What It Is Like to Go to War

by Karl Marlantes

  I can think of no finer examples of strength of character and fair play in war than those described by Hans von Luck, one of the most highly decorated of Erwin Rommel’s young panzer commanders.88 Luck joined the German Army in 1929 at the age of eighteen and became one of Rommel’s favorite line officers. He saw action on the Eastern Front and in North Africa, France, and Germany. He was captured by the Russians in the final days of fighting before Berlin and spent five years in a Russian labor camp, returning eventually to Germany to become a coffee importer.

  In North Africa Luck led an armored reconnaissance battalion. Armored reconnaissance units were constantly at the extremes of the main battle areas, screening, probing. Thus he was very often in contact with his British counterparts, the Royal Dragoons and the Eleventh Hussars. In a treeless desert, with no landmarks and no satellite fixes, it was impossible for units to find their way back to base in the dark. To light a signal would betray their position to artillery fire. So for both sides all activity ceased at evening.

  One night Luck received a call from the Royal Dragoons.

  “Hallo, Royal Dragoons here. I know it’s unusual to make radio contact with you, but Lieutenant Smith and his scouting party have been missing since this evening. Is he with you, and if so, how are things with him and his men?”

  “Yes, he is with us. All of them are unhurt and send greetings to their families and friends.” Then came the brainstorm: “Can we call you, or the Eleventh Hussars, if we have anyone missing?” I asked.

  “Sure,” he replied. “Your calls are always welcome.”

  It was only a matter of days before we arrived at a gentleman’s agreement: At 5 p.m. precisely, all hostilities would be suspended. We called it “tea time.” At 5:05 p.m. we would make open contact with the British to exchange “news” about prisoners, etc. From a distance of about fifteen kilometers, we could often see the British get out their Primus stoves to make their tea.

  One night Luck’s doctor went outside the perimeter to relieve himself and never came back. He was indispensable to Luck and it was a major blow. Finally Luck called the British. Yes, they had him. Then the British made a suggestion. They were suffering badly from malaria. Their quinine from the Far East had been cut off. Could they exchange the doctor for some of the German synthetic Atabrine?

  The moral issue was whether to continue to weaken the British by refusing them Atabrine or to get his doctor back. As Luck put it, “I quickly made up my mind.” He exchanged the Atabrine for the doctor.

  Once a Royal Air Force reconnaissance plane on a long-range patrol discovered Luck’s small column. There was no place to hide on that merciless flat plain. Within an hour the fighters, Hurricanes and Spitfires, came roaring over the horizon. They concentrated all their fire on his antiaircraft platoon, eliminating it. They were back within an hour and eliminated his artillery platoon. Now he was completely defenseless, so he scattered his men away from the tanks and reconnaissance vehicles and watched helplessly as the planes roared in for the third time to shoot up all the tanks.

  The only one to remain in his vehicle was my radio operator, who was sending off my messages. Next to the vehicle stood my intelligence officer, who passed on to the operator what I shouted across to him. Then a machine—I thought I recognized the Canadian emblem—approached for a low-flying attack on the armored radio station. At twenty yards, I could clearly see the pilot’s face under his helmet. But instead of shooting, he signaled with his hand for the radio officer to clear off, and pulled his machine up into a great curve.

  “Get the operator out of the vehicle,” I shouted to the intelligence officer, “and take cover, the pair of you!”

  The machine had turned and now came at us out of the sun for the second time. This time he fired his rockets and hit the radio car...

  This attitude of the pilot, whether he was Canadian or British, became for me the example of fairness in this merciless war. I shall never forget the pilot’s face or the gesture of his hand.

  Small incidents like this were numerous. When the end finally came, Luck, who thought he was in a place where no one could find him, received the following letter, handed to him by a bedouin.

  From C.O.

  Royal Dragoons

  Dear Major von Luck,

  We have had other tasks and so were unable to keep in touch with you. The war in Africa has been decided, I’m glad to say, not in your favor.

  I should like, therefore, to thank you and all your people, in the name of my officers and men, for the fair play with which we have fought against each other on both sides.

  I and my Battalion hope that all of you will come out of the war safe and sound and that we may find the opportunity to meet again sometime, in more favorable circumstances.

  With greatest respect.

  I’m not trying to say that throughout the Second World War the Germans and the British didn’t do horrible things to each other. They did. But there were these incidents when they did not. As Luck puts it, “The prevailing atmosphere was one of respect: We ‘understood’ each other.” The word respect is notable. For some reason, these particular men did not pseudospeciate each other. They remembered their common humanity and controlled the beast that lies within us all. Remembering our common humanity and controlling the beast that wants to obliterate that memory is the task for all conscious warriors of the future.

  Basic training is oriented toward eliminating the enemy’s humanity. I am well aware that this presents us with a very difficult question. Will our young people carry out our war policies if they can’t overcome the fact that they are killing a person just like themselves? Will increased consciousness decrease effectiveness?

  I think not.

