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“People give up their lives for many reasons. For friendship, for love, for an ideal. And people kill for the same reasons…” —Opening of the martial arts movie Hero.
When I was home on leave before reporting for duty in Vietnam, one of my best friends from high school asked me “Why are you going to Vietnam?” He was attending college, and like many young men of the time, had decided to avoid military service—the implication of his question was that I was a fool to answer my country’s call. I don’t remember exactly what I said. I probably gave him some stock answer about patriotism and courage and duty, and changed the subject. But then and now, I still don’t have enough self-understanding to truly explain the decision, to you—or even to myself.
Tim O’Brien wrote a short story “On the Rainy River” describing the emotions of a young man who seriously considers deserting to Canada instead of going to Vietnam. In the end, the young man chickens out—he goes to Vietnam. Since the author had done a combat tour in Vietnam with the Americal Division, most readers would have assumed he would consider not going to be the cowardly course. Whether you agree with Tim or not, the fact that there can be a credible storyline based on the idea that desertion is braver than combat shows how perplexing this question is. I suspect some of you have mixed emotions and motives, so in this chapter you won’t find any certitude. John Keegan, a highly respected military historian at the British military academy at Sandhurst (the British West Point) says in the introduction to War and Our World: “I do not know why men fight wars, though I make an attempt to sketch an answer in the pages that follow.” After decades of study, a dozen books written on the subject of war, Keegan doesn’t know why soldiers fight. So it’s unlikely we’ll be able to fully explain the reasons for war here. I’ll offer contradictory arguments for many motives, because most soldiers are conflicted about their experiences, and their motives aren’t always as noble as we sometimes pretend. Leo Tolstoy said in War and Peace: “The deeper we delve in search of these causes the more of them we discover, and each cause or series of causes appears to us equally valid in itself, and equally false by its insignificance compared to the magnitude of the event.”
The title of this chapter came from a series of seven indoctrination films produced by Major Frank Capra, now a Hollywood legend for the many films he produced, such as the Christmas classic It’s a Wonderful Life, and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Why We Fight was an extremely effective series of films which were incorporated into military training and also released to theaters during World War II. Admittedly propaganda, they laid out the ideological and moral case against the enemy in World War II. If ever there was a war that had incontestably good motives and ample moral justification, it was the campaign against the Nazis. Those of us serving in Vietnam often expressed envy for the pure objectives of the greatest generation, so I was surprised that prolific war writer Paul Fussell, himself a wounded combat veteran of that campaign, says that most of the GIs actually fighting the Nazis did not fully embrace the cause. “For most of the troops, the war might just as well have been about good looks, so evanescent at times did its meaning and purpose seem.”
Mark Carnes seconds this in his book Novel History: “This absence of political purpose is one of the many surprises uncovered by recent research into the supposedly Good War.” “Benjamin L. Alpers noted a study by the Office of War Information which found one out of three servicemen had never even heard of the Four Freedoms and only one out of ten could name all four.”
Many soldiers were willing to give their lives for their own country, but not necessarily to give their lives to liberate Europe. “We already saved their butts in one World War”. David Kenyon Webster, after reading General Eisenhower’s “Great Crusade” address distributed to the troops on D-Day, said: “I never met a G.I. who knew what the war was about or who believed in it”. Ike’s address speaks of “brave allies and brothers in arms”, and “eliminating Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe”. Webster says: “That crap has nothing to do with it”. He decides the address must have been written by a “Prince of Platitudes”, although the fact he was writing just before he boarded a C-47 to parachute into Normandy might have had something to do with his cynicism. [Note: The text of General Eisenhower's D-Day Address is included for your reference.]
Members of organizations don’t always embrace the organization’s cause. The U.S. Army did not ask for a show of hands by those who wanted to help the people to a better way of life, and send only them to Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan or Iraq. Major Tammy Duckworth, a helicopter pilot in Iraq, was shot down in November of 2004, losing both legs. Running for Congress, she makes her motives clear. “My sacrifice was not for the Iraqi people. It was for the American people” She volunteered for service in Iraq, but says she would have voted against it if she had been in Congress at the time. John Crawford in The Last True Story I’ll Ever Tell said that when Iraqis shouted “Go home!”, “We all thought that was a great idea and that it was heartwarming we could agree with the locals on something.” In Vietnam, most of the combat troops were draftees, there because they felt it shameful to evade military service, or because they might have been sent to jail for draft evasion if they had refused. Many soldiers couldn’t have cared less about the people of what they saw as a bewildering and hostile country, and therefore were not being inconsistent when they mistreated the people they were supposedly there to help. Even in the War on Terror in Afghanistan and Iraq, where most soldiers are “volunteers”, few specifically volunteered to go to the Middle East, and those that did were often motivated by goals that had nothing to do with helping these peculiar people residing on the opposite side of the planet. So if higher ideals do not motivate most soldiers, maybe the interests of their nation do.
