What It Is Like to Go to War

by Karl Marlantes

  We left the next day for Cortes Island, which lies between Vancouver Island and the British Columbia mainland, a favorite place of mine. On the Victoria–Port Angeles ferry I fell asleep. A woman tripped over my feet, startling me. Again I reared up, reaching out to choke her. There was great embarrassment all around, my mother trying to explain to this middle-aged Canadian who was trying to explain how she hadn’t meant to step on me and me explaining how I hadn’t meant to... and how she understood and... In any case, this kid was not ready to go on a public ferryboat ride. This kid was still in the jungle.

  My body was trying to tell me I was choking the feminine, but I didn’t get it. Twenty years later I had a dream in which I was going to a wedding. The bride was waiting. A friend asked where the groom was. I had to explain to him that the wedding wouldn’t occur until the groom came home from Vietnam. I had been reading a lot of women writers. This time I got it. The hypermasculine warrior energy has to be balanced by feminine energy, but it must come home to do this.

  I think the American people tried to reestablish balance by shaming the masculine principle and leaving a huge chunk of it in the jungle so it wouldn’t bother us at home. This had profound influences on men’s very identity, with profound influences on society. Trying to bring about balance by squelching the masculine won’t work any more than squelching the feminine. Pushing Mars into the jungle of our unconscious results in the frightening energy that fuels gangs, drug wars, and increased violence in general. When the Jesse James gang rode into North-field, Minnesota, to rob the bank, they thought that the town would fall prey to terror just as did all the other small towns they’d raided earlier. They were met by the men, all Civil War veterans, and the gang was destroyed. If drug dealers had shown up at the school in my 1950s logging town, the men would have been down there with rifles. I am not advocating vigilante justice. I’m talking about a basic attitude about a traditional male role: protecting the community. I’m worried that somewhere between the women’s movement and the nation’s reaction to the Vietnam War, this traditional role came to be viewed as obsolete, even déclassé. Too many men abandoned it. Today we expect the police to do everything. We’ve hired out community protection just as we’ve hired out military service. Unfortunately, there are never enough police, nor will there ever be.

  * * *

  Many of my compatriots are still not back from the war. Some are still in the bush, in places like Alaska or Montana. I am not. This is because some things were done right. Recall my recurring nightmare of slashing and being slashed in the muddy Ben Hai. There was always a corpsman who pulled me from the water and got an IV tube into my arm before I died. The corpsman is a combination of warrior and healer. Without my being aware of it, this corpsman was constantly at work when I came back and got into that self-destructive, and other-destructive, round of drugs, alcohol, and empty coupling.

  My usual pattern when somebody hurts me—and I was hurt badly coming home to America—is to put out the antiaircraft guns, set up the land mines and claymores, string the barbed wire, and just let the sons of bitches try to hurt me again.

  The first break in my defenses was made by an old friend from my secret society at Yale. Biggs was working for a senator at the time. He’s now a lawyer in New England. He would call me several times a week and just talk to me. He got me to rent a little house at the beach with him. He’d pick me up, every weekend, no matter how messed up I was, and we’d drive over to the Maryland shore, and the first thing he’d do upon arriving would be to fix a truly sensuous hamburger—lovingly “moojied up,” as he called the process, with unexpected ingredients, including substantial amounts of hash. This didn’t help my drug problem any, but Biggs wasn’t into therapy. He was into friendship. He pumped blood back into me, weekend by weekend, by the simple act of being with me.

  Ben was an older friend, a political commentator and writer. He’d have me over to his house in Maryland and just let me spend time with his family. He’d explain Jewish holidays to me and talk politics. One day I went with him to buy groceries and I tried to buy some beer. The man wouldn’t sell any to me because he thought my identification was faked. Ben lit into him. “This guy’s just come back from Vietnam. He’s been old enough to kill people for us and you don’t think he’s old enough to buy a beer. Sell him the goddamned beer.” The man did. It wasn’t the beer. It was the first public support. In fact it remained the only public support I ever got until the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a very welcome change in the public’s attitude toward returning veterans.

