What It Is Like to Go to War

by Karl Marlantes

  It was the Mass for the Dead.

  I handed Brother Mark my diary, the battered book that I had kept with me every day I was in Vietnam. It was with me on every godforsaken hilltop in the mountains of the north. It was with me in every firefight. It was with me when Isle died and when Utter died. And it was with me when I died. It was with me on the hospital ship Repose. It was with me when I was drunk on my butt at Vandegrift Combat Base. Along with it was a small green notebook, filled with medevac numbers, R&R dates for kids in the platoon, notes about the last Red Cross message to talk to the three kids who hadn’t written home in the past two months and whose mothers were wanting to know if they were okay, hastily scribbled defense plans, hole arrangements, machine-gun fields of fire, possible lines of approach by an attacking force. It had patrol checkpoints and daily brevity codes for radioing in positions. “Cigarettes will be at 7530. NFL stars at 8131.” I could radio in that we were located at “from Pall Mall, up 11 and right 5” or “from Hornung down three and right seven,” and the skipper could figure out where we were, so we could rain down fire and death on others than ourselves.

  Brother Mark placed these books on the altar next to the wine, water, and bread.

  “You ready?”

  I nodded.

  He handed me a silver spoon and I spread frankincense on the glowing charcoal in the censer. I carried it, tossing smoke, while Brother Mark spread holy water, and together we walked toward the huge oak doors at the far end of the aisle. Brother Mark unlocked the doors. I pushed them open into the night.

  “Welcome, friends of Karl. Welcome, former enemies. We welcome you. Come in.”

  I felt them filing in. They had been waiting, patiently, gathering outside beneath the dry grass hills dotted with dark green oaks. Gathering to wait there in the dark. They had waited for a quarter of a century.

  And they filled the church. My dead friends. Kids who died before I even learned their names. North Vietnamese soldiers I had killed, and the ones my friends had killed, shadows and wraiths connected with us all, connecting us to each other. I had invited an officer I just hated. It hadn’t been easy. Truly, there was a time when I wanted to kill him. A friend talked me back to normal insanity. But I knew there could be no forgiving of myself without the forgiving of him. And I also knew that he never thought too highly of me either.

  Then my grandparents all filed in and sat down in the front pew.

  We began the Mass. About halfway through I stopped Brother Mark.

  “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “They’ve all gotten up and have crossed the aisles. They’re hugging one another, shaking hands.”

  We waited about five minutes, until they got back into their seats again.

  I read aloud to them what I’d written the night before. “Andersen, all the sergeants thought you were kind of a fuck-off. Maybe you did too. But on Helicopter Hill you did everything—gave your life, maybe to prove you weren’t. You’re not a fuck-off in my mind. Thank you.” I told Clifton, “You took me on my first patrol. You took out the machine gun and died. Thank you, Teacher.” All I’d learned from Clifton probably saved many others long after he died. I told Isle how sorry I was I’d rushed him that day to kill the retreating NVA. He piped back, “Hell, Lieutenant, I was a Marine. I wanted to kill them too.” Others laughed, even the NVA. I told the officer I was sorry for hating him so. I thanked him for coming. “I know you thought I was just a fucking hippie. Neither of us was a perfect officer. I forgive you. Please forgive me.” When I saw him seated below me in one of the pews, he was no longer an old man against whom I’d held bitter anger for all these years. He was a relatively young man, killed when he was around thirty-eight or forty. I saw him as a young man assigned a battalion in combat and in over his head. I no longer felt angry. I felt sad. He and I just looked at each other and understood where we both had fallen short.

  The door had been left open. I would occasionally look at it, open to the night, afraid some unsuspecting parishioner would arrive early for quiet contemplation before the morning Mass and find us there with the dead. But the night held us in secret.

  As the Mass was ending, the light built up around the Santa Ynez Mountains, outlining their barren ridgelines against the gray. The open door changed from a black hole leaking light and warmth to a gray portal, where light came in.