Why do wars happen at all? Or, put another way: Why do nations go to war? The Prussian (German) military theorist Clausewitz said in 1833, in his classic work On War: “War is a continuation of politics by other means.” The ultimate political objective is to conquer an enemy, but often there is, or should be, some other policy objective. But it’s often hard to pin down the motives for a given war because they operate on many, often subconscious, levels.
Nations go to war for various reasons, but the publicly stated reason is not always the real reason. Politicians start the wars the soldiers fight, and the reason the politician started the war is not always why the soldier fights the war. This is nothing new. Victor Davis Hanson says that Thucydides’ narrative of the Peloponnesian War, written in the Fourth Century b.c.e., was “predicated on the belief that human nature is unchanging across time and space and thus predictable”. As for the whys of the war, “What men say, the speeches diplomats give, the reasons states go to war, all this ‘in word’ (logos) is as likely to cloak rather than to elucidate what they will do ‘in deed’ (ergon). Thucydides teaches us to embrace skepticism, expecting us to look to national self-interest, not publicized grievances, when wars of our own age inevitably break out.”
But do national interests motivate the individual soldier? Small wars are probably the most troubling—wars that are optional because being small, national existence is not immediately threatened. The soldiers face the unfairness of fighting a war that is no more than a minor inconvenience for all but the forgotten few out fighting and dying. Max Boot identifies four distinct types of small wars in his book The Savage Wars of Peace, the title of which underscores the ambiguity of these limited wars: 1. Punitive; 2. Protective; 3. Pacification; and 4. Profiteering. These motives are unlikely to stir the soldier who has no reason to punish, protect or pacify a distant land, and most certainly isn’t going to share in any of the profits. And nothing is of more interest to politics than profits, that is to say, money, or less crudely, commercial interests.
Most soldiers, if they think about it, will accept the idea that the wellbeing of the nation is connected to commercial influence, backed by military might. The lives of the average Roman were improved by the conquests of the Legions, the lives of the average Briton were improved because Britannia ruled the waves, and today American lives are better because the United States projects its influence in the world’s trouble spots. American Naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan in 1890 spoke of The Influence of Sea Power upon History [Note: The text of The Influence of Sea Power upon History is included for your use.] and a century ago “Imperialist officers such as Leonard Wood and Douglas MacArthur argued that the security of the United States depended on trade and power projection”. All of the soldiers in Iraq are not starry-eyed idealists, and as Evan Wright said in his book about the men of the Marine’s First Recon Battalion there: “Even though their Commander in Chief tells them they are fighting in Iraq to protect American freedom, few would be shaken to discover that they might actually be leading a grab for oil.” Implicit in the protest slogan “No blood for oil!” is the premise that a war for oil is illegitimate, even evil. But access to vital resources is a legitimate war aim, and oil is about as vital a resource as can be found—the American and even the world economy runs on oil. If the war in Iraq was over oil, it certainly wasn’t the first time the U.S. went to war because of it. In fact, Dunnigan & Nofi that in World War II: “The war in the Pacific was started over oil.” Japan went after the oil from the Dutch East Indies, what is now Indonesia, when the U.S., then an oil exporter, imposed an oil embargo on Japan and refused to sell them oil.
Many Americans think of small wars as a Post-World-War-II phenomenon, but the U.S. has been involved in small wars throughout its history, going back to the shores of Tripoli when the Marines battled the Barbary pirates from 1801 to 1805. The U.S. Marine Corps Small Wars Manual, published in 1940, before U.S. involvement in World War II, frankly recognized that “The history of the United States shows that in spite of the varying trend of the foreign policy of succeeding administrations, this Government has interposed or intervened in the affairs of other states with remarkable regularity, and it may be anticipated that the same general procedure will be followed in the future.” In these brushfire wars, it’s hard to make a direct connection between the distant war and commonweal of the country, since benefits are often long-term, and it’s hard to connect the cause when they do materialize.
Many soldiers don’t believe in the specifics. Some soldiers in Iraq don’t believe in WMD, or the 9/11 connection. Most others don’t care about those specific issues. In few wars could many soldiers give you a levelheaded explanation of how their actions relate to national interests. They follow the higher cause: they believe in their country, in America, and honor. Kayla Williams, who did a tour in Iraq in military intelligence said: “I thought this war was probably wrong, didn’t want to go. The lies that got us here, that killed some of us, that wounded and maimed more of us: Only the most messed-up-patriotic-head-up-his-ass-blind-faith-my-country-right-or-wrong soldier believed them.” But she served honorably nonetheless, motivated primarily by the hope that some piece of military intelligence she uncovered might save some of her fellow soldiers’ lives. “That was what kept me going: hoping I could make a difference; hoping I could provide good intelligence that saved even one life.”