  If a young warrior falls into killing from a rage or killing while thinking of the enemy as less than human, then, with some prior warning, some prior understanding, there is the chance for quick recognition of what is happening when the killing stops. It’s like catching cancer early. There’s a better chance for a cure if it isn’t allowed to grow unnoticed. I do not doubt that warriors will invariably switch into and out of consciousness and on occasion kill from rage. Warriors will almost always kill with the conviction, at the time of killing, that the enemy is not human. Our goal should be to strive not to do so and, when we do, to get back to consciousness as soon as we are out of immediate danger. Training for such a goal will not be likely to perfect us, but it will move us forward.

  BESTIAL NATURES, CONTROL, AGGRESSION, AND COMPASSION

  I shall probably never be as thrilled as I was that one moment I left a safe position to join my old platoon in the assault where I ended up trying to pull Utter from underneath the machine gun. I ran toward the fighting with the same excitement, trembling, and thrill as a lover rushing to the beloved in the spiritual love poetry of the mystics. Perhaps these are identical transcendent psychological states. But I don’t ever want to do it again. It is also a dangerous inflated state of being.

  The transcendent state is a major reason warfare is an intractable human problem and so difficult to put a stop to. It offers us raw life: vibrant, terrifying, and full blast. We are lifted into something larger than ourselves. If it were all bad, there would be much less of it, but war simply isn’t all bad. Why do kids play war games? Why do adults enter professions such as ambulance driver, search and rescue, firefighter? Because these activities lift you from your limited world.

  To teach the children who will become the warriors of the future about the dangers of this kind of power, each of us must know it and be able to draw on this energy when appropriate.

  I was in Germany with my friends Albert and Hilde and their four children. Hilde is from the Prussian aristocracy. We were visiting a large fortress and castle that had been in the keeping of Hilde’s family for many generations. As I walked down the corridors in the castle, I couldn’t help noticing that many of the portraits of the old warriors hanging side by side, generation by generation, on the walls, looked rem
arkably similar to Hilde.

  Hilde wandered off with the three girls, and Albert and I ended up with his son, Wilhelm, or “Vim,” on top of the wide and exposed castle walls. The fortress was high on a hill in the center of a small city. A large valley with gentle rolling hills stretched out below us. You could see tidy farms and villages out to the green horizon.

  Vim, who had barely turned four, was far too young to know anything about the castle or the portraits on its walls. He left us and walked over to the wall’s edge. There was no parapet, no safety fence, nothing between him and the scene stretched before him and death below him. Albert and I stopped talking, frozen.

  Vim spread his legs wide apart. Standing only inches from the edge, he put his small fists on his hips, thrust out his chest, and lifted his chin defiantly. In a clear piping voice, suddenly strangely powerful, he called out to that empty space and rolling valley, “Ich bin Deutscher.”89 Something had taken over Vim and it gave me shivers. The ghosts of the ancestors were here. The fierce Germanic god Wotan, the leader of the Wild Hunt, had come.

  Albert, who had lost his own father in the Second World War, gently walked over to Vim, knelt beside him, and put his arms around him. Albert is a wonderful man whose respect for traditional values doesn’t stop him from actively supporting the Greens. He looked out at the scene with Vim for a moment. I can’t translate verbatim, but the words and the tone conveyed something like “Yes, you are a German. It’s beautiful, isn’t it.” He brought Vim back to safety and said quietly to me in English, “The smartest thing you Americans ever did was split us in half.”

  Wotan exists. I think Wotan is closer to the surface in some cultures than in others. I think Wotan is closer to the surface in boys than in girls. I know that within me, or all around me, are very fierce and wild forces. These forces have to be channeled and guided. They are too big to dam or damn. These forces, which can come through all of us, are not created in childhood. However, the strength of character required to guide these forces is greatly helped, or greatly damaged, by how we parent our children, particularly when this force appears. Without such character the ego simply abandons ship when it faces this situation. There’s no ego strength left to control the unconscious forces that come ripping through the abandoned channels of the body and mind. The loss of this “I” is, according to most mystical traditions, the way to ecstasy, but it can also be the way to horror.

  Homer spoke of the warrior energy nearly two thousand years ago through the voice of Odysseus.

  great Ares90and Athena

  gave me valor and man-breaking power,

  whenever I made choice of men-at-arms

  to set a trap with me for my enemies.

  Never, as I am a man, did I fear Death

  ahead, but went in foremost in the charge,

  putting a spear through any man whose legs

  were not as fast as mine. That was my element,

  war and battle. Farming I never cared for,

  nor life at home, nor fathering fair children.

  I reveled in long ships with oars; I loved

  polished lances, arrows in the skirmish,

  the shapes of doom that others shake to see.

  Carnage suited me; heaven put those things

  in me somehow.91

  The great mothers—Mother Teresa—and the great fighters—Chesty Puller—are simply people who have dedicated their lives to the power that “heaven put into them.” Such people, however, are on an extreme end of a spectrum most of us only share in varying degrees. Women can briefly enter the realm of the Great Mother whenever they give birth. I entered the realm of Mars for a time in Vietnam. Some of us get swallowed alive by these energies or archetypes and some of us reemerge to carry on with other activities. Recognizing that we share these energies, but need not dedicate our lives to them, allows us all to use them, but not be used by them, or be manipulated by society into being used by them. To try to kill these energies through repression and shame is not only impossible but very damaging to individuals and society. A lot of current societal forces and politics try to do just this. But to be used by these energies also damages individuals. Women can more easily be manipulated and consumed by the Mother and men by the Warrior. To strike a healthy relationship we need to first see that “heaven put these things in us somehow.”