  “This Mass is ended,” Brother Mark said. “Go in peace to love and serve the Lord.”

  And they went, slowly, silently, with joy, with the feelings of a good class reunion, the feelings of a good wedding.

  Brother Mark shut the doors and we put away the vessels and hung up his robes and we drove into town and had breakfast.

  Two nights later a dark presence entered my bedroom, waking me from a sound sleep, a presence so malignant and evil it seemed to fill the room with dark oppressive liquid, squeezing the very air from my lungs. I felt the prickles running up and down my spine. My wife was sleeping in another room, unsuspecting; my kids were in their bedrooms. Whatever it was, it was angry, and it had to do with Brother Mark and me messing with the dead. I knew this was way beyond me, so I just started praying for help. I got the one-armed Viking who’d been with me in Vietnam. I got the Great Mother. I got the Archangel Michael. I grabbed the crucifix of the risen Christ that Brother Mark had given me at breakfast after the ceremony and I held tight and I whispered, “Jesus, if I’ve ever needed you, I need you now.” I sat there, terrified, for over an hour while this presence beat against me and my helpers.

  I’m not a person who is into pixie dust. I didn’t know what to make of this. It returned two days later, and the same scene ensued, with me terrified and my spiritual helpers holding off that evil. A Jungian would say I’d encountered the archetypal shadow, not just my own shit this time but the shit of the entire world, the entire race of humans and beyond humans from time beyond reckoning. I knew in my head that evil existed, but this was the first time in my experience it was palpable. This time, instead of merely seeing the results of evil, bad enough to give me nightmares for thirty-five years, I had hooked in direct. I went for days feeling the house was under siege. I talked to Brother Mark. He and I decided it was beyond us but he’d ask around for help. He called an older priest who was familiar with the Mass for the Dead. This man was now at the Vatican. He told Brother Mark that when you try to break the hold of evil on a soul, evil will fight back—hard. Brother Mark came over to the house and we sprinkled holy water all through it and even around it. What I had come to call the Presence came back anyway.

  The day after the latest encounter with the Presence was a Thursday, my day for group therapy at the Vet Center. After the meeting I met with my friend Bear. Bear, the nephew of a Chumash shaman, was an LRRP80 in Vietnam.

  “Oh yeah, evil spirits,” Bear said, as if I were describing a termite problem. “Here’s what you do.” Some cultures are simply better able to handle this stuff than my own. We drove over to Bear’s apartment and I waited there while he drove out to the valley to talk with his uncle. He came back with a tape of his uncle chanting, and he gave me his own clay bowl and some sage his uncle had personally picked and blessed. Two nights later when the family was away, I sat alone on the living room floor in my house, put on Bear’s tape, and crumpled the sage into the bowl and set it on fire. I began to imitate the chants, letting the sage smoke seep all over the house, all over me, making the space uninhabitable for evil spirits. For good measure I tossed holy water from the mission all around the windows and doors of my children’s bedrooms. I got only a few funny looks and brief comments on the smell when everyone came home.

  The Presence never came back. On rare occasions I feel its whisper on the edge of my consciousness, but it has never returned as it had in those days after the Mass for the Dead. It wasn’t defeated. It’s never defeated. It just stopped bothering me. It left for other fields to plow. I know that, if I allow it, it will come back, but it will come back unseen and unfelt. It’s the problem
with evil. As I’ve said, it’s usually ordinary stuff.

  Civilization advances because we have the ability to pass on culture to the next generation. We don’t have to start from scratch like other animals. But, unlike the Chumash, most Americans have stopped passing on the cultural gains of ritual and consciousness, while we continue to pass on the gains in technology. Grandma and Grandpa are in Sun City.

  A special problem for warriors, however, is that Grandma and Grandpa can’t come to war with you. There has to be another way of taking this wisdom with us to avoid being sent to war on a physical level only. You can’t have a successful homecoming without preparing for it before sending people out to fight in the first place.