Many wars are fought over ideology, based on ideals. There has been debate in the War on Terror as to whether Osama bin Laden is motivated by policy objectives, idealism, or perhaps pure hatred. Some argue OBL wants the United States, and the West in general, to make certain policy changes: end support for Israel, withdraw all troops from the Middle East, stop manipulating oil prices, etc. Others argue these actions would not be effective, since OBL and his gang are motivated by pure hatred: they don’t hate us for what we do, they hate us for who we are. I haven’t discussed these issues with OBL, but I suspect the individual terrorists haven’t either, and that many of them are not particularly ideological.
Ideological wars have some paradoxes. The Cold War was a titanic struggle waged in all corners of the world, and was all about ideology, democracy on one side, communism on the other. The first paradox of ideological struggles is that both sides can believe they are fighting for right. Communists have been among the most idealistic fighters of all history, as have anti-communists. One observer said of the motives of his comrades fighting against communist Bolshevism: “What I have seen is the commitment of youth who, in good faith, believed that Bolshevism was their common foe; a cause that in their eyes was noble, even greater than mere patriotism because it united young patriots from many countries of Europe.” Not much different from what many Americans would say about the Cold War, but the surprise is that the quote is from Johann Voss, speaking of his comrades in the Waffen-SS during World War II. In fact, many of the “French” fighting in the First Indochina War were actually Germans, former members of the Wehrmacht who had joined the French Foreign Legion. The U.S. saw the French war, which was fought at the same time as the Korean War, as part of the war against World Communism, and so did the German mercenaries. Ironically enough, after defeating Nazism, the United States found itself facing Bolshevism, and fought on the same side as the ideology we had fought against in the previous war.
This underscores the second great paradox of ideological struggles: Friends and enemies can easily trade places. Imagine an American who went into a coma during the Second World War, and awakened a mere half dozen years later.
“And how are our friends, the Russians and Chinese, doing?”
The reply: “You mean our enemies! They’re both nations of evil communists. They are killing our boys in Korea!”
“Oh, no, you mean they’ve joined our enemies, the Germans and Japanese?”
“No, the Germans and Japanese are our friends. The Berliners are standing valiantly against the Commies, and without our Japanese bases our war in Korea would be very difficult indeed.”
Although many American soldiers in Korea and Vietnam knew they were there to “Kill Commies”, few could have told you anything about the theory behind communism. But the world is a better place because the United States beat the Nazis and the Communists. And so we can defeat the Muslin Extremists in the War on Terror, and when we do, don’t be surprised if another enemy springs up, and our former enemies help us in the next struggle.
Even in America’s major wars, it’s hard to tell when idealism motivated the individual soldiers. James M. McPherson looked at why soldiers fought in the American Civil War. He collected the letters and diaries of over a thousand soldiers on both sides, and examined what they said about why they were fighting. McPherson found that both sides felt they were fighting for liberty and freedom, righteously defending the ideals of the nation’s founders. Slavery was at the root of the war—no slavery, no Civil War. But whether the individual men fighting were motivated by slavery is questionable. Lincoln did not announce emancipation as a goal until well into the war, and Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland, and Delaware were slave states but fought on the Union side. Many Northerners were not fighting against slavery, and many Southerners were not fighting for it. Paradoxically, many Johnny Rebs saw no contradiction in fighting for freedom and slavery, and a large number of Billy Yanks were indifferent to the plight of the slaves; many even opposed emancipation.
If the soldiers on both sides in the Civil War were on the side of the Angels, they were The Killer Angels. In his book of that name, Michael Shaara created a grizzled old Irish-born sergeant named Buster Killrain, the only character in that fine work of historical fiction not modeled on a real person. I highly recommend the book and the movie based on it, Gettysburg, so in keeping with my promise to point out historical inaccuracies in movies and books I recommend, I feel bound tell you the fictional sergeant does not ring true. Killrain speaks of fighting to free the slaves. This is not a likely motive for this character. Many Irish immigrants, poor and unskilled, feared competition for jobs from newly freed slaves who they assumed would migrate north. But more importantly, most Irish immigrants did not consider the plight of the slaves at all—they had trouble enough of their own. The ex-slave Frederick Douglass, after touring Ireland, said he’d rather return to slavery than be an Irish peasant. Few immigrants would have seen beyond the misery of their own people to fight to free others.
