What It Is Like to Go to War

by Karl Marlantes

  At home, parents should wrestle with their children, showing them physical aggression under control. It’s fun to wrestle. It’s fun to pin Dad (or Mom). It’s fun to cause him a little pain. And Dad has some fun pinning the kids too. But the kids learn that the fun stops at painful chokeholds or arm bars. They learn that little brother starts crying if his three older siblings pile on top of him.

  Roughhousing often ends up with someone crying at some point. This is because crying is a child’s sign that things have gone too far. Children are learning. They have to push to this point to find out when enough is enough. A normal reaction to games that evoke crying is to ban them because they hurt people. What should be banned is not the rough games but continuing beyond the point where the child signals that things have gone too far. Young children will understand what going beyond that point means only when they have pushed to the point where they see, hear, or feel the consequences for themselves. And they will push to that point time and time again.

  What needs to be taught is that the aggressor must stop when the opponent asks for the fighting to stop. Parents must attempt to link the feelings of the child being hurt to the memory of similar feelings on the part of the aggressor child. The best way to do this is to continue the game, because, sooner or later, everyone ends up on the bottom of the pile. The bottom of the pile is the best place to learn empathy.

  Empathy can be taught and learned. Traditionally we learn it the hard way. When I was in grade school, I never got into a fight thinking I was going to inflict pain on someone. I especially never got into a fight thinking I’d have the pain inflicted on me. I just got into a fight. Pain was the last thing on my mind.

  Along with teaching empathy we also need to teach the difference between empathy and sentiment. Warriors need empathy, but a warrior must not fall into mushy sympathy. My great-uncle Charlie raised cattle. The summer I was seven I got the job of feeding a little bull calf who’d been rejected by his mother. I imaginatively named him Ferdinand. I remember petting the hot coarse hair on his bony spine and talking to him, looking at his broad white face, noticing how his eyes rolled white when he tried to see me coming up behind him. I used to tag around with him, dodging mother cows and cow pies. I’d feed him from a bottle. I brought Ferdinand anything I could think of, flowers, candy, hay, rolled oats from my great-aunt Sandra’s cupboards.

  One already hot morning Ferdinand was gone. I went back to the house. “Aunt Sandra, where’s Ferdinand?” She looked at me, flour on her hands from making bread. “Go talk to Kalle Sita.” So I found Uncle Charlie, who was on the John Deere 40 haying, and asked him the same question. He asked me if I’d like to ride the pickup into town for a milkshake. There at the counter, beneath the paper straw sleeves hanging down from the ceiling where kids had blown them with gum attached to the ends, he explained the economics of ranching, including where the spending money came from to buy my milkshake.

  I cried. Charlie just put his hand on my shoulder. When we got back, he said something to his daughter, my aunt Lydia, in Finnish, and she took me over to my cousins’ farm to go swimming in the river. There was no mystery. I knew Ferdinand had been turned into meat. And I knew why. Money sends kids to college, not sentiment. If the air support comes loaded with napalm, you burn your enemy and save your recon team.

  INCORPORATING SPIRITUAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL

  SOPHISTICATION INTO THE CONDUCT OF WAR

  Raising our children to come to terms with natural aggression will bring us more mature and psychologically balanced warriors. Changes still remain to be done by the military. The first change will have to be in how it approaches spirituality. The second will be in how it incorporates the explosion of knowledge about psychology and brain chemistry into its training programs.

  Eighteen-year-olds haven’t lived long enough to be much aware of the spiritual and individualizing part of their personal development. They are in phase one, the societal-role part. Odysseus had been working on phase two for twenty years, and he still nearly lost it when tested defending his father’s farm against the revengeful relatives of the slain suitors. These kids will need a lot of spiritual guidance once they are in the military, and I don’t mean the battalion chaplain handing out cheer at Christmas.

  I would leave a great deal of the particulars of spiritual training up to the individuals themselves. I worry about the military’s natural tendency to do everything by the numbers, which, ipso facto, destroys the individual character of the training. But the military should provide the structure and the tools for individuals to successfully engage in personalized training. To begin with I’d make each advance in rank a time for reflection and instruction. By the time soldiers are old enough and have had enough experience to reach ranks such as staff sergeant or company commander, they should have to go through several weeks of intensive inner work, particularly dealing with their own rage on the psychological level. On the spiritual level they need to come to terms with the fact that their job will probably require them to lead anywhere from forty to several hundred soldiers whose job it will be to kill other warriors and, because we are not perfect fighters with perfect weapons, innocent people. I can think of few other professions that require as much leavening in their leadership and ranks of phase-two leaders for the well-being of society. I can think of no other profession, save perhaps psychotherapy, which should have more psychological training than these warrior professions. When I got promoted I got drunk.

  Men and women should have significant parts of this inner training separately. You can’t relate well to the opposite sex until you come to terms with your own sex and sexuality—and your unconscious contrasexuality. In the immediate future, many heterosexuals are going to have difficulties with homosexuals. Women choosing the military as a profession are going to have an immense struggle not to become pseudomen. It’s not just a woman’s problem, however. There are a lot of male pseudomen in the world, still behaving like forty-year-old frat boys. A pseudoman, whether male or female, can be an effective killer but cannot be a conscious warrior.

