What It Is Like to Go to War

by Karl Marlantes

  The appropriate response is to get him to keep talking about it. It may just be a bit shocking to find your friend has a wild and savage side that did a lot of harm. And it won’t hurt him to find out that you think he did something very harmful and destructive, as long as at the same time he finds out that you won’t love him any less for it. This is his great fear, that he won’t be accepted back in. So he joins the conspiracy of silence. So do we all.

  Society needs veterans to express all sides of their experience, the guilt and sorrow and the pride. Cut off one and you cut off the others. Veterans’ organizations such as the VFW and the American Legion go a long way toward helping with the pride side and also providing a safe place for veterans to talk about experiences. These organizations are also enablers in numbing. They are filled with men drinking and smoking cigarettes. The Department of Veterans Affairs has successfully organized groups of veterans who talk to one another about war with the help of a trained therapist. This has helped many veterans to express all sides of the war experience. The problem is simply one of numbers—too few good therapists, too few veterans willing to attend—and one of audience: it is only veterans talking with veterans. In both cases, the problem is that the veterans’ experiences and feelings remain quarantined from their families and communities. They go to the dark bar at the Legion Club, where children and nonveterans are not allowed. They disappear once a week into the VA outpatient clinic to be “cured.” They aren’t talking to friends and family; they’re talking to bar buddies and therapists.

  The grief that is expressed at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., and it is the grief that most people focus on, would not be possible if it weren’t for the fact that the very building of the memorial was itself an act of recognition and pride on the part of veterans who took it upon themselves to get the project done. The memorial was not built by a grateful nation; self-respecting veterans built it and had to fight to have it placed where it is.

  The combat veteran experience is still not out in the open where the whole of culture can benefit from the sorrow and the pride and society’s attitude toward war and fighting can mature psychologically and spiritually. No nation will ever reach maturity, or make sensible foreign policy, until its warriors, its people, and its leaders can talk about all sides of war with equal feeling. “I lit up the whole valley” and “I’ve grieved, crying for the little ones like my own children.” Without integration of the positive and negative sides of the war, the experience isn’t transmitted in any practical and meaningful sense, and we will continue to seek the glory of war unchecked by wisdom about all the costs of war.

  11

  RELATING TO MARS

  I speak with some nervousness of relating to the war god Mars. Who am I to suggest any human can relate to this terrifying yet justifying god? Mars is the underlying organizing power that creates and sustains those physical and terrible aspects of war that seem beyond the comprehension of our small psyches. How does one relate to Gettysburg, or Stalingrad, or Hiroshima? Yet we must, or similar events will happen again. In the face of this seemingly overwhelming power I am going to evoke the name of Mars to stand for those war-making aspects of our own psyches that love war and hate war simultaneously, aspects over which we can exercise control. I do this because I believe that this area of conscious control can continually increase. We waged war far less destructively in Iraq than we did in World War II. I personally relate to war differently today than I did when I was twenty. This gives me hope for humanity.

  Throughout this book I have attempted to honestly share my experiences of combat with an eye toward how I might have managed those experiences with more wisdom and psychological, spiritual, and ethical maturity. I have argued that had I been more conscious when I was fighting in Vietnam, I would have contributed just as effectively, or even more effectively, to the war aims of those in power. I would have wreaked less havoc and less pain and still gotten the job done. In this chapter, in the now shared context of my combat experience, I will touch on a few more general aspects of war fighting that I consider areas in which we can improve our relationship with Mars but which are more societally oriented than personally oriented.

  UNDERSTANDING WARRIOR ETHICS AND PSYCHOLOGY:

  WAITE’S DICTUM AND THE WARRIOR’S DICTUM

  Terry Waite, the special envoy for the archbishop of Canterbury, went to Lebanon in 1987 to negotiate for the release of hostages. While there, he was taken hostage as well. Day after day, for five years, he feared for his life. He was kept constantly blindfolded and chained, often for weeks at a time in a fetal position. He was tortured. If ever a person had good reasons for making an escape, Terry Waite had them.

  At one point in his captivity his guard took him, blindfolded as usual, to the toilet. After Terry was let into the tiny room he removed his blindfold, and there, left accidentally on top of the toilet, was a fully loaded automatic rifle. His guard was the only guard around, just outside the door, unsuspecting. Waite walked out of the room and handed the rifle to the guard.

  In an interview after his release Waite said he had no doubt that he could have killed the guard and escaped. He handed the rifle to the guard because for years he had been telling his captors and other terrorists that violence was not the way to settle disputes, and that he wasn’t on one side or the other of this particular dispute. If he killed this man to escape, he felt it would have devalued everything he stood for. He said, “Other than to protect someone, I could not use that weapon.”

  Is Terry Waite the warrior of the future or just crazy?