  One of the best methods will be to employ the spiritual wisdom of the master martial artist. Most people think the martial arts are ancient. They are actually relatively new to the world, the very earliest records of martial monks appearing not much before the sixteenth century in China. Most martial arts practiced today originated in the twentieth century. Recently, the Marines have made more of a commitment to martial arts training. This is a welcome sign. The spiritual component, however, must never take second place to the physical—always a danger in a society dedicated to separating religion from government and a culture conditioned to favoring the practical over the impractical. Training must move beyond here’s how you kill. It must include why you kill, and here’s how killing fits in the great scheme of things, and here’s how you are likely to feel afterward. Without this preparation, homecoming will be orders of magnitude more difficult.

  In addition to training with an eye toward the eventual return to society, there are also many practical things that can be done outside training to improve reintegrating returning veterans. First of all, the military should never discharge people immediately from combat as it did during Vietnam, no matter how anxious the kids are to get the hell out of uniform. They should be taken in groups, preferably the group they fought with, through ritual ceremonies and counseling.

  There should be a ceremony of handing over the weapons. I have a strong physical memory of the barrel guard of my M-16 resting in my left hand, sort of wide, rocker-shaped, cool, grainy plastic. I have just as strong a physical memory of holding my kids, feeling their puffy diapers through their clothes. What I’m saying is that I was very connected psychologically to my weapon.

  Most important, we need ceremony and counseling to help returning veterans move from the infinite back to the finite. I’m reminded of the opening of a Tim O’Brien short story: “The war was over and there was no place in particular to go.”81 The story is about a veteran who wants to talk about what happened to him but can’t. He ends up aimlessly and endlessly driving a car around a small lake in a small town in Iowa. At the end of the story there is a note, whether fictional or true I don’t know, explaining that the story was about a friend of Tim’s, Norm Bowker, who hanged himself without explanation in the locker room of his local YMCA after a pickup basketball game about eight years after he got back from Vietnam.

  What returning veterans need is someplace to go that will fill a vast empty feeling, and it’s not the YMCA or the video store or the tavern. The first emptiness is that caused by missing your friends, your unit. Some are dead. All are gone. To regain that same feeling would require going through a similar experience with another group. This very few veterans would ever want to do.

  The great writer Norman Maclean writes about this feeling of longing in a story about a U.S. Forest Service crew in Montana just after the First World War. The crew had decided to go into town and take revenge on some local cardsharps who had cheated one of them. “And at the end we banded together to clean out the town—probably something also that had to be done for us to become a crew. For most of us, this momentary social unit the crew was the only association we had ever belonged to, although somehow it must have been for more time than a moment. Here I am over half a century later trying to tell you about it.”82

  The second emptiness is the hole of trivia. About five years after I’d returned from Vietnam, I was down in the basement of our new fixer-upper tearing out walls, redoing the wiring and the plumbing. I stopped for a sandwich break and idly started reading a section of the paper that happened to be lying on the floor next to me. The Federal Reserve was doing this. Business leaders were expecting the economy to do that. Somebody in New York was being honored for something. The usual. It was mildly entertaining. I was about to toss the paper aside when I noticed the date, 1926.

  I sat there stunned. That news was fifty years old and I hadn’t even noticed. It had apparently been stuffed in the wall I’d opened. Then I started laughing, at myself, at the whole situation. Suddenly everything seemed so trivial, me trying to fix up this old house, my job, the news, marriage, history. Everything. There I was, in the basement of my new fixer-upper with “no particular place to go.” It seemed that nothing, absolutely nothing, could stack up against the intensity of war and war’s friendships. I felt only intensely empty. I fantasized about flying to Chicago to find an old Marine friend of mine. We’d get involved in running drugs from South America. Something like that. What the hell. But I was married and we wanted kids and we needed a house. I picked up the crowbar and continued working on the house while just about that time Norm Bowker killed himself. So did too many others. We’d have saved lives if returning veterans had been better prepared for reentry.

