It’s actually your moral duty to keep up.56

  When Norman Schwarzkopf told reporters during Desert Storm that estimates of how many Iraqi soldiers had been killed were meaningless, I raised my fist in the air and shouted for joy. The pressure for numbers and statistics comes from people who don’t have anything to do, don’t know what it’s all about or how it happens, and are frustrated because they’re left out of what looks to be, at a safe distance, something exciting. The press people are constantly pushing briefers with inane questions like “What percentage of the Republican Guards is destroyed?” Suppose I just told you that half of my platoon had been destroyed but didn’t tell you the remaining half is so goddamned mad we’re going to fight twice as hard. What meaning will be conveyed by statistics like “50 percent destroyed”? The only meaningful statistic in warfare is when the other side quits.

  This nonsense went on in Vietnam for several reasons. Probably the most important was that the president and a group of advisers insisted on running things from Washington with no clear military objectives to pursue. So they had to have something upon which to make decisions, because, after all, if they didn’t make decisions, what the hell were they doing in charge? The second factor was military careerism, in both competing with statistics and not blowing the whistle on their stupidity. This happened all the way up the line. And finally the lying took place because the kill ratio statistics were so totally out of line with the ordinary grunt’s psychology that lying about it was a trivial and meaningless act for him.