Next to the Civil War, Vietnam has probably generated the most controversy as to what was in the national interest of any war in U.S. history. By the time I was there, in 1969, a number of my fellow combat troops disagreed with the war, and a substantial number, including myself, had doubts. In my unit, it was acceptable to oppose the war theoretically as long as you continued to do your job. In the meritocracy of the battlefield, political opinions were irrelevant. Whether that war should have been fought, and how it was fought, are still the subject of raging controversy, but the experience of young officers there and their view of what went wrong led to something that’s been called the “Powell Doctrine”.
This is not a book about national policy, but political decisions have an important impact on the soldier, affecting his thoughts and morale in war, so you need to know about The Powell Doctrine. It evolved over time with input from many people, but is named for General Colin Powell. It’s of interest to the soldier because it exposes ideas about the use of the military, came from military and gets much press. The Doctrine reacts to the mistakes of Vietnam, so that war is singled out, although Vietnam is not unique in violating the principles. Different commentators have had different numbers of points, anywhere from three to seven, but these four appear in most lists in one form or another:
1. National Interest. We should go to war only when our vital national interest is clearly involved. This principle was violated in Vietnam since the United States had little trade with Vietnam, no cultural ties, and had no need of Vietnam’s resources. Few Americans even knew there was a country named Vietnam when the U.S. first became involved.
2. Clear Mission. There must be a clear mission with clearly defined political and military objectives that have the support of the American people and Congress. In Vietnam, about the only identifiable objective was “not lose”, or for the individual “not get killed”.
3. Overwhelming Force. If we must go in, use overwhelming force to assure success at minimum risk to our forces. Commit enough forces up front, don’t escalate piecemeal. This is often expressed as “Don’t go if you can avoid it, but if you do, go in to win!” Teddy Roosevelt said it this way: “Speak softly, but carry a big stick.” Note the invasion of Iraq violated this principle, attempting to use as small a force as possible.
4. Exit Strategy. Define what it means to win—Have objectives that trigger an end to the engagement. In World War II, the objective was “Unconditional Surrender”, but in the limited wars since then the ultimate military objective has rarely been clear.
Clearly, the difficulty with the Powell Doctrine is that the interpretation can be in the eye of the beholder, for example: “What’s vital?” and even “What’s winning?” could be argued about endlessly. Furthermore, in the American principle of civilian control of the military, soldiers do not get to decide where, when, and why to fight. Soldiers are the servants of society: They go where they are sent, when they are sent, and they usually aren’t even told why. But this has often been the soldier’s lot. Leo Tolstoy’s epic novel about the Napoleonic Wars in the early Nineteenth Century, War and Peace, drew on his experiences in both the Crimean War and in a campaign against Chechen rebels (that’s right: Russia was fighting in Chechnya in the 1850s). A character expresses reluctance to join the Russian military since he did not agree with the war aims in the impending war. Tolstoy says it was hard to find any answer to such a naïve question than that made by another, worldly wise, character: “If everyone would only fight for his own convictions, there’d be no war.”
I would hope our leaders would at least ponder the Powell Doctrine before committing forces, but the machinations of international politics are of only academic interest to the soldier, since princes and presidents don’t ponder the opinions of privates. So let’s leave global politics and the national interest for college sophomores and debates over beers and look at why the individual soldier fights. If the academic question is “Why do nations go to war?” the practical question is “Why do soldiers go to war?”
Most of the soldiers in America’s wars throughout its history have been volunteers, and certainly during Vietnam many young men found it easy enough to evade military service. So why do the volunteers join, and why do draftees not use the ploys that would spare them danger and discomfort? And why is it that draftees who would never have voluntarily joined the army, and men who joined the National Guard in peacetime for the extra money, assuming they would never go to war, make such good soldiers?
In the movie Gettysburg, the character Joshua Chamberlain gives a speech in which he speculates on why soldiers joined to fight the Civil War: “Some came mainly because we were bored at home—thought this looked like it might be fun. Some came because we were ashamed not to. Many of us came because it was the right thing to do.” Throughout history, men have fought for pay, women, loot, land, power, and for a few, because they like killing. In most times and places, answering one’s country’s call has been highly honored, and evading service has been seen as dishonorable. The passions for war can be powerful. Especially at the beginning of many wars, men are driven by what the French call Rage Militaire.
Wild enthusiasm at the outbreak of war is often accompanied by what in French is called rage militaire, a patriotic fervor that is a kind of hysteria where the general populace cheers on the many who rush to join up. The attacks on the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001 inspired some Americans to join or re-enlist, but this has happened in many wars. In World War II, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor so enraged the U.S. populace that recruits had to be turned away in droves, and on the other side, people cheered in the streets throughout Japan; the American Civil War started with great enthusiasm, and the firing on Fort Sumter brought exhilaration on both sides. With the start of many wars, recruits are in a kind of frenzy for fear that with such righteous might on their side, the war will be over, the enemy crushed, before they can get to the field of battle. The prediction that the coming struggle will prove an easy victory is strong, and has been notable on both sides in many wars.