  We have grown, and to be fair, the majority of people in the peace movement did not treat the returning veterans badly. Small towns in the Midwest and South welcomed their veterans home. I experienced kindness as well.

  There was the sister of a Marine friend who was still in Vietnam when I was at Headquarters Marine Corps in Washington, D.C. He had written to her saying I was probably finding it hard to meet girls. This was true. The phrase “politically incorrect” hadn’t been invented yet, but I was a living prototype. She invited me to her house several times. There I could talk to her and her friends. One of them became my first wife, Gisèle.

  There was a friend from another small town next to my hometown who was stationed in Washington with the Navy. He and his wife let me sleep in their living room while I searched for a hard-to-find apartment. I was there several months.

  There was a group of girls who worked at the CIA who decorated my guitar case for me. I still keep it.

  Salley was the sister of another Marine friend. He’d also asked her to call. One day, when she was in town for a peace rally, she did. She was a senior at Mary Washington College and lived in an isolated farmhouse near the Wilderness west of Fredericksburg with several other girls. I’d get off duty late at night and drive down, hoping someone was still up, anticipating and then receiving the joy of seeing their mellow light from the farmhouse window in the winter-bare forest. The girls were still awake. My welcome would be warm.

  These simple contacts, even if I wouldn’t allow them to go very deep, made it possible to avoid another self-inflicted wound. The CIA needed people to train hill tribesmen in Laos. I was approached—flattered. “Lieutenant Marlantes, we’re very impressed with your war record. You might know So-and-So from Yale. We get some of our best men from Yale.” It appealed to me. More bloody transcendence? No, just escape, from pain, from the feeling of being wrong. I had all the skills. They’d put my salary in a tax-free 10 percent savings account. Although this was not part of the official pitch, it was clear there would be all the dope and girls I’d ever want. It would be the parties without the telephone call from the angry and hurt husband the next day. And there would be the biggest drug of all, and one I still miss, the passionate intensity of life on the edge. It was perfect heroic self-destruction.

  Had it not been for these few who showed me what I needed, and a timely letter from E. T. Williams, the warden of Rhodes House, inviting me to retake my scholarship at Oxford, which I thought I’d given up by going off to the war, I might have gone for the brass ring instead of the gold one. I might have taken the short-term jolt of adrenaline and power and probably never reintegrated into society.

  The warden’s offer took me out of the country, away from the anger, pain, and humiliation. It took me away from drugs, because Oxford was, and still is, for all its pretensions otherwise, a pretty middle-class sort of place. Most important, of all the right things about my homecoming it connected me with a group of women at Oxford whose ability to feel had not been politicized away.

  They healed me simply by letting me sit in their rooms, drink their tea, and listen to them talk, which I did nearly every afternoon for two years. One of them took me home with her for Christmas. Another invited me to her home in Switzerland over spring break. Another asked me to her twenty-first birthday party, where she played the piano for us. One invited me to her wedding. They accepted me. I wasn’t wrong. They brought me back to life,
pouring tea and life back into me by the orange glow of their electric coil heaters. I’ll never cease to love them for it.

  It is primarily women who reintegrate the warrior back into society, the energy of the queen, not the king. Women carry this queen for most young men. Joking about men getting in touch with their inner woman aside, this is healthy, but it usually doesn’t happen until they’re quite mature, at least in their forties. When a young man comes home from war, he’s all testosterone and he’s scary.

  When Cúchulainn, the warrior hero of the Táin, returned to the walls of Emain Macha from combat, the three heads of Nechta Scéne’s sons with him, a swan flock he’d captured fluttering above him, a wild stag behind his chariot, he turned the left chariot board toward Emain in insult,78 and he said: “I swear by the oath of Ulster’s people that if a man isn’t found to fight me, I’ll spill the blood of everyone in this court.”79

  “Naked women to him!” Conchobar mac Nessa (the king) said.