  The old Women’s Army Corps, like the other women’s services, had already made a good start, perhaps unconsciously, on much of what I’m talking about. The women’s branches had their own traditions, rituals, and standards, which were separate from those of the men. Unfortunately, these were eliminated when the military integrated.

  Young soldiers will also need help from the older men and women they work with. Today, however, we have lost almost all old soldiers down in the ranks. Many poor and illiterate men found permanent homes in the armies and navies of the previous centuries. The all-volunteer military has moved a considerable distance from that former economic role. Today our military consists of educated working-class or middle-class personnel, and people who aren’t capable of advancing are usually encouraged to leave. This has left the military with mostly young people in low ranks. There are no more old peasant soldiers with pipes dispensing hard-won wisdom. Older, and therefore higher-ranking, people now need to actively get down into the ranks to be more involved with younger military people’s personal development. When I promoted a fire team leader to squad leader, I never once asked the usually teenage kid how he felt about the added responsibility or the moral burden. Even though I was only three years older, I was older and should have. Had someone ever asked me such questions, it probably would have been sufficient to prompt me to ask them similar questions, because I would have seen the value.

  We were being resupplied on an operation north of Khe Sanh when out of the resupply bird came a sweating, cursing caricature of an overweight top sergeant. But this top sergeant had been busted back to gunnery sergeant and sent to Vietnam for using Marine Corps equipment to build a secret swimming hole for the kids in his company back in the barren hills behind Camp Pendleton.

  Ex–first sergeant Michaels, or “Gunny Mike,” as he came to be known all over the regiment, was close to retirement. He drank too much. He ate too much. His heart was bad. We
could hear him wheezing and gasping whenever we stopped, his face florid, refusing to sit down for fear he’d never get up again. He never complained. When asked if he was all right, he would snap back, “I’ll-goddamnit-get-in-shape-now-leave-me-the-fuck-alone.” Old Corps—to the core.

  He was with us in the bush around a week when he finally faltered and fell on a very steep ridge on a very hot day. The corpsman passed the word up the column to the skipper. The gunny’s blood pressure had skyrocketed. We’d kill him if we didn’t get him out of the bush. That night the skipper ordered Gunny Mike back to the regimental staging area at Vandegrift Combat Base. He told the gunny we needed someone back at VCB to make sure we got supplies sent out to us in the bush and to clean up the company’s supply tent, which was always in notoriously bad shape because no one was back there to look after it. This was all true, but Gunny Mike knew the real reason. I watched his lips tense, holding back what emotions I don’t know. He saluted. No one salutes in the bush.

  From that day on we had an institution. All the kids in the company—passing through sick, passing through on R&R, coming in-country, going home—all went through Gunny Mike. He’d walk them to the LZ when they were too scared to walk there themselves. He’d sit them down with cold beers and let them talk off the most recent horror when they came back. He’d help them write letters home.

  Once, at three in the morning, I came to crash in the tent on my way back into the mountains after a one-night drunk. There was Gunny Mike playing cards with a lone new guy. A candle was guttering on the steel supply table, throwing wavering shadows against the dark canvas walls that luffed slightly in the damp night air. He was listening to the kid nervously telling him what must have been his entire life story before he would have to sky up with me two hours later for the unknown terrors waiting for him in the bush.

  When we would come off an operation there would be ice cream. We’d burn out machine-gun barrels, and there to replace them would be barrels stolen at great risk from Army helicopters. One time he had two hours of porn movies and popcorn waiting for us. He was no saint. And we never asked questions he’d have to lie about.

  Gunny Mike was twenty or twenty-five years older than the oldest of the rest of us, which would have put him somewhere in his forties. He seemed like an elder uncle or even a grandfather. His value was inestimable. What he did won him no medals and what appeared on his military file would never come close to describing what he did in our supply tent. He counseled. He performed communion with a cup that held Wild Turkey and a host of freeze-dried trail food, also stolen from the Army. He made room for soul.

  What Gunny Mike was doing is nothing more or less than what therapists call co-counseling. He happened to be a gifted natural at it. But this sort of thing can be taught. I would have everyone trained in it at least a little bit and NCOs and officers trained in it a lot. It would save money and lives in the long run and improve efficiency and motivation in the short run.

  I envision a system where each unit, maybe as far down as platoon level, could elect somebody to help conduct ceremonies of significance. Another way might be to provide combat corpsmen and medics with some of this training. They often act as platoon psychologists in any case. Such a person would do this in addition to his or her normal duties. It would be wrong to set someone up as a specialist exempted from the dirty work, wrong for that person and the unit. Our kids talked with Gunny Mike because he’d been there in Korea. They hardly ever talked to the chaplain.

