What it is Like to Go to War (19 page)

The radios burned with questions about our progress. Artillery batteries, helicopters, supply depots, and all sorts of other units were all being held up because our company didn’t take that designated hill and open up a landing zone as promised. Careers get hurt over things like this.

We tried for a long time to assume that there was a good reason for this mad rush. But after a few days we became convinced that it had nothing to do with Marines’ lives. This is a crucial element. Other lives are worth risking your own life for. Generals’ timetables that don’t have lives at stake are not. They were certainly not worth it in that environment where no hill was important and no battle critical other than for a body count. The unit with which we identified began to change. Loyalty started to wobble.

George Patton once said, “There has been a great deal of talk about loyalty from bottom to top. Loyalty from the top to the bottom is much more important, and also much less prevalent. It is this loyalty from the top to the bottom which binds juniors to their seniors with the strength of steel.”
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This reverse loyalty was clearly absent.

In the bush we rarely saw officers over the age of twenty-five. If we did see older officers, it was when
we
went to a rear area. Even then, we didn’t talk with any of them. This was in part a result of the particular kind of widely dispersed company-sized warfare that was being conducted. It was also because there were too many career officers, with no combat experience, who knew
that their bread was buttered by those above them and not below them, and who simply didn’t give a shit.

In addition to the breakdown in downward loyalty there had been another change. It had become clear to us that the mission was no longer a matter of life and death for someone else. This went a long way toward making it no longer a matter of life and death for us. In the absence of incredible coercion, Clausewitz’s often misunderstood dictum that war is diplomacy by other means simply won’t work. Troops won’t fight for oil. Troops will fight to stop murder and torture of other human beings and to stop terrorism and threats of mass destruction to their people. “Diplomacy by other means” is going to have to line up with nineteen-year-old psychology or it will fail. This is not at all bad.

When the basic psychology of the warrior—to feel oneself to be the protector of lives in one’s relevant unit—has been violated, as it was in our particular case that winter in the mountains along the Laotian border, the only way to get it right again, to get feeling lined up with one’s gut instincts, is for unit loyalty to shift. In this case it shifted downward. This seems to be the easiest solution. It sort of works with gravity.

The skipper presented us with three options. He could do what he was told and risk losing lives stumbling off a cliff in the dark; he could directly oppose the orders as stupid and endangering his troops; or he could “lose comm,” blaming low radio batteries, and simply not respond to any more orders. He would be suspected of doing this on purpose, but it could never be proved, so he would probably face only losing the esteem of the battalion commander, an eventual transfer, and a career-damaging fitness report.

We all decided to lose communications. The skipper did, indeed, pay the price, just as described. For the skipper it was a
sacrifice of the self for the unit. I bless him to this day. For the rest of us, there wasn’t much sacrifice.

Another interesting aspect of loyalty, perhaps an atavistic one, had become clear: loyalty to the leader. We had all decided to throw in our lot with the skipper. I, for one, would have supported him no matter which option he decided on. If the unit’s integrity or safety is at stake, then you will do what the unit needs to do to save itself. My unit had become the company, not any greater entity like the Marine Corps or the nation, because my basic psychology had been violated. There were no lives of others at stake, and no downward loyalty toward us was being exhibited. The skipper had now taken on, in some deeply symbolic way, the representation of this entity to which I was now loyal.

This shifting of loyalties between different groups is a psychological phenomenon that warriors need to recognize, not because it is inevitable and explains behavior under stress but to help them choose consciously when placed in circumstances where loyalty is tested. I have no trouble defending my choice to go along with losing communications instead of either obeying the orders or refusing openly and accepting the personal consequences. I point out, however, that this decision was at variance with that extreme formalization of loyalty inculcated in Bushido, the samurai code of conduct that values honor and loyalty above life. Bushido is loyalty’s most severe philosophical exposition and elements of it exist in all military traditions. No military person can come to terms with loyalty until he or she comes to terms with Bushido, both its light side and its dark side.