  The women of Emain went forth, with Mugain (the queen), the wife of Conchobar, at their head, and they stripped and showed their breasts to him.

  “These are the warriors you must struggle with today,” Mugain said.

  Cúchulainn “hid his countenance” and immediately was thrown by the warriors into a cold bath, which began to boil from his heat and burst the vat. They threw him into another vat and that boiled with bubbles “the size of fists” and then they threw him into a third vat and he warmed it to the point where its heat and his own were equal. At this point Mugain clothed him in a blue cloak with a silver brooch. He at last has shed his warrior garments and is ready to be part of the community again. Then he “sat on Conchobar’s knee” (the king’s knee, not the throne, and certainly not on the floor) and “that was his seat ever after.”

  Can you imagine how much raw courage it must take for a woman to stand naked and defenseless in front of a raging boiling warrior like this? See yourself, on the empty plain, a cold damp wind blowing in from the sea, chilling your naked legs, making goose bumps on your back, stirring the hair on your head and vulva, tightening your exposed nipples. There you stand, naked in front of rude wooden walls, the mud beneath your feet, your king powerless to resist this onrushing force, a man who can kill anyone who stands in his way, a man boiling with battle rage, the very air above him captive to him, vibrating with the spirit power of wings and the wild stag of all the hunts that ever were tied captive to his chariot. And you stand there, small and straight, or maybe fat and a little foolish looking, but you stand your ground, totally vulnerable. And you stun him like a bird from a slung stone.

  We don’t understand this feminine courage anymore; in fact, we denigrate it.

  Can you imagine Cúchulainn raging before the gates of a modern American Emain Macha? The king is inside the walls, quivering with fear, and he shouts for the queen. She’s a lawyer. “We’ll get a court injunction against him,” she cries. “He can’t run around the walls slandering and threatening us like that.”

  The king, who’s afraid to talk back to his wife because she’ll accuse him of being insensitive or exploiting his position in the patriarchy, thinks to himself, “Good idea, Mugain. But isn’t Cúchulainn the guy we send for to back up the court orders?”

  The baring of women’s breasts to the returning warrior could take many forms today. For me it was as simple as girls serving tea. Bared breasts symbolize nurturing milk, children, family, community, life. Finally, for all of us, the breast that we lie upon as newborn babies is as home as we ever get.

  Too many veterans, from Vietnam but also from Afghanistan and Iraq, are still waiting to come home. Take Raymond, who’d been a Marine in Vietnam and now sells commercial real estate. Raymond is big. You could hug only half of him at a time. Yet his bulk contains a stereotype-defying sensitivity.

  I went to a party at Raymond’s over the holidays. Kids wrestling in the basement, running around the furniture upstairs throwing a football. A piñata. The adults lit candles for the new year in a quiet ceremony in the living room as the children drifted in and out, some participating, some not.

  In the kitchen, the quiet eye of the storm, I talked with Raymond’s wife, Dee. She and my first wife shared the not uncommon and deeply disturbing experience of living with a man with post-traumatic stress disorder without knowing where all the craziness was coming from. These women are veterans of a different war. For every veteran who goes through a divorce, a wife goes through one too. For every veteran alone in the basement, there is a wife upstairs, bewildered, isolated, and in despair from the dark cloud of war that hangs over daily family life. For too many years the public hasn’t recognized or sympathized with families of veterans coping with PTSD and has left them in silence.

  Dee and Raymond had just been to Washington, D.C., for the tenth anniversary of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. I asked her how it went. She looked quickly at the kitchen door, checking her flanks. “Pretty well, until the parade.”

  “They had a parade?”

  “Well, you know, everyone getting with their state contingents. They marched right through the middle of town.”

  I listened.

  “Raymond kept expecting to see the people on the sidewalks. There’d been a lot of press about the anniversary. There’d been the big turnaround about veterans after the Gulf War. And there were lots of veterans there. It seemed like a big success.” She turned the water tap on and turned it off again. Shhhhht. It was like the static burst from a lonely night listening post keying the handset. “But there wasn’t anybody there. Raymond kept thinking they must be up ahead. Maybe when we get to Constitution Avenue. They’re probably waiting there. It’s right in the center of town. But when they swung around the corner into Constitution Avenue—uh-uh, no crowds.”