The war that started with the highest expectations and ended with the lowest achievement was probably the “War to End All Wars”. When World War I broke out in August 1914, young men rushed to enlist so they could see action before the war ended, since it was obvious to each side that their army would win before Christmas. Ernst Jünger, author of Storm of Steel, volunteered for service with the German army on August 1, 1914. He didn’t make his Christmas deadline, since he arrived at the front on December 27. But not to worry, the war ground on for almost four more years, so being late didn’t matter.
On the British side, Vera Brittain’s brother and two friends were also in a mad rush to get to the Front before the peace could break out. Brittain (1893-1970) was the author of a moving World War I memoir, Testament of Youth. Vera’s brother, Edward, and his two close friends were the three musketeers, “All for One and One for All!” Vera fell in love with one of the trio, Roland Leighton, and they were engaged to marry. With the coming of World War I, the three valiant young men went off to war. Roland died first, shot one night while inspecting the wire in no man’s land in front of his regiment’s positions. Although she still loved Roland, almost inevitably she became engaged to the other friend. But he was killed. Near the end of the war, her brother joined his two friends, as one by one, the war ground on, and each was lost in turn. In addition to her loss of friends, Vera’s experiences nursing the casualties of war further embittered her about war, and Vera became an ardent pacifist. But in the beginning, even Vera Brittain had been gung-ho. In a letter to Roland, September 6, 1914, she expressed an opinion that I believe correctly sums up a rational view of war. It is terrible, “But it seems to me that to refrain from fighting in a cause like this because you do not approve of warfare would be about as sensible as refusing to defend yourself against the attacks of a madman because you did not consider lunacy an enlightened or desirable condition.” I can understand why her experiences would lead her to pacifism, and I would never fault her for her pacifist beliefs, but I believe her initial realism was the correct view of war. War is terrible, but some things are worse than war.
Rage militaire can explain why people join up in a burst of passion, but it can’t explain why people join the military in peacetime, and then do their duty when war unexpectedly comes, or soldier on through a long and costly war after enthusiasm inevitably wanes. The leaders in 1860 were so certain the Civil War would be short that the first enlistees were signed up for ninety days, assuming that would be plenty of time to wrap the war up. What sustained the soldiers’ commitment? Why did they re-enlist after they had “seen the elephant”, which Civil War soldiers said meaning “been in battle”? Probably not for the extra $2 per month a second-hitch veteran received. In the Civil War, as in most wars, many were sustained by an ideological conviction to defend way of life; in a word, Patriotism.
Patriotism is often the first reason given for fighting, but as Samuel Johnson said in 1775 “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” Patriotism is problematical for those who would abolish war, because it is an irreconcilable difference—It is unlikely a patriot of one country can be convinced by rational argument to become a patriot of the enemy country. As Stephen Decatur famously toasted in 1816 “Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations, may she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong.” Bob Innes, contributing to the War on Terror by advising the Yemeni coast guard, said what he learned from his experience in Vietnam was “that honor and integrity are personal qualities, not institutional ones, not ones we should expect the state to always have. If you don’t like the policy, tough. Bad things happen in this world.”
The extreme of patriotism, to the height of fanaticism, was probably the Japanese soldiers in World War II. Meirion & Susie Harries tell how Japanese troops “were informed they would die and their bodies would lie rotting in the sand dunes, but they would turn to grass, which would sway in the breezes blowing from Japan.” They point out “Promises like these would not have put fire in the bellies of many Allied troops”. But even for the allied troops, not as fanatically patriotic as the Japanese, patriotism played an important part.
As an adjunct to patriotism, many soldiers say they are fighting for their home and loved ones. When asked, “What are you fighting for?”, many married soldiers will pull out a picture of their spouse and kids. Whether rational or not, people are afraid the enemy might kill, or debase the lives of spouses, children—or even as yet unborn grandchildren. So protecting the family is an important motivator, and some join because of family traditions. As an army brat, I saw a number of my classmates go into the family business, and probably every child of a professional soldier considers the possibility of attending one of the Academies. Many soldiers explaining their service will speak of their fathers and grandfathers before them.
Even small wars often have defense of the homeland as part of their justification. In Korea and Vietnam, it was often said: “If we don’t fight them there, we’ll have to fight them in San Francisco!” No one really believed it: in 1975, when Saigon fell, we did not man Fort Point, and we did not emplace troops at Ocean Beach; so we didn’t really believe they were going to invade San Francisco. Likewise, in many wars some who gave patriotism as their motive were actually motivated by a quest for adventure.
