What it is Like to Go to War (10 page)

Still, it’s far too easy to say that unbalanced expenditures on weapons systems are simply the results of ego-enhancing little-boy posturing on the part of a bunch of military brass and their congressional cronies. It has this component, yes, but just as with the carpenter the job does indeed get done better with a fine tool. Those who procure weapons for our military have a moral obligation to get the best and finest. Unlike the carpenter, the people who use the tools aren’t the ones doing the buying; they are the ones doing the dying. I never once got upset with a weapon that was “too expensive” or “too sophisticated.” I got upset only with weapons that didn’t work.

The critical psychological issue about weapons technology is the ability to distance the user from the effects. A constant martial fantasy is the “clean kill.” To kill someone with an almost effortless
eloquent blow of the first two knuckles of the fist is aesthetically more pleasing than to bludgeon him to death with a rock. How much more pleasing, then, with a fine rifle? A precision-guided bomb? A ray gun that simply makes people disappear? One of the major horrors of war is the blasted bodies, rotting parts, and bloated intestines, and the stench. In Vietnam I used to fantasize about a laser beam so fine you could slice an airplane’s wing off with no more than a hairline cut—or a man’s head with no blood at all.

This clean-kill fantasy avoids the darkness. It allows the hero trip without any cost, so of course we fantasize about it. And as we get more and more technologically advanced there are more and more policy makers tempted to live out this fantasy. Even the language is getting neat and tidy, as in “surgical strike.” There is nothing very surgical about maiming Gadhafi’s children, the children of Baghdad, Taliban fighters, or Iraqi soldiers. Managing the blood is a major problem in surgery.
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I don’t mind the activity nearly as much as the hypocrisy.

Numbness and hypocrisy aren’t learned in boot camp. When it comes to inurement to violence, boot camp is just a finishing school.

I had an insight into inurement one day when I came off the train in Calcutta during a business trip and was faced with a beautiful little girl who had had both of her hands cut off to enhance her ability to beg. A cup was tied around her neck. I could hardly move. The world lurched. I stuffed something into the cup and stumbled out of the train station in horror. Yet the local people walked by her with seeming indifference. We in the United States react to violence the way the citizens of Calcutta react to such scenes of cruel poverty. We have identical nervous
systems. Calcuttans are as bombarded by images of cruel poverty as Americans are bombarded by images of violence. Although we often criticize them for their indifference, we are actually responding in the same way. To our shame, however, the Indians aren’t inventing the poverty for purposes of entertainment.

Getting used to the extremes of violence in combat is just another level up from our everyday training. The circuitry is all in place, having been wired long years before. All that’s happening is an increase in voltage. The problem is, however, that the voltage has been steadily and rapidly increasing in all of the entertainment fields. From the first shock of performers destroying their guitars onstage to the common and daily sadomasochistic fare of MTV and the like; from the stabbing in the shower in
Psycho
(1960), where we saw virtually nothing but a shadow, to the Roman-circus savagery of what is lightly stamped PG today, our psychic wiring is getting sized upward for higher and higher voltages. The score was roughly 100,000 to 127 in the first Gulf war and we loved it. Of course for Gulf I the reasons for going to war, to repulse an invasion and brutal bullying of an ally and friend, made it easier to get self-righteous. Self-righteousness is one of the best ways invented to fall into the rapture of violence: witness the terrorists who are waging holy war and taking “justified revenge.” The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, however, have forced us to face much more ambiguity about using violence, and the country is getting increasingly more divided on the matter as the wars lengthen.
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Even the motivation for inurement to violence is the same in war as in everyday life, that is, ego survival. We mistakenly assume that bodily survival has a higher precedence than ego survival. This is simply not generally true. Ego will happily destroy body for its own sake. Look at overweight executives headed for heart attacks on the way to getting their pictures in
Fortune
or anorexic models suffering slow starvation on their way to getting their pictures in
Vogue
. Protecting the ego is the general case.