  He is neither. He is a brave man. Not all brave people are warriors. But in that interview Waite helped define what a warrior is when he said he would not choose sides and would not use a weapon, i.e., violence, other than to protect someone. In contrast to Waite, a warrior does choose sides. Choosing sides is the fundamental first choice that a warrior must make. Like Waite, a warrior is also willing to protect someone against violence, but Waite was talking about violence that is immediately being applied. The second fundamental choice of the warrior is to be willing to use violence to protect someone against even intended or implied violence. This second fundamental choice engenders an additional choice, which is accepting the risk of death and maiming that usually results from the decision to use violence against violence. To become a warrior requires making these two fundamental choices and accepting the risks entailed. Doing the above eliminates any need to use the adjective “ethical” in front of the noun “warrior.” A warrior, by my definition, acts ethically. Using violence other than to protect makes a person a bully or a murderer.

  The first decision, choosing sides, means taking on the warrior spirit. People who take on the warrior spirit become metaphorical warriors. They are like warriors in certain aspects, but they are not warriors. This choice is serious enough, often entailing commitments of great personal sacrifice. A prime example is a government or corporate whistle-blower. The second decision, however, choosing to use violence to protect someone else against actual and intended violence, a choice that usually also entails danger to the lives and psyches of the people who choose the violent path, moves one from being a metaphorical warrior to being a warrior in deed. Warriors are prepared to kill people.

  Because warriors make these two fundamental choices that Waite does not, warriors operate under a moral code that is grounded on different principles from Waite’s. At the base of Terry Waite’s moral philosophy is what I call Waite’s dictum: “Violence is not the way to solve problems.” But Waite himself said in the same interview that he would have used a weapon to protect someone. This is the warrior’s dictum: “No violence except to protect someone from violence.”

  These two seemingly incompatible positions invite wonderful moral philosophical debate. I can’t say that Waite’s position is more or less moral than the warrior’s. I can say that the position of the conscious warrior will decrease the suffering of political violence in an imperfect world whil
e the position of Terry Waite will eliminate the suffering of political violence only in a perfect world. One of my axioms of faith is that we don’t live in a perfect world.

  In order for a moral code to be of any practical value, that moral code must be applicable in the world in which we live. I unabashedly take a utilitarian stand that any moral code must help reduce suffering. This view invites the criticism that war itself causes more suffering than not going to war. The answer lies in the relative value one places on nonphysical suffering—for example, living under a dictator—and that gets us back into basic belief structures.

  Although the world would definitely be less violent and therefore a better place if everyone acted like Waite, we happen to live in a world where people abandon Waite’s nonviolent position regularly. When they do, they inflict injustice and suffering on innocent people. The warrior steps in and persuades them, by threatening or inflicting pain and death, to put an end to their harmful behavior.

  The warrior’s dictum is, however, oddly dependent philosophically on Waite’s dictum. In order to adhere to the warrior’s dictum the ethical warrior acts only when and if others use violence first. That is, someone else must have already abandoned Waite’s position—the philosophical necessity required for the ethical application of the warrior’s power. Accepting this means accepting that a moral nation’s first use of its warrior power will always be defensive because preemptive strikes are immoral.

  Like capital punishment, once done, a preemptive strike cannot be undone, and the nation struck could be innocent. Look at how badly the United States botched the intelligence, or botched the conclusions drawn from what intelligence it did possess, leading up to the 2003 Iraq war, namely that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction it was about to use against the United States. The United States got it wrong. Based on that justification alone, the United States was in the same position as a vigilante mob hanging an innocent man. There were more ethical justifications that should have been used and that were already well proved, namely a brutal dictator killing and torturing his own people who were powerless to stop him. The United Nations should have put a stop to it. It did not. The United States, Britain, and other states of the coalition did. Unfortunately they botched the occupation badly, setting back return to rule of law for years.

  Preemptive strikes also put the nation’s warriors into an untenable moral position. It’s all well and good for the president to get tough and say we’re going to bomb some country because he thinks it is fixing to bomb us. He, however, doesn’t do the killing. Some pilot has to pickle the load on some human being, and if that human being’s government never intended to strike the United States, then the pilot kills an innocent person. A warrior cannot commit to combat tentatively. Flawed as our response to Pearl Harbor was by racism and ignorance, it was not flawed by doubt about Japan’s intentions. Our guys went to war with everything they had. Imagine the Roosevelt administration telling Patton he couldn’t pursue the German Army south of the Loire for fear of upsetting the Vichy government.

  Of course a no-preemptive-strike policy limits options and confines strategy and makes less philosophic warriors moan in frustration. Since the ethical warrior’s position requires someone to break Waite’s dictum, in some ultimate sense, the ethical warrior always plays defense. More traditional fighters will call this approach impractical. What they mean by “impractical” is that they are initially placed in a vulnerable position. This presents real practical problems for the warrior that should not be minimized. The point is to plan with this constraint in mind, not to abandon the principle.