Although patriotism is the most commonly stated reason for fighting in a war, it cannot explain all service, since many famous fierce fighters in history were mercenaries, not fighting for their own country. The French Foreign Legion is perhaps the most colorful unit; it’s the “foreign” legion because Frenchmen are not allowed to join it (although the officers come from the French Regular Army). And consider the Irish “Wild Geese” for some insight into fighters for a country not their own. Irish have fought in wars far and wide, including most of the wars of the British in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Technically, Ireland was part of the British Empire until 1921, but many Irish did not recognize British sovereignty over their “country”. Paradoxically, they fought bravely for Britain anyway. By World War II, Ireland had gained independence and was technically neutral, but many Irish citizens joined the Royal Army and fought well. In the present day United States military there are many soldiers who are not U.S. citizens and who are uncertain whether they will choose be naturalized. These people are technically mercenaries, but good soldiers nonetheless, and in many units, the citizens are mighty glad they are there.
Holy Wars—Religion can be perverted into merciless killing. And even as religion, especially Zen, was hijacked by Japan’s militarists, Islam is being hijacked today by Terrorists.
In the modern West, religion has not been a prime motive for war, at least on the national level. The modern concept of separation of church and state means religion is not a political question. But this was not always so, and the Crusades are the extreme example of this. Although the motives of the popes and princes are sometimes suspect, there is no doubt many of the leaders and individual soldiers fighting in those wars on both sides believed they were doing God’s will. The Christians of the time believed they could confess their sins and then be allowed into heaven, but there was a residue of guilt for each sin that would require they spend time in Purgatory. Soldiers who signed up for the Crusade were given a plenary indulgence, which meant the slate was wiped clean and they would have all time due in Purgatory forgiven, as an enlistment bonus. In addition, if they were killed, they would be considered martyrs, and go straight to heaven. Ike used the word “Crusade” in his book title, Crusade in Europe, but Bush certainly won’t.
Few Westerners would accept a guarantee of a place in heaven in lieu of a reenlistment bonus, but many Muslims are motivated by such beliefs. The Muslims have a concept called Jihad, which is a holy war. Martyrs in a Jihad not only go straight to heaven, they find 72 virgins waiting for them! Probably not all suicide bombers truly believe they are on their way to heaven. But some of them do. One bomber whose bomb failed to fully explode wasn’t killed, but was taken unconscious to an Israeli hospital. When he came out of his coma, he was certain he was in heaven. One of the doctors, who was Jewish, had to show him the Star of David medallion he wore around his neck to convince him he wasn’t. “You see I’m Jewish. Do you believe a Jew would be in your heaven?”
Brain Lamb: “What were you doing in the Army when you were 15 years old?”
Col. David Hackworth: “I was interested in sex and adventure. And it seemed to me the Army provided both.”
People have always been driven by a quest for adventure, especially the young, and especially males. Some climb mountains. Some trek across a wilderness. Too many go to war. Richard Connell’s short-story character, General Zaroff, was bored with his passion, big-game hunting, since all game animals were so easy for him to outwit. And then he discovered “The Most Dangerous Game”. In the short story of that name, the most dangerous game is revealed to be—other men. War is all about facing other men in life-and-death situations, and as such is the ultimate adventure. As the black-humor saying went about the Vietnam War: “Look, it’s a dirty, rotten, stinking little war, but, Hey!—it’s the only war we’ve got!”
Irish poet W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) fought as a pilot for the English in World War I. Yeats said, in his poem, An Irish Airman Foresees his Death, “Those that I fight I do not hate, Those that I guard I do not love”. He realized that no likely end could bring his countrymen loss, or leave them happier than before. So why did he fight? “As an Irishman, he could not hate the Germans or love the English; his impulse to enlist came from an existential love of adventure.” Another flyer, this one a helicopter pilot in Vietnam, Robert Mason, said: “I joined the army in 1964 to become a helicopter pilot.” He didn’t know much about the cause in Vietnam, but “I did know that I wanted to fly.” Martin Dockery, who became a combat advisor in the early days of the American involvement in Vietnam, said: “I was not committed to a cause. To paraphrase Mohammad Ali, I had no enmity toward these little people.” “So why did I volunteer? The answer is that I asked to go to Vietnam for the excitement and adventure it promised.” War is the ultimate adventure. It’s been said that the two most rewarding masculine accomplishments of life are to love a good woman, and kill a bad man. The hippie slogan against the Vietnam War was “Make love, not war”, but throughout history, soldiers have succeeded in doing both.