In war, as in normal life, there are still far more cases where the body is not threatened but the ego is. For those in positions of authority, and farther from the action, ego survival is the key factor. If pilots begin to weep whenever they’re on a bombing run they might soon find that their proficiency would start to drop. Such pilots will hardly be the ones chosen to become squadron leaders. If becoming squadron leader is an ego need, then the ego will override the compassionate response. It’s no different for the lieutenant trying to become company commander, the colonel trying to make general, the White House staffer trying to get a cabinet post, and the politician trying to ensure reelection.

Since many people strive for positions of power as compensations for needy egos, it is hardly surprising that the corridors of power are filled with people for whom the compassionate responses will be short-circuited as a matter of course. War simply draws out in stark relief the immense power of our need to be accepted by our peers, which causes us to conform to society’s rules of conduct rather than respond with compassion. In so-called normal life we do these things every day, but we don’t see the results quite so clearly and therefore don’t relate to the remorse. This is because no one grabs us by the scruffs of our necks and shoves our faces into the messes we’ve created while shoring up our images.

When I first joined my company it was operating alone in the high mountains that formed the Vietnamese border with Laos. Our job was to disrupt the Ho Chi Minh trail and find and destroy supply bases and hospitals.
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The company had set up on a hill temporarily and I was asked to take one of my squads out on a security patrol to screen the company position. It was my first combat patrol and I was determined to look competent. I was also nervous as hell. So, I assume, were my troops.

We’d been out several hours, moving ever farther from the company through beautiful untouched jungle, when we heard noise down in a very steep draw. We took cover, silently forming a hasty defense. After a few minutes of tense listening, the squad leader and the artillery forward observer, a young lance corporal who was extremely good at map reading, which was why he was directing artillery fire, turned to me with slight smiles on their faces. “It’s a gook transportation unit,” the F.O. whispered.

I was an NFG
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for sure, but not stupid. So I knew some kind of joke was at hand, though I couldn’t figure it out. “Okay, I’ll bite. There’s no roads for miles around here.”

“Elephants. The gooks use them for packing gear.”

“They do?”

“Sure they do.”

Well, this made sense. I’d read about that back in the world. I tried to ponder what significance this might have for the patrol
and me when the artillery observer said, “It’s a legitimate target. I usually call in a fire mission.
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Okay, sir?”

I didn’t want to look soft or indecisive. This was my first patrol, my debut, my coming out. So I ended up looking totally soft and indecisive and said, “You sure it’s a legitimate target?”

“Sure. We do it all the time. The gooks use them just like trucks.” And with that I said okay. My first fire mission in Vietnam was against an unseen “gook transportation unit”—a herd of elephants.

When the first shells came crashing in I heard the screams and the tearing and crashing of the brush by the maddened elephants. I called off the mission. I was so ashamed I didn’t even take the patrol into the draw to see the damage. In the intensity of war we see the ordinary small evils driven by trivial causes, such as not wanting to look incompetent or soft, magnified into horrors, such as the wounding of innocent animals.

For all practical purposes, most of us have already been raised with this “short-circuit training” that enables us to override the more complex neurological wiring of compassion with the simple and direct short circuit of trivial concerns and immediate needs and wants. So how do we mortals overcome this short-circuiting of compassion?

There’s a physical method and there’s a ritualistic method.

The physical method is pretty simple. It requires that we make a conscious attempt to use other senses besides the visual whenever we are faced with making decisions that could result
in killing or carnage. Our nonvisual senses haven’t been dulled like our visual ones. A congressional junket to a combat zone is one junket this taxpayer would feel good paying for—as long as it doesn’t stop short at headquarters. Unfortunately most of them do because most junketing members of Congress are there so that they can tell people back home they’ve been there and not to actually see the results or failures of their votes. Walk through a burned-out village where the dogs haven’t been fed and you
hear
them eating the dead. If this doesn’t snap through your conditioning, then
smell
human meat rotting.
Listen
to the wailing of the orphaned child and go mad with it because you can’t get it out of your ears until you either walk away or do away with the child. Pick up chunks of body and
feel
the true meaning of dead weight. These senses aren’t filtered and dulled by visual media. These channels are much more directly open to the heart. This is another reason why computer-game warfare has no natural checks on its violence.

