What It Is Like to Go to War

by Karl Marlantes

  The inspector, himself the son of a former retainer of Michizane but now through circumstances a retainer of the new lord, looks carefully and long at the head and then announces in a businesslike tone that it is indeed Michizane’s son and leaves with it, to present to his new master.

  That evening the mother waits for her husband to return. When the door opens the husband announces, “Rejoice, my wife, our darling son has proved of service to his lord!” The inspector was the dead boy’s father.

  One can grasp this tale only if one understands the basic philosophy of Bushido. The inspector’s own father had long been in the service of Michizane and had received much from this lord. The inspector himself, because of Bushido, would never be untrue to his own cruel master, but the inspector’s son could still be true to the cause of the inspector’s father’s lord, Michizane. Mother, father, and son, together, had all agreed upon the plan.

  The heart of Bushido is that loyalty is more important than life, yours or your child’s. A follower of Bushido would immediately sacrifice his life to avoid betraying his master or his own conscience. This looks crazy to most Americans, but that is because we value individuals above the group or society. The Japanese, certainly back then, did not. The fundamental essence of Bushido does, however, remain true. Loyalty should always be to the higher cause.

  Again Nitobe, in Bushido, writes, “Bushido did not require us to make our conscience the slave of any lord or king... When a subject differed from his master, the loyal path for him to pursue was to use every available means to persuade him of his error, as Kent did to King Lear. Failing in this, let the master deal with him as he wills. In cases of this kind, it was quite a usual course for the samurai to make the last appeal to the intelligence and conscience of his lord by demonstrating the sincerity of his words with the shedding of his own blood.”

  The Japanese don’t have a monopoly on this positive aspect of Bushido. Erwin Rommel and his fellow conspirators in the attempted assassination of Hitler and those Iraqi officers who were executed for opposing Saddam Hussein’s plan to invade Kuwait all understood well the value of and the price of placing conscience first when it was in conflict with loyalty. But men like these are rare. Back there in the jungle I didn’t have the wisdom or maturity to make such a choice consciously, and I was able to do so without personal sacrifice because the skipper took it all upon himself.

  Upon reflection, I would have made the same choice, but I also would have had to choose to hang with the skipper should he be court-martialed. I simply didn’t think about that. In combat, one should be very suspicious of painless moral choices. When you are confronted with a seemingly painless moral choice, the odds are that you haven’t looked deeply enough.

  8

  HEROISM

  The heroic journey can be taken consciously or unconsciously. There’s a time in one’s life when the unconscious heroic journey is understandable, when one is young and in positions of little authority. The young warriors of the future will still largely perform their heroic tasks unconsciously. It is a part of development, eventually to be outgrown. As warriors grow older, however, and move into positions of power and authority, far more is at stake because their actions affect a far wider field. Because there is more to lose, they will have to perform their heroic acts with full consciousness of the often painful consequences for everyone, including themselves. Many heroic acts of this kind will go unnoticed by society—if not actively denigrated. There will be no medals. This makes such acts far more difficult to do, and therefore even more heroic.

  A wise man once said to be careful of what you wish for, because you may get it. I wanted to be a hero.

  Our company had been pulled out of the bush to act as a reaction force. On the one hand it meant a rest. We got to be in tents set up next to a small airfield in the center of a narrow valley about 20 kilometers east of Khe Sanh. There were showers heated by diesel fuel, hot food, and a portable electricity generator so that in the evenings we could sit outside, rain or mist, and see a movie. Then there was the other hand. We were in combat readiness at all times, waiting. We sat there, most of the lower ranks unfairly having to fill sandbags, all of us whittling, writing letters, bullshitting, but always listening in on the battalion and regimental nets, trying to determine which firefight was going to turn into the mess that would send in the Marines.

  So whether in the outdoor shower or at the movie watching Clint Eastwood, we were constantly aware that within minutes we could be running for our rifles and packs, the skipper shouting for the platoon commanders, maps out, hearts racing, while the thumping of rotor blades echoed off the green walls of the valley as the choppers peeled off one by one to take us to where some of us surely were going to die.

  I remember that particular dying day. The soft gray of the sky was slowly going dull as the sun began its afternoon slide into Laos. I watched two squads, who’d been filling sandbags for some one-star general at a place called Task Force Hotel, run full bore the long half mile to their gear, which waited neatly stacked by the runway. Marines were in trouble. Semper fi.

  I remember the stomach-turning lurch of the chopper as it came out of a deep spiral just north of the Rock Pile, about 10 kilometers south of the DMZ. I was trying to get my bearings on the revolving hilltops and rivers, my map out, my hands trembling. My neck snapped backward, whipping my helmet against the bulkhead, as the chopper jolted into the ground. I remember the crew chief screaming at us to get out of the chopper because we were taking fire standing in the landing zone. Several kids on the helo team had to jump for it because the pilot lost his nerve and gunned the chopper out of the zone too soon. The last one dropped around ten feet with ninety pounds on his back. He broke his leg. We temporarily lost his squad because they had to stay on the LZ to protect him, weakening the company, and then another chopper crew had to risk their lives to get him out. Combat magnifies small acts terribly.