Inazo Nitobe relates a classic illustration of the code of Bushido in his retelling of the story of Michizane’s retainer.
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Michizane, a samurai lord, loses power through various machinations of his enemies and is exiled from the capital. These same enemies then seek to wipe out Michizane’s entire family. They learn through their spies that Michizane’s young son has been secretly hidden in a village school run by a teacher named Genzo, a former vassal of Michizane.

The game is up. Genzo, on pain of death, is ordered to present the head of the son. Genzo seeks desperately for a substitute, but none of the village children have the young son’s features. He is in despair. Just before the execution is to take place, however, a woman arrives with her son to place him in the school. Her son is just the same age and of remarkable resemblance to the young son of Michizane. Genzo suggests the idea of a substitution. The mother and son never give a hint that both had already, in the words of Nitobe, “laid themselves upon the altar; the one his life—the other her heart.” The mother leaves the boy to his fate. Genzo kills the child and nervously presents the head to the samurai inspector at the appointed time, his own hand on his sword, ready to fight or kill himself if the inspector isn’t fooled.

The inspector, himself the son of a former retainer of Michizane but now through circumstances a retainer of the new lord, looks carefully and long at the head and then announces in a businesslike tone that it is indeed Michizane’s son and leaves with it, to present to his new master.

That evening the mother waits for her husband to return. When the door opens the husband announces, “Rejoice, my wife, our darling son has proved of service to his lord!” The inspector was the dead boy’s father.

One can grasp this tale only if one understands the basic philosophy of Bushido. The inspector’s own father had long been in the service of Michizane and had received much from this lord. The
inspector himself, because of Bushido, would never be untrue to his own cruel master, but the inspector’s son could still be true to the cause of the inspector’s father’s lord, Michizane. Mother, father, and son, together, had all agreed upon the plan.

The heart of Bushido is that loyalty is more important than life, yours or your child’s. A follower of Bushido would immediately sacrifice his life to avoid betraying his master or his own conscience. This looks crazy to most Americans, but that is because we value individuals above the group or society. The Japanese, certainly back then, did not. The fundamental essence of Bushido does, however, remain true. Loyalty should always be to the higher cause.

Again Nitobe, in
Bushido
, writes, “Bushido did not require us to make our conscience the slave of any lord or king... When a subject differed from his master, the loyal path for him to pursue was to use every available means to persuade him of his error, as Kent did to King Lear. Failing in this, let the master deal with him as he wills. In cases of this kind, it was quite a usual course for the samurai to make the last appeal to the intelligence and conscience of his lord by demonstrating the sincerity of his words with the shedding of his own blood.”

The Japanese don’t have a monopoly on this positive aspect of Bushido. Erwin Rommel and his fellow conspirators in the attempted assassination of Hitler and those Iraqi officers who were executed for opposing Saddam Hussein’s plan to invade Kuwait all understood well the value of and the price of placing conscience first when it was in conflict with loyalty. But men like these are rare. Back there in the jungle I didn’t have the wisdom or maturity to make such a choice consciously, and I was able to do so without personal sacrifice because the skipper took it all upon himself.

Upon reflection, I would have made the same choice, but I also would have had to choose to hang with the skipper should he be court-martialed. I simply didn’t think about that. In combat, one should be very suspicious of painless moral choices. When you are confronted with a seemingly painless moral choice, the odds are that you haven’t looked deeply enough.

The heroic journey can be taken consciously or unconsciously. There’s a time in one’s life when the unconscious heroic journey is understandable, when one is young and in positions of little authority. The young warriors of the future will still largely perform their heroic tasks unconsciously. It is a part of development, eventually to be outgrown. As warriors grow older, however, and move into positions of power and authority, far more is at stake because their actions affect a far wider field. Because there is more to lose, they will have to perform their heroic acts with full consciousness of the often painful consequences for everyone, including themselves. Many heroic acts of this kind will go unnoticed by society—if not actively denigrated. There will be no medals. This makes such acts far more difficult to do, and therefore even more heroic
.

