What It Is Like to Go to War

by Karl Marlantes

  When the child asks, “What is it like to go to war?” to remain silent keeps you from coming home.

  10

  THE CLUB

  After the warrior returns home from the initiation of combat, he becomes a member of “the Club” of combat veterans. It has always been a club with its own secrets and its own and societally imposed rules of silence. Traditionally, it has been a club tied in with the mystery of gender because being a warrior was tied in with manhood. This ancient mystery combined with the silence forms an intriguing and powerful combination for attracting future members, particularly boys. You don’t join this club; you can only be initiated into it.

  The warrior of the future will become a member of this club, just as have the warriors of the past, but the future warrior will have to understand that the Club’s true purpose in modern society should be as an honorable guild. Like membership in all honorable organizations of craft or commerce, full membership in the guild of warriors can be an important part of the path to adulthood, but membership must no longer be considered the only path for conferring manhood. In addition, the membership requirement of silence needs to be rescinded.

  I was thirteen, and we older Scouts in our troop had been learning survival skills. Now we were to be tested. We were crammed into an old crummy, the tough panel truck that hauls loggers up to the logging sites before sunrise. Its steel walls were moist with condensation from the cold outside and the breathing of the boys inside. Joe, one of our adult leaders, was a timber cruiser83 and had borrowed it from the large timber company he worked for. We were dropped off along a muddy logging road in pairs, without food or equipment, about half a mile apart. Before us was a series of dark fir-covered ridges cut into steep canyons by rain-filled creeks. Each succeeding ridge was increasingly obscured by the gently falling rain, the darker green of the firs getting more and more indistinct until after three ridges you could see nothing but gray.

  I was paired with my best friend, Moose, and our task was to make our way to a certain rendezvous point over the next two days. If we didn’t show up by dinner Saturday night, the dads would come looking for us. People didn’t worry much about lawsuits in those days and the kids had a lot more freedom.

  Shortly after Moose and I took off down into the first deep ravine it started to rain—hard. With no sun to guide us, we had to rely on topography, following streams up and down. This delayed us. We got soaked through, but we were wearing wool, which kept us, if not comfortable, at least protected against hypothermia. After many hours of misadventure, and some of fear, Moose and I slept the first night wrapped together for warmth in a burrow we’d dug out of a hillside, running ditches around its entrance so the water wouldn’t pool where we lay curled on fir boughs laid on the clay.

  Late the next afternoon we eventually found our way to the rendezvous, a lake with several lean-to shelters next to it. There we were met by our three Scout leaders, who had packed in sleeping bags and dry clothes and had waited, probably a little nervously, for the two days.

  We all made it. We all were proud.

  That night something important happened to me. The three leaders, all men in their late thirties or early forties, were talking around the campfire. Everyone else had long since clunked out from exhaustion, but for some reason Moose and I hadn’t settled down yet, so we quietly sat with the men by the fire, hoping if we sort of sidled in no one would object. They were talking about “the war.” In those days that meant World War II.

  We sat very still, half expecting the glance that would send us back to the world of kids. I remember Joe pausing to look at us. The other two turned and looked at us as well. Ed worked for the railroad. Jens was a heavy equipment operator for another logging company. In the silence the fire lit their faces against the dripping black of the surrounding forest. A light mist fell on us but couldn’t fight the strength of the fire. We admired these men. They gave a lot of time to us and we knew it. They taught us skills. They let us do crazy things like wander around lost. But we always knew, as scared as we were, that if we got lost they’d find us somehow.

  Would they stop talking about the war? Would we be sent off to our lean-to? Joe just looked at us, it must have been for four or five seconds, and then he continued his story. We had been allowed to peek inside the Club.

  Joe’s story was about D-day at Normandy, Omaha Beach. Other stories came out. Ed was in the Navy in the Pacific. He talked about phosphorous glowing in the wake of the destroyer. Jens had fought in North Africa and Germany. No one talked about heroic deeds or ignoble ones. There were funny stories about military foul-ups and red tape, and there were brief vignettes of terrifying moments. I remember few particulars. Just as they were ordinary men, they had been ordinary sailors and soldiers. Moose and I knew that. No one bullshitted anyone. But we still made heroes of them. They had gone through the experience. What was that like?

  Moose and I kept our mouths shut. The fire died down and the stories came to an end. I didn’t want them to end. I remember the feeling of being “inside,” and never wanting this feeling to go away.

  My own father had driven trucks in the Third Army, supplying Patton’s tanks, and there had been a movie just a few years earlier about this. So I said, “My dad was on the Red Ball Express,” but I wasn’t real sure driving a truck was a very warriorlike thing to do.

  Joe looked at me and smiled. “I remember those guys. That was a hell of an operation. They drove gas and ammo up to the tanks, right up to where they’d run out, and then they’d come right back and sleep in the trucks while they were being repaired and loaded up again. You wouldn’t catch me anywhere near a truckload of gas and ammo in a combat zone.”

  I went to sleep that night in my warm sleeping bag, rain spattering on the lean-to roof, the wet Pacific air on my face, proud of my father, proud of myself.