  Given that this responsibility rests on our individual shoulders, how are we to bear this load? How are we to recognize and acknowledge the evil within, yet not give in to it and act it out? How are we to be warriors who essentially perform violent acts yet still maintain our humanity? Our only hope is to see this Mars energy clearly so we can be aware of ourselves as distinct from it yet a part of it. There is no hope for limiting the tragedy of warfare and violence if we don’t see it. It will take us over, obliterate our egos, turn us all into people overwhelmed by our dark sides. “Command yourself” is the second great principle of the ethical conscious warrior.

  Our response to the problem of keeping the beast in check while we are still waging frightful war has been the typical flip-flop of extremes that people usually adopt when faced with seemingly irreconcilable demands. At the one extreme we say things like “War is hell,” excusing ourselves as we ride the beast over Tokyo, firing paper houses and burning civilians, or ride it a quarter century later, doing the same things with napalm in Vietnam. At the other extreme we make extraordinary efforts to keep the warrior leashed, mistakenly hoping that somehow if we leash the warrior the beast will also remain leashed. But at this extreme all we can do is wring our hands and point fingers while all the things we hold dear, our children, our ideals, our values, are ground into the mud by the beast unleashed by the opposing side. It seems an impossible situation. How can we kill to protect without releasing the dark warriors of pseudospeciation, racism, hatred, and slaughter?

  This dilemma isn’t a new one.

  Our greatest protection against falling into the thrall of the beast is children raised without shame and suppressed rage. This will ultimately demand a revolution of respect in child rearing.92

  To deal consciously with the warrior aspect of small children, our task as parents is to recognize that aggression and the warrior energy are as natural and as problematic as sexuality. There is a biological base to them, the strength of which varies from individual to individual. Just as some people like to make love more often than others, some people are naturally more aggressive than others. Just as virtually all people like to express sexuality, so too with aggression. Natural aggression, like sexuality, can either be repressed, to eventually emerge ugly and out of control, or it can be guided into healthy and productive uses.

  One day our son Alex, when he was three, got accidentally locked out of the house. My wife and I were upstairs cleaning his brother’s and sisters’ bedrooms. We could hear him pounding on the door, shouting for us to open up, but we were in the middle of trying to reverse the laws of entropy with the toys and decided he could wait a minute or two.

  We heard a shattering of glass.

  I ran down the stairs. Alex was standing in the living room with glass all around him, door wide open, a large stick in his hand. He was radiating. He had smashed the window in the door to unlock it from the inside.

  I gently took the stick from his hand and carried him up to his room for a quiet talk. I was so dumbfounded I couldn’t think of what to say. I suppose I should have told him how frustrated he must have felt when he couldn’t get in and how strong he must have felt to solve his problem all by himself by smashing in the window. Then I should have told him that his strength needs to be used for different sorts of occasions, for instance if he were really endangered, or a friend were endangered. At least I didn’t go into a rage and make him feel ashamed of his natural, albeit misplaced, vitality.

  One of the results of repressing natural aggression in children is that aggression gets blocked permanently and is replaced by passivity. This has traditionally happened to women. We’ve actually g
otten ourselves into such a state with repression of natural aggression in women that many women are now going to classes to unlearn the shutdown imposed on them by society. They can’t even draw on this natural energy that the gods put in them to save their own lives. I worry that the same thing is now happening to men. It’s the wrong response to the problem of violence. Repressing natural aggression until it becomes passivity works only temporarily; the aggression will be released as unconscious rage years later, through either physical violence or ugly, damaging verbal aggression.

  The first time the child smashes the window to get inside the locked door you must recognize and check your own fear of the violence that act invokes in you. Then you must recognize, and help the child recognize, how good and strong that must have felt. Never cut the child off from his or her warrior feelings, particularly by statements such as “You don’t really feel that way.” Once you affirm that the feelings are honest, you then immediately say how that strength and those feelings should be used for something better than smashing windows.

  When a child grabs a playmate’s toy, or defends himself violently against someone else who is grabbing the toy from him, you show both children what warrior energy is used for by immediately protecting the victim of the aggression, innocent or guilty. Then you help the little warriors see clearly what happened and how they feel. “That made you mad. That anger helped you feel strong. You may need that strength someday when there is nobody else to help. But you didn’t need it here. You can get your toy back without hurting someone.”

  Preschool teachers constantly repeat the convenient shorthand “Use your words” when a child gets aggressive. The overriding message is that aggression is bad. It doesn’t recognize the healthy aspects of aggression. Unrecognized, the healthy drive frequently goes over to the dark side. There are times when physical aggression is an appropriate response. When you meet the serial killer on the jogging path, words are going to fail you.