Many people enjoy the physical, outdoor life associated with the Army. Some people can’t stand being inside behind a desk, and see the military as an extended Boy Scout jamboree, with the only difference being, as the joke goes, that “in the Boy Scouts, they’re under adult supervision”. Many in the current volunteer army enjoy the soldiering life for its own sake. As Tommy Franks, who went on to become CENTCOM commander during the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, said of his decision to join, “the military would probably be a more adventurous version of camping and hunting, which I’d always loved. Whatever I did in the Army would be better than bagging groceries at the supermarket or fixing outboards with my dad.”
Military service is sometimes associated with admirable pride, but can sometimes be a way to prove something. Some young men see a war as a way to prove manhood. I’ll admit to a certain pride in having earned a CIB—the Combat Infantry Badge—awarded by the Army for experiencing infantry combat. Stephen Ambrose said: “The most extreme experience a human being can go through is being a combat infantryman”, and the CIB is recognition of that experience. As the Vietnam War reporter Ward Just said: “The medal that is worn above all others is the Combat Infantryman’s Badge. For the career man, combat is the essential experience—both as a man and as a soldier.” Although a CIB and $3 will get you a latte at Starbucks, it’s something that no one can ever take away from you, something you always know you accomplished.
Since I was a labor economist for five years, let me drop a little economist’s jargon on you: Military recruiting is counter-cyclical. That’s the fancy way of saying people are more likely to join the military when there are fewer other options: when the economy goes down, enlistments go up. As noted author Tom Clancy said “For some, the Army is a path up from the gangs and violence of the inner city or the despair of poverty. For many it is a way to make their own way in the world.” To my father and others who grew up in the Great Depression, the military offered three square meals a day, something that to some, even today, is a powerful attraction. Although U.S. military pay scales always have, and probably always will be, relatively low compared with civilian jobs—especially when you factor in the long hours, separation from home, and the danger—it’s a living.
Despite the presumed patriotic motivations, recruiters tend to emphasize economics—the money, or the benefits, especially recruiting or re-enlistment bonus money. The bonus was used in the Civil War, when a recruit might receive, at a time when a dollar a day was the going pay for most workers, a bonus of $400 to enlist or re-enlist for three years. The money was paid out over three years, $125 the first year, $100 in the next two, and the remaining $75 as a parting gift. Now that actually worked out to just over $11 per month, which when added to the private’s $13 base pay was not a princely sum, but in those days $400 did sound like a lot of money to many a poor lad, especially starving Irish and German immigrants. And there was a provision that if the War ended before the enlistment concluded, the soldier would be discharged, with the remaining bonus paid in full, so when it looked like the War was coming to a conclusion the bonus did look pretty good. Then as now, recruiters realized a signing bonus appears better than an equivalent raise in base pay, so it has been, and still is, an effective inducement.
In addition to the direct compensation, training and education have been a strong draw. My infantry experience in the army was not directly translatable to employment, except perhaps with Murder, Incorporated, but many a soldier has learned a skill that led to a good career after discharge. Kayla Williams in Love My Rifle More Than You said: “There are many reasons to join the Army. But without a doubt it’s a great way—leaving aside the whole prospect of getting maimed or killed—to better your career prospects.” Williams, who already had a college degree, cited money for grad school as one of her motivators. GI Bill educational benefits have drawn many, including John Crawford, author of The Last True Story I’ll Ever Tell, who joined the National Guard to help with his tuition at Florida State—but got called up and sent to Iraq before he graduated. Even those enlistees with no specific educational goal often have a vague notion of someday pursuing education under the GI Bill after seeing a little of the world.
Truth to be told, I’m not sure I would have ever gotten my college degree without the assistance and incentive of the GI Bill check. Ironically enough, I recall a base pay of $254.20 per month as an E-5 when I was discharged, but I got an immediate pay increase to $311 per month as a student on the GI Bill—and there was no income tax on the GI Bill money. Even when you include Combat Pay, I actually collected something over twice as much in GI Bill money as I did in army pay! Some join up to learn a career, but for the “Lifer”, the Career Soldier, or Thirty-Year Man, it is the career, at least until the pension is earned. Let’s look at the lot of the professional soldier.
John Keegan, a long-term instructor at the British military academy, says “To the question ‘Why war?’, therefore, Sandhurst supplied the answer that the professional soldiers of constitutional states fight wars because it is their duty to do so.” Colin Powell relates how when he and his friends went to Vietnam as advisors in 1962, they “were all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed captains and majors and lieutenant colonels.” “But we were ready to go, and this was the great adventure of our young military careers.”