  The shooting was all over before I knew what was going on.

  A company from another battalion had been in a fight somewhere to our east with an NVA unit of unknown size but big enough to cause some heartburn when they started chewing on each other. We were launched to take the NVA unit from behind, simultaneously blocking their exit in this narrow valley. They’d taken us under fire as we came in, but, seeing they would soon be between the hammer and the anvil, they had quickly disengaged. Now they were moving toward an ominous-looking ridgeline that stretched across our northern horizon, dark and gray-green in the somber light, sheathed in clouds and fog.

  Through our field glasses, whenever the swirling fog would thin a little, we could see movement and fresh diggings of a sizable unit already on top. And now reinforcements were climbing to join them. The order came to exploit the situation. The other company and our company would assault at first light. To do this meant we had to sneak up on them that night. We stripped down to essentials, leaving our gear in a neat pile on the jungle floor, and started climbing at around 0130 that night.

  In war you need to be lucky. Be at war long enough and you’ll have some bad days. Just before dawn, about 500 meters from the NVA position, we started running into booby traps, trip wires leading to mines lashed in the trees at chest level. Our point men were terrified. We rotated them every five minutes, pushed ahead. Then we stumbled into a listening post and a brief firefight erupted. So much for surprise.

  The other company, working up another finger to our right, took a couple of nasty hits. I heard someone screaming after the dull crump of an explosion. The screaming went on for a full minute, a lone voice, piercing through the fog and jungle from a couple of kilometers away from us until abruptly cut off. I found out later it was a friend of mine from the Basic School. I was told that his lower jaw, his entire face, and a leg had been blown off by a DH-10 directional mine, normally used against tanks. His platoon sergeant had run up to see what the screaming was all about and had cut it off by placing his hand against the hole where the voice box was sti
ll intact. Eventually, I understand, he pinched off the carotid artery and my friend died, still fully aware.

  The other company commander lost his nerve and stopped. It happens, even in the Marine Corps. Our company made the assault alone.

  The next day we took a second hill just to our west but couldn’t hold both for lack of Marines. We regrouped on the first hill and were assaulted that night by NVA sappers and ground troops. Another friend who’d gone with me through PLC66 was in the company that stopped. He took his platoon, on his own authority, and worked his way up to join us. He reached us when we were much in need defending the hill against counterattacks. The greater part of our ammunition had been spent in the assault and we were now two full nights without sleep. I remember him and his platoon sergeant making the rounds of the holes under fire just after they’d arrived, eager to make amends for not joining the assault, eager to prove themselves always faithful—which they did.

  Instead of going with them to help familiarize them with the perimeter, I just watched, telling myself that I’d already risked my neck enough. I’m still ashamed of it.

  In the midst of all this chaos and carnage, cowardice and honor, I won my first medal, a Bronze Star. It was during the initial assault. The platoon commander who replaced me when I was moved up to XO was green. He had been in only one real fight, not counting the hot landing. I couldn’t stand to have my old platoon make the assault without me. My actual post, as number two, was with the command group on a small knoll just down the ridgeline from the hill we were assaulting. My job was to help the skipper direct the artillery and the supporting fire from the weapons platoon and be there to take over if he got killed or wounded. I couldn’t stand it. I told the skipper I was joining the assault and didn’t wait to hear an answer.

  The small knoll and the larger hill where the NVA were dug in were connected by a blasted barren neck, the top of the ridge. I ran alone down this neck between the command post and the assaulting Marines. The assault group was already at the FLD67 draped across the ridgeline, one end of the string hanging down the south slope and the other end hanging down the north slope. I knew that one very critical tactical task would be to keep the assault together, as the tendency is for the squads to slide down their respective sides of the ridge, opening a gap in the assault and weakening the force to be applied against the NVA bunkers. In any assault the defenders are usually considered to have at least a three-to-one advantage, mainly because they are dug in and have prepared defensive fires on all the easy ways up. Up is the other operative word. Assaulting a hill slows and exhausts the attackers enormously, making them very vulnerable to fire. To succeed, an assault depends on all-out fury focused at the smallest possible point.

  Artillery shells were piling into the hill above us. Pieces of nearly spent shrapnel were falling beside me as I ran toward the FLD. While I was running toward my old platoon and the coming assault, I felt an overwhelming sense of excitement, almost joy. I was rejoining my unit. I was nearly crazy with adrenaline. The screaming and earth-shattering artillery rounds filled the air around me with vibrant shaking noise that I felt pounding right up through the soles of my jungle boots and smashing into my face and ears from the shivering air. I’ve jumped out of airplanes, climbed up cliff sides, raced cars, done drugs. I’ve never found anything comparable. Combat is the crack cocaine of all excitement highs—with crack cocaine costs.

  The artillery stopped, smoke grenades were popped, and we stood up and walked up the hill in an eerie silence, waiting for the first bullets. Then, all across our front, unseen machine guns and small arms opened up. Bullets cracked past our ears, kicked dirt, and killed. We surged forward. Everything was blood in the throat, shouting, running, furious thinking, noise, and chaos.

