What It Is Like to Go to War

by Karl Marlantes

Unfortunately, we had a very large problem to overcome. The numbers looked bad and instead of thinking of putting us up for a unit citation some officers on the battalion staff were thinking of relieving the skipper because he’d lost so many men without enough enemy dead to show for it. Taking the hill meant nothing in the overall scheme of things. Here was the morale effect of the overriding strategy of the war in a nutshell. We who had done the fighting all felt immensely proud of what we’d done. We were proud we held the hill. The staff, however, was stuck explaining a poor kill ratio, the only number that supported the overall strategy of the war. The staff members didn’t know the facts about the actual fighting; they didn’t witness any of the actions—understandably, given that they weren’t there. What they needed to look good, and to make the company look good, was body counts way in excess of KIAs. Unfortunately, we timid types, who were there, never particularly wanted to leave the perimeter—under fire from an enemy who’d dug in all around us—to count bodies so the staff could get their numbers. So we had bad numbers. Somebody had to be responsible. (But we held the hill. We won, didn’t we?) It so happened that our company commander was a first lieutenant of twenty-three. He was cocky and more than a bit brash and had managed to get his picture in the papers several times already for previous actions. Many of the older career officers would have given a left nut to have a company in combat on their records and here was one being wasted on a hotshot ex–fraternity president who was probably going to go back to America and develop real estate. He was the easy choice for scapegoat. I, of course, was firmly with my company commander and very much wanted to give my version of the facts, so I was doubly motivated in this report to strike a blow for justice and truth. The skipper said we should write up the entire company for a unit commendation, so by God I was going to do a good job of it. I’d overcome those bad numbers.

  I had been told by some of the kids that they’d seen wire wrapped around the NVA bodies. I never saw any. I wrote it in the commendation as if it were a fact. I was going to get my guys that commendation no matter what.

  This may seem pretty trivial to a civilian reader, decades after the war, but the reader must realize how much the ideal of professionalism and honor means to the military. Believe me, it is not trivial to lie in a report. I still feel ashamed of doing it. Luckily, for me, the battalion commander was killed and the report must have gotten lost or thrown away by some wiser officer. The point I want to make, however, is not just that I felt I had done wrong. What amazes me to this day is that at the time I wrote it I actually believed what I wrote to be true, fervently. I’d have fought anyone who called my troops liars or me a liar and thrown my honor right on the line. I had convinced myself that NVA soldiers had wrapped barbed wire around themselves to slow their bleeding while making a fight to the death of it. This made our struggle for the hill that much more heroic. “In the face of a fanatical enemy... etc.” Yet, when I wrote it, I also knew it wasn’t true. I call this the lie of two minds.

  “I” convinced “myself.” The I that did the convincing was the one who needed desperately to justify the entire experience, to make it sane and right and okay and approved. Myself was convinced as the moral self, the part of me I would want to be a judge in a legal system. This moral part of us, however, in these extreme situations, is vulnerable to the overwhelming force of that part of us that needs to justify our actions.

  I am ashamed of this lie because it was done for nothing more than self-aggrandizement. There was no greater cause, such as saving lives. Also, in both of the previous examples of lying, I wasn’t of two minds. I didn’t believe what I was saying for a moment. I was in control. With this lie I’d lost myself. Perhaps this too adds to the shame.

  It is the lie of two minds that is the most dangerous. I’m sure William Westmoreland believed Khe Sanh was important militarily in order to justify the importance it gained politically back in the United States.57 Oliver North probably got into the lie of two minds when Congress told him he’d have to abandon people he’d promised to help. This was a Marine officer and Naval Academy graduate, absolutely steeped in the tradition of never abandoning fellow fighters, and it conflicted mightily with his promise to uphold the Constitution of the United States and probably a naive view that American leaders would never welsh on a deal in the first place.