A wise man once said to be careful of what you wish for, because you may get it. I wanted to be a hero.

Our company had been pulled out of the bush to act as a reaction force. On the one hand it meant a rest. We got to be in tents set up next to a small airfield in the center of a narrow valley about 20 kilometers east of Khe Sanh. There were showers heated by diesel fuel, hot food, and a portable electricity generator so that in the evenings we could sit outside, rain or mist, and see a movie. Then there was the other hand. We were in combat readiness at all times, waiting. We sat there, most of the lower
ranks unfairly having to fill sandbags, all of us whittling, writing letters, bullshitting, but always listening in on the battalion and regimental nets, trying to determine which firefight was going to turn into the mess that would send in the Marines.

So whether in the outdoor shower or at the movie watching Clint Eastwood, we were constantly aware that within minutes we could be running for our rifles and packs, the skipper shouting for the platoon commanders, maps out, hearts racing, while the thumping of rotor blades echoed off the green walls of the valley as the choppers peeled off one by one to take us to where some of us surely were going to die.

I remember that particular dying day. The soft gray of the sky was slowly going dull as the sun began its afternoon slide into Laos. I watched two squads, who’d been filling sandbags for some one-star general at a place called Task Force Hotel, run full bore the long half mile to their gear, which waited neatly stacked by the runway. Marines were in trouble. Semper fi.

I remember the stomach-turning lurch of the chopper as it came out of a deep spiral just north of the Rock Pile, about 10 kilometers south of the DMZ. I was trying to get my bearings on the revolving hilltops and rivers, my map out, my hands trembling. My neck snapped backward, whipping my helmet against the bulkhead, as the chopper jolted into the ground. I remember the crew chief screaming at us to get out of the chopper because we were taking fire standing in the landing zone. Several kids on the helo team had to jump for it because the pilot lost his nerve and gunned the chopper out of the zone too soon. The last one dropped around ten feet with ninety pounds on his back. He broke his leg. We temporarily lost his squad because they had to stay on the LZ to protect him, weakening the company, and
then another chopper crew had to risk their lives to get him out. Combat magnifies small acts terribly.

The shooting was all over before I knew what was going on.

A company from another battalion had been in a fight somewhere to our east with an NVA unit of unknown size but big enough to cause some heartburn when they started chewing on each other. We were launched to take the NVA unit from behind, simultaneously blocking their exit in this narrow valley. They’d taken us under fire as we came in, but, seeing they would soon be between the hammer and the anvil, they had quickly disengaged. Now they were moving toward an ominous-looking ridgeline that stretched across our northern horizon, dark and gray-green in the somber light, sheathed in clouds and fog.

Through our field glasses, whenever the swirling fog would thin a little, we could see movement and fresh diggings of a sizable unit already on top. And now reinforcements were climbing to join them. The order came to exploit the situation. The other company and our company would assault at first light. To do this meant we had to sneak up on them that night. We stripped down to essentials, leaving our gear in a neat pile on the jungle floor, and started climbing at around 0130 that night.

In war you need to be lucky. Be at war long enough and you’ll have some bad days. Just before dawn, about 500 meters from the NVA position, we started running into booby traps, trip wires leading to mines lashed in the trees at chest level. Our point men were terrified. We rotated them every five minutes, pushed ahead. Then we stumbled into a listening post and a brief firefight erupted. So much for surprise.

The other company, working up another finger to our right, took a couple of nasty hits. I heard someone screaming after the
dull crump of an explosion. The screaming went on for a full minute, a lone voice, piercing through the fog and jungle from a couple of kilometers away from us until abruptly cut off. I found out later it was a friend of mine from the Basic School. I was told that his lower jaw, his entire face, and a leg had been blown off by a DH-10 directional mine, normally used against tanks. His platoon sergeant had run up to see what the screaming was all about and had cut it off by placing his hand against the hole where the voice box was still intact. Eventually, I understand, he pinched off the carotid artery and my friend died, still fully aware.