  I kept screaming at the troops to try to keep the gap from opening. They responded admirably. We hit the slope of the hill as one. Then began the extremely hard job of climbing it under fire. The new platoon commander immediately had his hands full trying to force through, or around, a concentration of bunkers and holes on our right flank, about midway up the hillside. I went tearing around a small bump of dirt to the left of where the ridgeline joined the steeper hill, working my way sideways on the hillside, trying to link two squads that had drifted apart while at the same time spreading people to our left trying to keep them from bunching up.68 There I saw Utter, a tall awkward kid of eighteen, leaning with his back against the steep hill, frantically trying to clear his M-16. I remember his Adam’s apple pumping up and down. He was near panic.

  I threw myself against the hillside, so steep here that both of us were actually standing, leaning our backs against it, looking out over the valley below us. Bullets, exceeding the sound barrier, made loud sonic snaps over our heads, but we were safe in this little cup that protected us. Utter’s magazine hadn’t been properly seated, causing the bolt to hang up on its forward edge, a common problem with the M-16. I cleared it for him, fired a short burst, and handed the rifle back to him. I asked him where his squad leader was. He didn’t know exactly. Over there someplace.

  I looked up over the lip of the cup and could see that the brush had been carefully cleared away from the ground up to about knee level. By this time I’d been around long enough to know this meant a machine-gun emplacement. They’d shoot the legs first. When the attacker fell, the bullets would finish him off as the body fell through the kill zone.

  I grabbed Utter by the shirt and forced his head above the lip to show him the trap, shouting at him not to go up that way, to try to find some way around. He stared at the cut brush. I yanked him down and then told him to stay put. I’d find his squad leader and we’d get a team together and get the gun by flanking it from the left side. Don’t go up there. He nodded, still dazed with fear. I made him shoot a couple of rounds. He nodded; he was all right. I took off to organize an attack on the machine gun. As I left the protection of the cup I saw Utter take off, straight up the hill. I’ll never know why. Perhaps he too wanted to be a hero. Maybe he just wanted to show me he was a good Marine.

  My former platoon sergeant, Staff Sergeant Bell, came running around from the opposite side. His radioman, Lance Corporal Putnam, piled into the hillside right after him. Bell, a terrific platoon sergeant, was doing the same thing I was, trying to get the two squads back together, but from the other direction. So the gap was getting closed.

  I shouted at him, “Utter’s just gone up the hill toward that machine gun. Where in hell’s Second Squad?”

  He just pointed over his shoulder and leaned his back against the side of the hill, his chest heaving. I saw movement in the brush and heard the sound of an M-16, so knew that Bell and the second squad leader had closed the gap.

  Then we all heard the enemy machine gun open up. You can definitely tell this machine gun by its heavy popping sound, methodical and hammerlike, unlike the heavy slapping sound of the AK-47 or the tense, high-pitched scream of our own M-16s.

  I heard Utter cry out, “I’m hit.”

  The machine gun kept firing.

  I looked at Bell and he looked at me. He shook his head, lips pressed tight. I finally said, “I don’t have anything else to do. I’ll go get him.”

  Bell looked directly at me and said, “Don’t go up there, Lieutenant.”

  I was split three ways. I’d known Utter for months. He was my guy, even though I’d just been replaced. He was hit. I simply wanted to get him before he bled to death. Another part of me was screaming to listen to Bell and stay safe. Then there was the third part. I wanted a medal.

  I’d always wanted a medal, ever since I looked at my father’s medals from World War II, ever since I’d seen Audie Murphy in To Hell and Back, ever since I was never chosen first when we chose up sides. All that. It wasn’t enough to do heroic things. I had to be recognized for it. That meant putting the ribbon on my chest so that when I went home other Marines would know not only that I’d been there but that I’d done something extraordinary. I would be extra ordinary. I
’d be special among a special group.

  I have heard Napoleon quoted to the effect that an army runs on its stomach and ribbons. This man understood the desire to feel special and how it motivates. This man, who could have been the savior of the French revolution and all its ideals, as much revered as George Washington, also blew it by making himself emperor. He too wanted to be special.

  When I first got back from Vietnam I hadn’t yet received any medals except my two Purple Hearts and Combat Action Ribbon,69 paperwork being paperwork. I felt proud. They showed that I’d been there, that I was one of the group. But while I was at the Pentagon the paperwork started catching up with me and it seemed as if every few weeks I was in front of some general getting another medal. It became a sort of office joke. And I, Mr. Hotshot, got more and more special.

  Wanting to be a society-certified hero is a specialness issue. I see people killing themselves at work and at home to pay for mortgages that are too much for them, or taking vacations they can’t afford in the right spots, all to be special. Wanting a medal in war is just killing yourself at a faster pace, for all the same wrong reasons.

  With every ribbon that I added to my chest I could be more special than someone who didn’t have it. Even better, I quickly learned that most people who outranked me, who couldn’t top my rows of ribbons, didn’t feel right chewing me out for minor infractions.70 I pushed this to the limit. I read the regulations on hair. I grew mine to the absolute limit allowed, getting it cut weekly to keep it there on the margin of acceptability. I found out mustaches were permitted. I grew a scraggly little thing that made me look like a corn-fed Ho Chi Minh.