  The only difference between unit spiritual helpers and the other fighters would be that the helpers receive some extra training in addition to their basic killing skills. This would be something that chaplains could do well, along with some co-counseling techniques and consultation on particularly knotty problems. The unit spiritual leader would conduct simple ceremonies, with no particular religious heritage, mourn dead friends, bury dead enemies, and help people come to terms with the fact that they’ve just killed someone who was probably as innocent as they were in this whole mess. They could conduct small ceremonies before going into battle or going on ambushes or patrol where battle might suddenly erupt. These people and their ceremonies would help line other people up with the right reasons for what they are about to do. They would help detoxify others from the contaminants of rage, shadow, and the occasional missions devoid of meaning. They would help release, gradually and steadily, as close to the actual time of combat as possible, the overwhelming emotions and psychic pressures of war. I think if more of this was done, atrocities would be less likely to occur. Infantry platoons have medics for the body. Why not for the soul?

  MYTHOLOGY: COMING TO A NEW UNDERSTANDING OF MARS

  Beyond fundamental changes in child rearing and military training, we need, finally, a new mythology about war itself. We must recognize that even the mythologies of the past don’t always bring sufficient wisdom to our situation today. We are presently being asked to move beyond the old myths, even as we still struggle to grasp their deep wisdom.

  This is not a new situation in history. Many an old religion has disappeared to be replaced by something “better” or more true. The Odysseus of Homer was different from the Odysseus of Sophocles. Odysseus grew and changed as the consciousness of the poets grew and changed. We must take from an epic mythology such as the Bhagavad Gita what we can, but we must apply to it our own expanded knowledge of other cultures and other myths. In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna says to the despairing Arjuna, “A wise man never weeps.” The Bible verse all Christian kids love to memorize, John 11:35, says, “Jesus wept.” We are no longer limited to one tribal myth. We can choose.

  Joseph Campbell has said that the new world mythologies yet to come must transcend national boundaries. So too must civilization’s use of warriors. When you put the primary duties of the warrior into a global perspective, rather than simply a national one, the warrior comes out looking more like a police officer. This is because at last we have come back full circle, back to the mythologies of the original warrior gods.

  The warrior gods in prehistorical times were gods of justice as well as war. In my view, this seems to be in large part because early people almost invariably considered themselves the only people. In their eyes, they constituted everything that was human. Subsequently their mythologies and religions were themselves global, explaining all.93 If you were never confronted with an enemy, and particularly an enemy with a totally different religious system, you didn’t need a war god on your side, because, in effect, you were the only side. The god of war could easily be a god of justice, putting to rights differences between people of essentially the same beliefs.

  As populations increased, however, territories got abandoned and invaded. Mass migrations confronted these early people with alien religious forms and understandings of the world. “Us” became “them and us.” People began to need a war god more than they did a god of justice. The war god split off from the god of justice as communities came into conflict. As the world is reunited and made smaller through advanced communications and technology, once again we become the only people. The war gods will have to shift back as well.

  For people of European, Persian, and Indian ancestry all the war gods evolved from the Indo-European god Deus. The name means “shining heaven” or “light of day.” Deus was probably the supreme sky god of these early people as well as their god of battle.94Deus is the root word for Zeus, the supreme god of the Greeks. It is also the root for Dyaus pita, which means father Deus and was shortened to Jupiter, the supreme god of the Romans. The Indo-European source word for the sky god still exists in words like deity and day.

  The early Germanic tribes, long before they split into the tribes of history such as the Norsemen, Goths, and Vandals, also worshipped a god with a variation on this name. This god was called Tiwaz, another variant of Deus or Zeus, the original form of the Tyr in the story of the binding of the Fenris wolf and, as Hilda Ellis Davidson, a distinguished researcher of pre-Christian northern Europe, says
, this god was “no mere crude deity of slaughter.”

  Early Roman travelers associated Tiwaz with their god Mars, calling him Mars Thingsus. The Thing was the assembly of free men where disputes were settled. The Thing is not only one of the earliest known forerunners of the jury, a fundamental institution of our current judicial system, but also a precursor of Western legislative systems.

  Tiwaz was the god of the justice system as well as of battle. He was the protector of law and order in the community. Davidson quotes Tacitus, the early Roman historian who wrote about the Germanic tribes. “No man might be flogged, imprisoned, or put to death among the Germans save by their priests, ‘in obedience to the god which they believe to preside over battle.’ If the god of battle punished criminals, then he must surely have been regarded as the supporter of order and justice.”

  This shouldn’t surprise those of us from a Judeo-Christian heritage. Our Jehovah basically started out as a war god, the Lord of Hosts. It was this same Lord of Hosts who gave Moses the tablets of the law. Tiwaz was one-handed, another reflection of the sacrificed hand of Tyr or of Nuada Argetlam (He of the Silver Hand)—all gods who sacrificed a limb for the good of others. He also wielded a sword. The statue of blind Justice in our courtrooms shows her wielding a sword as well as scales.

  Over time, Tiwaz disappeared. Eventually Tiwaz turned into Wotan for the early Germans and, later, Odin for the Norse Vikings. Davidson writes, “As time went on the emphasis seems to change from that of a supreme ruler holding in his hand victory or defeat, who taught men the value of law and order among themselves, to that of a more capricious power who bestowed madness on his followers, and who meted out victory or defeat with the arrogance of an earthly tyrant.” These splits in our culture become representations in our own psyches. As our psyches split, so too did our images of our gods, and today we are left with a war god split off from an earlier, more whole figure.