  The deliberate lie is an intentionally launched piece of misinformation, which, like any other missile, can be launched for good or for evil. Its morality is dependent upon the intent of the launcher. Its effectiveness, as with all missiles, depends upon the launcher’s skill and judgment. The lie of two minds is like a wild card thrown into the system. There’s no control once it happens. It’s like the gods coming in and messing with our heads: “Let’s see what they do with this information, yuck, yuck.” The shame of the lie of two minds exists not only because it often ends up hurting a system you believe is a good one, but because it’s like abdicating the control of your weapon. No warrior could ever do this with pride.

  We lie because we find ourselves in positions where it appears the truth will hurt us. But a truth isn’t a thing like a flying rock. So by “hurt us” we must mean it will hurt some goal toward which we strive. And we’ve managed to confuse that goal with a definition of ourselves. “Hurt our ability to achieve our ends” equates to “hurt us.” Worse, we have such a large number of goals to use to define ourselves that we rarely know which to apply at any particular time. I want to be a hero. I want to stay alive. I want to be a good officer. I want my troops to like me. I want to defend my commanding officer. I want his job. I want to tell the whole world how incredibly difficult a time I have just had. I don’t want to look like a crybaby. I want to uphold the honor of my service. I want to get even.

  It’s quite clear I can’t give a straight report and achieve all of the above. It is also clear that I can’t consciously give an intentional lie, as that makes several of the above impossible to achieve as well. I therefore give a report that fits, and I believe it. Never mind that I shove the lie well down into my unconscious, where it lies buried for years. Lie as in “falsehood” also means “lie in wait.”

  To avoid the lie of two minds the warrior must do two things: first, consciously rank personal goals so their order of importance is clearly differentiated and, second, see which subpersonalities of his psyche will most benefit from each of those goals. Then, that part which is always there standing back and able to watch all the subpersonalities has to step in and choose which one gets satisfied and which ones don’t. When there are conflicting aspirations, one or more must be put aside. This takes a lot of difficult soul-searching and time and is extremely difficult to accomplish in the heat of war when you are young. Yet it must be done.

  7

  LOYALTY

  Warriors have always had to deal with loyalty. Concepts of loyalty change, however, and warriors have to cope with that as well. Through much of history loyalty pretty much meant being faithful to the leader of your group. In many parts of the world today loyalty is given to some concept of the nation or the state and leaders are simply viewed as temporary managers of these larger entities. No matter the course of the future the warrior will need to constantly reevaluate to whom or to what he is loyal and why. There will be situations when loyalty to the side of the fight or even some higher value is in direct conflict with loyalty to one’s own moral code. The warrior must live with these tensions and consciously choose among them. Sometimes the conflict will be unbearable. The warrior will fail and will have to learn to live with that.

  In 1964 I stood with a bunch of other kids, raised my right hand, and joined the United States Marine Corps. I swore an oath to follow the orders of the commander in chief and defend the Constitution of the United States of America. I don’t remember the precise words. I do remember the solemnity and seriousness with which I swore that oath. I believed in God. I believed in the Constitution. Most important, I believed that a president of the United States would never give me
an order that would cause me any moral conflict.

  Three years later I was in my room at University College, Oxford, England, struggling with my friend John about just such a moral conflict. We were both trying to decide whether to give up our Rhodes scholarships: in my case, to join my fellow Marines who were already fighting in Vietnam or to desert to Sweden or Algeria; in his case, to turn in his draft card, an act which entailed permanent exile in Canada.

  Earlier, in September, my commander in chief, President Lyndon Johnson, had given a speech in El Paso, Texas. I had listened to it in a 1954 Buick driving across South Dakota with a friend from college. We were on our way to New York from Seattle, he to the Columbia University business school and eventually the Peace Corps and I to Oxford and eventually Vietnam. I was by then a Marine second lieutenant with a temporary duty assignment to Oxford so I could take up my scholarship.58 In his speech, Johnson had made a remark about “cocktail critics,” people who bitch about things at cocktail parties but never have to face any of the hard choices. That remark hung with me all across the brown plains and all across the gray early-winter Atlantic on the S.S. United States with my fellow scholars. And it hung with me every day of what should have been the time of my life at Oxford.