  By passing that test of survival, and being awake at the right time, we found that the door of the Club had been opened just a little so we could see inside. Women have their clubs too. In those days they were usually based on childbirth and raising children. It’s these old initiations, still with us, and these old clubs. They aren’t all bad. It’s just that things are changing for the reasons I talked about in the first chapter. If the initiations are changing, the clubs must change too.

  In those days the club of manhood was still well intertwined with the club of warriors. It’s time they separated themselves. Although both sexes today will have to incorporate some of the warrior attitude in order to enter adulthood, neither will actually have to become physical warriors or combat veterans to become men or women. Boys and girls will enter the club of manhood and womanhood by being invited in primarily by their fathers and mothers, and secondarily by other older men and women in their community, providing, of course, all these people are members themselves. Those men were inviting Moose and me, and it was valuable and good to be invited. The problem for me was simply that the clubs of manhood and combat veteran were still confused. A lot of the reason for this was that no one talked about it very much, and when anyone did talk, there were all sorts of mixed signals.

  In tribal cultures when individuals successfully underwent an initiation and returned to the community they were admitted to a different club from the one to which they previously belonged. Where a person was once a member of the boys’ or girls’ club, he or she now became a member of the men’s or women’s club. Upon being made a full-fledged member of the new adult club, he or she was also asked to keep the club’s secrets.84

  The club of combat veterans has always had its own code of silence that wraps it in mystery just as thoroughly as the earlier initiatory clubs. Boys, in particular, read and see lots of stories about the entrance tests and exploits of club members. It doesn’t seem to matter whether these stories are gruesome and horrifying or glamorous and heroic; they all have the effect of simply whetting the boy’s appetite to join the club. For one reason, the boy knows that unless he experiences these things for himself,
he won’t understand them.85 This, unfortunately, is true. But another reason the tales of horror don’t dissuade a lot of boys from wanting to join the club is that the tales are too often told without emotion, and I mean both sides of emotions. In the horror are the pain and the transcendence. If the tale of horror is told without admitting the transcendence, the boy will hear it peeping through unconsciously. “I want some of that,” he says, just as unconsciously. And if the horror is told without the raw emotions, the choking sobbing tears, it is abstracted and unreal.

  Of course avoiding pain is one of the major reasons for the mystery and silence. Society itself would rather forget as well, and so not only colludes in this but actually enforces it with its own codes of behavior, which I’ll get into shortly. The mystery that arises from all this silence simply whets the appetite to find out. People are curious, and children are very curious people. The club of warriors needs to be demystified in order to become one of many honorable clubs in which adults participate. If there is no longer any need for mystification, then there is no longer any reason for silence.

  Most people seem to need a club of some kind, whether it’s a secret society at Yale or a Wednesday night bowling league. We are a social species. It seems appropriate we should define ourselves as adults by being part of adult social groups. I was gradually being guided into manhood by those Scout leaders, but at the same time I was confusing the men’s club with the Club, that is, the guild of the warrior. So too, probably, were they, just as many young men today confuse the men’s club with the street gang, which they use as a substitute, with horrible consequences, for a more honorable warriors’ guild. All this confusion is primarily a result of the silence imposed on the membership. If you can’t or won’t talk about it, you can’t get clear about it. And one of the greatest ironies of joining the club of combat, for me, was finding out that the silence seems to be as much societally imposed as self-imposed. If you talk about what you’re proud of, you’re bragging. If you talk about what was painful or sad, you’re whining. If you talk about the brutality, you’re brutal. Society simply wants us to shut up about all of this.

  My uncle, the one who was wounded in the leg in Italy, never talked about it. My father started to talk about his experiences in France and Germany only when he was in his seventies and I was in my forties, and I had to prompt him all along the way. Club members don’t even talk to their sons about the club. I used to feel embarrassed, over exactly what I don’t know, when I talked to my own children about the war, but I’m getting better at it.

  The pressures for silence also work on the families, just as with alcoholism or any other aspect of society that is shamed. When I was first working on this book, my first wife hated to tell people that I was working on a book about war and killing.86 One day while we were driving in the car she burst out in anger at me, asking me to use a pseudonym so the children wouldn’t be at risk of being jeered or shamed at school over some of my less than pretty exposures. (Images of conversations in the school cafeteria: “My mom says your dad kills people when they want to surrender and he screws prostitutes.”) My first wife obviously felt the same awful don’t-talk-about-this stuff that I did. I still don’t like it when I’m asked by people I don’t know what I’m writing about, because it requires too much explanation to be sure that the questioners don’t think I’m some kind of war freak who runs around in camouflage on weekends. Being interested in things military is still considered politically incorrect by a large segment of society and as a result this subject remains a virtual mystery for most people.

  There are several aspects of this code of silence. There’s the stiff- upper-lip aspect. The English are particularly good at this one, having invented the phrase. One simply doesn’t brag; one never complains. My experience of war is 95 percent things to complain about, 4 percent things to be ashamed of, and about 1 percent things to brag about. So if the code is don’t complain, you’re left with very little to talk about.