The second area is that of ritual. Upon reading Homer’s
Iliad
I was struck with how much time the ancient warriors spent in ritual. If they weren’t offering something to a god or goddess, they were burning some dead comrade along with his armor. In the
Táin Bó Cúailnge
, the Irish equivalent of the
Iliad
, virtually every encounter is preceded by some ritual marking of stones utilizing the ogham,
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placing of stakes in streams, placing of heads on stakes. During combat tours time must be carved out in which to reflect. I wish that after each action the skipper could have drawn us all together, just us. In ten or fifteen minutes of solemn time we could have asked forgiveness and said good-bye to lost friends.

Compassion must be elicited consciously in warfare. Our natural tendency is to think of the enemy as an animal inferior to
us. This serves to help warriors accomplish very ugly tasks, but it brings on unnecessary suffering if not constantly checked. It takes time to respond with compassion. During combat, when you are actually fighting, you have to use this time for saving your own life. Your already learned survival mechanisms will cut out the compassionate response and you’ll proceed to save your skin. But you don’t fight all the time in a combat zone. You don’t even fight all the time in an actual battle. There is time to be snatched, but unfortunately the way we go about fighting now is that you are most likely to get another sensory input of violence, and have to short-circuit the response to that, before you’ve unblocked the previous delayed response. Do this enough and the circuitry gets jammed completely and you become inured to violence as long as more violence keeps happening. Many years later all the jammed wiring starts coming loose. Rituals must be reinstated, on the battlefield, on the bloody street, immediately, to keep the jamming to a minimum.

Ego loses control when emotion (body) reigns. When you’re sobbing, the body, not the mind, has control of the organism. The ego is a mind thing and it doesn’t like this.

In a later chapter on atrocity I will tell of an incident when some of the kids in my platoon cut off the ears of some enemies we’d killed and pinned them onto their bush hats and helmets. I punished the kids who did this by making them bury the bodies. During the burial, which I assumed to be a totally mechanical task, two of the kids started crying.

Why don’t we bury our enemies with ceremony?

Certainly, immediately after a battle we must set up for the counterattack. The bodies just get shoved aside as best they can be. I’ve used them for temporary sandbags on occasion. I’d still do it. But there always comes a time when you can spare a moment
for ritual. It can come when you are set up and your security patrols are out and functioning, or you’re being relieved by the next unit, or when, as it so often did, the order comes to abandon the hill so dearly gained.

Even if the graves are dug with bulldozers, the people who killed these people should file by and throw a handful of dirt on the bodies. They or the leaders should say a prayer, out loud, thanking these dead on both sides for their fully played part in this mysterious drama. We should allow people to curse the dead for murdering their friends, and then, if the younger ones can’t, the older ones, officers and NCOs, should be trained in conducting the rituals of forgiveness and healing. Something like:

Bless these dead, our former enemies, who have played out their part, hurled against us by the forces that hurled us against them. Bless us who live, whose parts are not yet done, and who know not how they shall be played. Forgive us if we killed in anger or hatred. Forgive them if they did the same. Judgment is Yours, not ours. We are only human.

There will be those who fear that doing such things will undermine the killer instincts of the troops. Well, if the war is a stupid one it probably will. If it’s not, I wouldn’t worry. Imagine the young NVA soldiers doing it to the young American soldiers laid out before them and ask yourself if in any way such a ritual would have weakened their resolve. Think of Russian soldiers pushed all the way back to Moscow doing it over the frozen bodies of young Germans. Now take those same Russians and have them do it over the bodies of dead Finns whose country they had just brutally invaded. Such rituals will indeed have consequences—all of them healthy.