  We need to give returning veterans some sort of commitment to the future they are returning to. Most veterans can return to families or build them. All veterans can return to communities or build them. All veterans can return to a world where they can pursue their individual callings. To do this, however, eventually the war has to be integrated, the horror absorbed, the psyche stretched to accommodate the trauma. This requires tools. Most veterans come from the strata of society where counseling is something that happens to crazy people. Counseling should be required. This will eliminate the stigma. A further way to eliminate the stigma would be to train senior officers and NCOs in the techniques of helping men and women leave military service, honoring parting as much as entering, with equal emphasis on ritual. Counseling for the veteran and his or her family should be paid for or supplied by the Department of Veterans Affairs for as long as the veteran or his family may want it. There should be special religious services for each faith, specifically designed to get returning veterans back on home ground and reconnected to the infinite through something besides dealing and avoiding death. Ideally, these would be performed in the churches of those who have them. The chaplains, again, have missed their marks here, not contacting and not encouraging the religious leaders of the churches in the veterans’ communities. For those without a church, or with no particular denomination, chaplains could conduct ceremonies on the military bases before final discharge. For those who don’t feel connected with any particular religion, it could be something as simple as sharing poetry and stories.

  I’m aware this would take lots of time and effort. But it would save the nation billions in wrecked lives and heartache. I’m also aware that young men of this age might find such ceremonies funny or a waste of time and they’d be cool. I once attended a church service just after a battle. It was meant to be a memorial for those we lost. Everyone was polite during the service, but there were jokes afterward. The service was meaningless because we were all still out in the bush, psychologically, and the people leading the service hadn’t been out there with us. This wasn’t their fault; it was just a problem. Also, we all just sat there. No one participated. This is why the Vietnam Veterans Memorial works so well. You can physically do something there, touch a name, leave a flower. You’ve got to engage the bodies of these young fighters before you can engage their spirits. They live and thrive in the physical world. Engaging the physical is the only way to break through. Include something as simple as a group recital of the names of their dead friends and they’ll know that they’re touching the transcendent. I will
never forget a solemn group of three kids beating on a cardboard C-ration box down on the perimeter of a new hilltop position, chanting the names of their dead friends in the jungle twilight.

  Before being discharged veterans should be gathered in small groups with career veterans who have had some training in group dynamics and be allowed to talk themselves down. Just talk, in a safe place, with other veterans. It gets the talk started, breaks the damaging code of silence that stops the integration process. This process could then go on in civilian life, because now it’s legitimized and the young veterans know how to do it. Some veterans will always be afraid to bring back their nightmare. They need to know early on that the nightmare can be faced. All veterans fear being misunderstood. If war detox is required while people are still in uniform, the shame and fear will be faced cleanly and won’t have to come out twenty years later after painful divorces, lost jobs, and alienation from society in general and their own children in particular. It wouldn’t be perfect, but it would be better.

  Metaphorically, veterans should be encouraged to sing. Joseph Henderson once showed me a collection of paintings in his home that were copied from pollen drawings made by a Navajo shaman. He walked me through the story of two brothers who went on a journey to find their father, the Sun. Their father armed them, and they became warriors and fought the wild monsters threatening their tribe. The paintings showed bolts of lightning and vibrant energy coming off the brothers when they returned to their village. The villagers were afraid of them and told them to leave. Sky Woman took them in and taught them to sing of their adventures. When they had made up their songs and sang them to the people, the people were no longer afraid.

  This book is my song. Each and every one of us veterans must have a song to sing about our war before we can walk back into the community without everyone, including the king, quaking behind the walls. Perhaps it is drawing pictures or reciting poetry about the war. Perhaps it is getting together with a small group and telling stories. Perhaps it is dreaming about it and writing the dreams down and then telling people your dreams. But it isn’t enough just to do the art in solitude and sing the song alone. You must sing it to other people. Those who are afraid or uneasy must hear it. They must see the art. They must lose their fear.