  We have often limited our strategic first-strike options in the past without serious harm. In many cases, by so doing, we have avoided harm not only to innocent people but also to ourselves. Take the tacit agreement between the belligerents of World War II not to use poison gas. Take the tacit agreement between the Soviet Union and the NATO powers not to use first-strike nuclear force, even though for years neither side would publicly give up this option. The strategies of mutually assured destruction, in this light, were not only practical, in that nuclear war was never waged, but moral. The problem is that a strategy of mutually assured destruction works only with opponents who have essentially the same value system. It will not work against suicidal terrorists or suicidal governments. Such people obviously value some things more highly than their own lives. This does not make these people irrational.

  In the case of the suicidal opponent, there is a further problem. Deciding just when someone has broken Waite’s dictum (violence is not the answer) and when to invoke the warrior’s response is hardly ever a black-and-white case. Unfortunately, in terms of moral clarity, but fortunately in terms of misery, history hands us few clear-cut scenarios. Judging when to resort to violence, when to enter the warrior mode, is almost always done with limited information and under extreme duress. This means making decisions when our instinctual save-the-organism side is roaring to the fore and threatening to obliterate our feeble consciousness.

  Once a decision is made, however, to commit our warriors to violence, the moral restraint of waiting for the enemy’s next move should be removed. We should commit totally to the offensive, what Robert E. Lee called “taking the aggressive.” The warrior should hold back force or offensive operations only when the other side stops using violence—period. The warrior stops fighting with every ethical means at his or her disposal only when one side quits. Being unclear about the warrior’s dictum can get us into moral hot water with first-strike policies. Being unclear about taking the aggressive has embroiled us in the “gentle surgeons make stinking wounds” kind of fighting we have been involved in too many times since World War II. Escalation, the strategy used in Vietnam, didn’t work. Just because game theory can be applied to war does not mean war is a game.

  If we are unable to take sides against a clear opponent, and unable to use violence with every means at our disposal to force that opponent to stop using violence against our side, then we should not go to war. We should use other means to either encourage or coerce people to do what we want. The world community helped end apartheid in South Africa through a whole lot of pressure other than military force.

  Finally, there is the very real problem that the people who make the decisions to send in the warriors often fail to adopt the warrior mode consciously themselves. It is as if they are deciding to involve someone else in a war. They “send our youth into harm’s way.” I do not doubt that most of our leaders take their responsibilities very seriously, but only if they see that they are actually doing the killing can they make a more conscious decision. Ideally, they should know ahead of time that they will have to face nightmares the rest of their lives over the killing. It will make for better decisions.

  I have often heard, and have agreed with, people who bemoan the fact that our political leaders, once they declare war, don’t get up on their horses like the chieftains of old, draw their swords, and lead the charge. That role is rightly outdated because the modern war chief must marshal and direct economic, political, and diplomatic as well as military resources and it is ineffective to do so from a horse. However, this distancing from the action should not preclude the leaders’ use of their imagination so that they can get into the correct relationship with the decision to wage war. Without this leap of imagination, modern political leaders will not be prepared to think and behave like ethical warriors.

  In a decision to make war, leaders must stop thinking of themselves as policy makers. The policy makers’ fundamental decision is whether or not to enter the warrior mode themselves. First, they must choose sides. This is something good political leaders do or should do as a matter of course. The more problematic decision is the second step. Killing people with Marines is ethically no different from killing people with hatchets. Only the distance from the spurting blood differs. So when a politician sends in the Marines, the politician uses violence every bit as much as the Marines themselves. The decision maker must ima
gine that sending warriors into harm’s way is the equivalent of charging the enemy with a sword with his own hide at stake. When a president or member of Congress decides to go to war, he or she must do so as a warrior, not a policy maker. It is the leaders who are choosing sides and using violence to stop violence, the very definition of a warrior. It remains a reason why the electorate should value military experience in its leadership.

  THE GROWING CYNICAL “NO HOLDS BARRED” ATTITUDE

  Completely taking the aggressive does not mean “no holds barred.” I am constantly told, usually by people who have never been to war and who apply varying degrees of simplistic reasoning, that all is fair in love and war, that having rules of war is total nonsense. This is simply not true. To sink to the position that fair play and the impulses of good character have no place in modern war, taking some sort of tough-guy realpolitik stance, is something the ethical warrior must never do. As I have said, warriors must wage war totally, without holding back, until the enemy stops using violence. Waging war fully, committing every ounce of force at one’s disposal, however, is different from waging war unethically. Entering the boxing ring with one hand tied behind your back is entirely different from agreeing not to hit below the belt. Is the veterinarian who however reluctantly kills the mad dog with sodium pentathol any less effective than the enraged man who kills it with a rifle or poisoned bait?