  I’m reminded of the response of a much-admired older man, a don at Oxford, who I knew had been in combat in World War II. I’d asked him on several occasions about his experiences. I’d always get answers like “Oh, I just pottered around in the jungle a bit. Nothing very exciting.”

  We do this to ourselves, I think, because we’re trying to fit back into society. Not talking about it allows this with the least disruption to all concerned. The Club is the veterans’ protection against our great fear of being misunderstood. Being misunderstood means being thought bad because of having certain feelings about certain experiences, few of which were under our control at the time. It’s actually not much different from being a racial or sexual minority. You have to protect yourself against the negative projections. To do this minority groups have formed their clubs too. But instead of protection through silence they use tools like “camp” or “cool.”

  The Club is also society’s protection for those who stayed home. In war there are a lot of painful memories for nonveterans too. There is the loss of loved ones. In many countries nonveterans share much of the horror of actual warfare. Nonvets also share some of the thrill and may not want to admit it. People cheated on the black market and made lots of money working in war industries but can hardly justify talking about this. Others yearn for the sense of community, the sense of life on the edge, but can hardly justify their memories of these good feelings knowing the costs that have been paid by so many others. In short, not only are there painful memories; there are also unexamined motives and actions and, as a result, guilt. The silence of the Club suits society only too well.

  There are several aspects to this societally imposed silence. First, there’s the “Sunday school head lice” aspect. This I hate even more than the stiff-upper-lip and modesty games. Thou shalt not kill. Violence is bad. People who do either of the above are bad. So talking about it is going to spread the nits and infect everyone with this disturbing reminder of our human condition. This approach didn’t do much good with regard to stopping venereal disease either. The United States has gone to war, actually killing people, over a dozen times since Vietnam: Cambodia (Mayaguez), Iran (failed hostage rescue), Lebanon, Libya (bombing Gadhafi), Panama, Grenada, Gulf I, Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya again. We’ve aided and abetted killing in the Falklands, El Salvador, Afghanistan (when the Russians were there), Angola, Cambodia, Colombia, and Israel/Palestine. We are a very aggressive and warlike nation. Denying our collective responsibility for these activities, whether they were right or wrong, is like scurrying around the house of an alcoholic hiding empty bottles and never mentioning the drinking.

  If the silence continues and debate is limited solely to questions of morality and international politics without reference to our own shortcomings as humans, our own involvement in violence, and our grand illusions of power, then our sons and daughters and our next crop of political leaders will never be able to make clear judgments about entering situations where they will be asked, or ask others, to kill or be killed. We will continue to misunderstand a foundation stone, whether we like it or not, of current world society and most of human history.

  Silence is a recent Club rule. It was not always so. The great Norse sagas, the epic poetry of the Greeks and Romans, all talked of war. War poetry and songs were recited and sung in the eating places. Tales were told around campfires and in the wigwams and desert tents. These epics often glorified war and warriors, with some bad consequences. But I think society has thrown a lot of nuggets out with the gravel by deciding that talking about war is taboo.

  Veterans need to boast more. Everyone needs to boast more. We simply need to learn where and when it’s appropriate, as opposed to what we learn now—that all boasting is inappropriate. I used to love listening to Muhammad Ali when I was in high school. He was having fun. Boasting is the same as a peacock spreading his feathers. It’s a natural act. Why shame it? It can even be an art form. Listen to how Mark Twain captured the wonderful bragging of the old-tim
e flatboat men.

  “I’m the old original iron-jawed, brass-mounted, copper-bellied corpse-maker from the wilds of Arkansaw! I’m the man they call Sudden Death and General Desolation! Sired by a hurricane, dam’d by an earthquake, half-brother to the cholera, nearly related to the small-pox on the mother’s side! I split the everlasting rocks with my glance and I squouch the thunder when I speak!”87

  Boasting like this would be put down today as testosterone poisoning. Suppose when my daughters, Laurel, Sophia, and Devon, were young that they had gone whirling around the living room twirling their skirts, giddy with their beauty and joy and budding sexuality, and we called it estrogen poisoning. Warrior energy is fierce and wild. It upsets men who don’t have it, and women who are afraid of it, primarily because the only form of it they know is the negative one that is a result of repression. And this negative side comes booming out unconsciously in the glorification of warfare and violence in books, TV, and movies, the authors of most of which aren’t members of the Club themselves.

  How do we bring some balance to the way the Club is perceived? What do we do when, in an honest moment, the former pilot looks right into your eyes, completely vulnerable, and says in a near whisper, “I loved it. I lit up the entire fucking valley.”

  One honest reaction is to be appalled. The chances are pretty good that if he lit up the entire fucking valley he probably maimed and killed a lot of innocent people along with the ones who were trying to kill him and he most certainly did vast damage to the natural habitat. But should we condemn him for speaking the truth? At one level, and one he’s admitting, he certainly loved it. So did I. At another level he did what his society had asked him to do, and he did so with skill, courage, and even élan. Should that same society now cut him off at the throat or, worse, at the balls?