  I was thinking to myself, They expected crowds?

  “Some of the men started to drop out.”

  The cynical voice whispered again, They still expected a crowd?

  “Finally, they heard cheering up ahead. Clapping. They quickened their pace. Guys got back into formation. Of course, they thought, everyone is at the memorial where the parade ended.”

  “Were they?” I asked. Maybe there was a crowd, my whisper said. I felt my own dead hopes start to rise.

  “No. It was the veterans at the front of the parade welcoming the ones at the back.”

  “Ah.” What did you expect?

  “Guys started packing and going home just after that.”

  Raymond came in the door just then to get something from the kitchen. Earlier in the evening he had told me several stories about the anniversary. He had crashed a party of the 101st Airborne, U.S. Marine written all over his jacket. A silence. Old rivalries. The clubs within clubs. He had grabbed a beer, raised it overhead, and shouted, “Airborne!” Laughter. Cheers.

  Raymond had told stories like these. Solidarity stories.

  “I just heard about the parade,” I said.

  “Yeah.” He walked back into the living room, forgetting what he’d come in for.

  “Was Raymond sad?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Raymond was sad.”

  “And you?” I asked.

  “Me? All those years? Raymond crying every Christmas because he lost his entire squad on Christmas day? Him sitting at dinner with his eyes darting all over? The rages? Going to bars in black neighborhoods and shouting ‘Nigger’ just to start a fight and coming home beat to hell? And no one ever told us what in hell was happening? What to do? No one. No help. Me, sad? I’m goddamned furious!”

  There is a correct way to welcome your warriors back. Returning veterans don’t need ticker-tape parades or yellow ribbons stretching clear across Texas. Cheering is inappropriate and immature. Combat veterans, more than anyone else, know how much pain and evil have been wrought. To cheer them for what they’ve just done would be like cheering the surgeon when he amputates a leg to save someone’s life. It’s childish, and it’s demeaning to those who have fallen on both sides. A
quiet grateful handshake is what you give the surgeon, while you mourn the lost leg. There should be parades, but they should be solemn processionals, rifles upside down, symbol of the sword sheathed once again. They should be conducted with all the dignity of a military funeral, mourning for those lost on both sides, giving thanks for those returned. Afterward, at home or in small groups, let the champagne flow and celebrate life and even victory if you were so lucky—afterward.

  Veterans just need to be received back into their community, reintegrated with those they love, and thanked by the people who sent them. I wanted to be hugged by every girl I ever knew. Our more sane ancestors had ceremonies like sweat rituals to physically bring the bodies back into civilian mode. Mongolian warriors were taken into heated yurts and had every muscle that could be reached pressed and rolled with smooth staves, squeezing out toxins, signaling the psyche and the body that it was time to stop pumping adrenaline.

  There is also a deeper side to coming home. The returning warrior needs to heal more than his mind and body. He needs to heal his soul.

  It was two in the morning and dark. The dead had been summoned for several days before and were now gathering outside Old Mission Santa Inez. It was cold for southern California, and wet. Six months of drought had just been broken by the first Pacific storm and the surfers were reporting twenty-footers.

  My friend Brother Mark, a Capuchin friar, had spent the evening before with a friend of his, a former nun, setting up candles and laying out the tools of ritual, and the large old mission was hushed in their glow. On the floor in front of the altar stood a large single paschal candle, the sign of the risen Christ, and deeper yet and beyond, into twenty thousand years of our common ancestry, it was the power of the phallus rising from the earth. I had spent the evening writing what I wanted, and never had the chance, to say to my dead friends killed in the Vietnam War.

  Brother Mark was in full regalia. “If we’re going to do this thing, Karl, we’re going to do it full force, with two thousand years of tradition behind it.”