  By the fall of 1967 I couldn’t defend the war politically. Nor did I. John and I basically agreed it was a mistake. But I would get news of friends getting killed or wounded. I think I kept hoping, probably like the mystified battered wife who keeps hoping her husband will change, that there really was some sort of reason behind the tragedy, that it would all turn out okay and understandable in the end.

  John was from a small town in Minnesota, the son of a truck driver. Although a similar social background made it easier for us to be friends, John was quite unlike the other Rhodes scholars and me. Most of us exuded the look of earnest young men on the way to power. John had a beard that touched the top button of his work shirt. His hair hung over his collar. When I first met him on the United States, I worried that he’d find me too conventional, too square. After we were at Oxford a few weeks, I found we shared the same passions. John taught me my first talking blues.

  Above all, we shared a fierce passion not to be cocktail critics. For some reason, neither John nor I could sit it out with student deferments like others. The war kept at us. We both felt we were just hiding behind privilege. The discussions got more heated; the stakes were raised. Stay and be a coward, go to Sweden or Algeria and be a deserter and never go home again, or sign up and kill other people for no apparent good reason or be killed yourself. I kept thinking of my friends, both from the Marine Corps and from my high school, already fighting and dying in Vietnam. Then there was Meg: beautiful, deep, warm Meg. I was in love for the first time in my life.

  I lived racked at two levels. I could stay with friends, parties, studies, and, most important, Meg or choose between exile for life and war. Worse, the wrong war. For me the penalty of refusing to fight wasn’t draft dodging but desertion, a far more serious crime, involving a military trial instead of a civilian one.

  Studies lost all value. Who cared what Locke, Berkeley, or Hume thought about reality? I couldn’t go to a party without thinking of my Marine friends, terrified in the jungle while I was hanging on to Meg’s very beautiful warm body with one arm and holding a pint of bitter in the other. Oxford, a place I’d happily be buried in should I happily die there someday, became a cold gray limbo between black choices. And the one choice my conscience would not allow was to sit it out in college, a cocktail critic.

  John and I decided what to do around three o’clock in the morning. The narrow Oxford streets were cold, wetly reflecting yellow sodium vapor lamps. The pubs had closed hours before. I feel now as if there were a candle lit in my room, but I can’t imagine there was. Still, that is the image I carry, this sputtering little light, this bit of warmth, that cold North Atlantic drizzle outside, and John and I alone.

  I had to force back tears when the decision came. Neither of us could sit it out in college while those with less education bore the burden. I could not desert and go with him to Canada and he could not go with me to war, but we would both leave Oxford together. I walked with him to where he had to climb over the back wall, as the college gates had long been closed. I shoved on the cold gritty sole of his shoe to boost him over. That was the last memory I had of him, a cold gritty boot in my hands launching him into darkness.

  John had to get to Canada before the State Department pulled his passport. I had no intention of waiting around Oxford for the Marine Corps to decide what to do with me. I pulled all of my scholarship money from the bank and went to Africa, harboring some vague idea that maybe Algeria and exile wouldn’t be all that bad and I’d desert after all. But after weeks in North Africa, smoking all the hash and kif I could get my hands on, I decided to face the music I’d started. I can still see the amused look on the face of the young Navy lieutenant at an American base north of Casablanca when a desert-darkened hippie in a camel hair djellaba and heelless yellow leather slippers announced he was Second Lieutenant Karl Marlantes, USMCR,59 reporting for active duty.

  He advised me to go back to where the bureaucracy thought I was. So I returned to England, received my orders, and had a hell of a farewell party. The last I saw of Oxford was two friends waving good-bye to me from the train platform and my pockets full of hash slabs. I clearly remember thinking I would not be likely to see them again.

  I had a terrible aching parting from Meg. She hadn’t come to the party, nor did she come to the train. We’d said farewell alone in a drizzly dawn in Christ Church Meadow after being up all night. Her face was wet with the fog from the Thames and tears. We walked along the river’s edge, occasionally throwing a small stick into the water, disturbing the quietly feeding ducks. We kept making a foolish joke through the sadness about some crazy notion of taking the first duck to London. I was terribly frightened that I would be killed and had already started withdrawing from her. She felt betrayed and hurt by my actions. Not only did I not consult with her about my decision, I didn’t even think about consulting her. This hurt her—and it was true. In those days it would simply never occur to me that my business was anyone’s but my own, particularly decisions of conscience. Meg’s hurt translated into anger and eventually a Dear John while I was in Vietnam. I wrote to her for several years but she never wrote back. I eventually gave up. I’ve never gotten over it. Yet, given who I was then, I don’t think I could have done differently, nor could she. Even given who I am today, I still would not choose any differently. But I wouldn’t leave Meg out.60

  What I was experiencing was my first moral dilemma about where my loyalties lay. On a psychological level I was facing a hard choice between duty and heart, loyalty to an abstraction such as a unit or even ideals and loyalty to a person. In the months to come I would often face this conflict between loyalty to some abstraction such as “unit” or “country” and loyalty to those immediately around me—loyalty to duty or loyalty to those who were going to get killed and maimed doing the duty. Many times, someone I considered to be a complete ass would order me to do something I thought stupid or even stupidly dangerous and I, cursing out loud at my superior’s stupidity, would go off and do what he’d ordered, knowing that a terrible price would be paid. In those cases I remained loyal to the larger unit, to the abstraction of structure of command.

  I must also add that it wasn’t purely a choice of loyalty upward versus loyalty downward. Loyalty downward included not only the unit immediately around me, my platoon, but also the smallest unit of all, myself. There was always the pervasive fear of the consequences of disobeying a direct order while in combat, none pleasant and some, like a long prison term, very unpleasant. This fear provided a very easy rationalization for following stupid orders, a common defense used by many of those on trial at Nuremberg, though to little avail. No professional warrior should be ignorant of Nuremberg. What one thinks about Nuremberg will have a great deal of influence on what
one thinks about following orders.61

  It is easier to disobey orders in some systems than in others. This doesn’t change the morality, but it changes the anguish and the cost. Anguish and cost are significant factors in making moral decisions. We agree that to kill is wrong. Yet most would agree that to kill someone who is torturing you is right. The difference is the anguish of the person being tortured.

  In nations such as Baathist Iraq or Nazi Germany, the consequences of disobeying orders were extreme, like death by torture and strangulation from meat hooks—not only for the individual but for his family. I reiterate: identical moral choices can require far more personal courage in some instances than in others and those who do the right thing under such circumstances are very brave indeed. An individual in the military service of a Western democracy has considerable freedom to disobey orders. This is certainly true in the American military. Nonmilitary people will be surprised at how often, particularly in combat, you can work things around. For example, you can make a mistake. You can not understand. You can lose communication. You can even tell the idiot that you think he’s an ass, you won’t obey his stupid order, and you want a transfer. There are very few officers who want to have the question of whether or not they are stupid asses debated in a court-martial.

  Even in circumstances where I could have very likely escaped punishment, however, I followed the “stupid” order. I even did it in circumstances where any possible punishment later compared with what I was being asked to do now looked trivial. Surely, the risk of death through a court-martial in 1968 was nearly nonexistent as compared with the extremely high risk of death through assaulting a hill. Why did I follow patently stupid orders to my own detriment and the detriment of my men? To whom or what did I give my loyalty? Obviously it wasn’t to my own men. They would pay as dearly as I would. Nor was it to myself, because good lieutenants in battle have even higher casualty rates than their men.