Soldiering can be a career, although not without its disadvantages, and many have found it a reasonably good living, including my father. Because he was a professional soldier, my father’s favorite poem was Tommy, by Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936). It could be the anthem for all professional soldiers in all times. Kipling was a British poet who had great sympathy for the common British soldier, the “Red Coat” or “Tommy”. Kipling made the point that soldiers are mistreated and unwanted—until war comes. “For it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ Chuck him out, the brute!” But it’s “Saviour of ’is country” when the guns begin to shoot. He concludes:
We aren’t no thin red ’eroes, nor we aren’t no blackguards too,
But single men in barricks, most remarkable like you;
An’ if sometimes our conduck isn’t all your fancy paints,
Why, single men in barricks don’t grow into plaster saints
Herman Wouk’s book The Caine Mutiny, although fictional, shows this attitude toward the American military. The movie based on the book with Humphrey Bogart and Fred MacMurray is a great watch, so rent it some weekend. (Warning: the dramatic conclusion is about to be revealed, skip to the next paragraph if you’re planning to watch the movie). As the story unfolds, the reader is led to identify with a group of Naval Reserve officers serving only for the duration of the war, who are subjected to petty grievances and then increasingly dangerous whims of a career navy commander, Captain Queeg, who is obviously loosing his marbles. Caught in a typhoon, they decide to relieve their own commander, and are court-martialed for mutiny. They are acquitted after Captain Queeg’s mental instability is made evident on the witness stand. But at their victory party, the rebellious officers’ own attorney, who had so adroitly cross-examined Queeg, shames them. He points out the commander whom they had failed to support “was standing guard on this fat dumb and happy country of ours” while these civilians were pursuing their glamorous careers and drawing high salaries. “Of course, we figured in those days, only fools go into armed service. Bad pay, no millionaire future, and you can’t call your mind or body your own. Not for sensitive intellectuals.” And who held the axis off while the Reservists were training? The Regulars. Perhaps if they’d supported their captain instead of undermining him, the result would have been much happier. As Kipling put it, “Yes, makin’ mock o’ uniforms that guard you while you sleep, Is cheaper than them uniforms, an’ they’re starvation cheap”.
Let me tell you about one of these professionals, this one an NCO, my platoon sergeant in Vietnam, SSgt. Andujar. As our column moved down a jungle trail, Andujar stationed himself second in line, just behind the point man, Lewis. As he moved down the trail, Lewis saw that the ground rose sharply. He looked up to a ridge about thirty feet above. Just then, Sergeant Andujar grabbed him by his pack strap and pulled him behind a tree. Lewis was a little irritated about being manhandled like that, but he didn’t say anything. The platoon sergeant was standing on the trail, and pointed at the ridge that Lewis couldn’t see since from where Andujar had placed him the tree was between him and the ridge. “I smell rice cooking” said Andujar, sniffed the air, then said “I definitely smell ri-i-i…”. He didn’t finish the word “rice”, because just as he said it a bullet fired from the ridge took the back of his head off. He fell instantly, limp as a rag doll, leaving Lewis standing there shocked.
I think one reason we all respect Sergeant Andujar is as an archetype of a remarkable group of men, the professional NCOs without whom no army could exist. Many of the draftees placed in their charge had gone to college, and many more, such as myself, would go on to college on the GI Bill. The typical career NCO was a high school graduate at best, often through a GED. We draftees called them “lifers” and said “they couldn’t make it in civilian life”. Respectable society shuns them: a soldier’s aspirations are seen as booze, broads and brawls. The pay was ridiculously low: most of us draftees would earn four or five times as much as a Staff Sergeant by the time we reached the same age. But many of us wouldn’t have reached that age were it not for them.
These men were not educated, but they possess a certain knowledge, even wisdom, that college degrees cannot confer. They understand toil, and fear, and people, and life—and especially death. And they display a quiet courage that those who haven’t seen them in combat could never imagine. They had a genuine concern for the young men for whom they accepted responsibility, and many more of us draftees would have died without their skill and sacrifice. SSgt Andujar does not stand out in my mind for uncommon valor, but for the common valor displayed by this group of men. I was not alone in this regard; one of the men in my unit, Robert Fromme, wrote an article Vietnam magazine about SSgt. Andujar, whom he remembered and respected three decades after his death. In my mind’s eye, I sometimes still vividly see SSgt Andujar’s dead body lying on that jungle trail, and I probably will on the day I die.
If you have chosen a military career, nothing is as likely to enhance it as much as actual combat experience. Combat offers the prospect of medals and promotion. When I first got out of the army, I would carry my DD214 to show to skeptics who didn’t believe me when I said I was a sergeant E-5 a mere seventeen months after being drafted. For soldiers who served in peacetime, that was absurd, you’d be lucky to be a sergeant after five years! But in wartime, promotions come fast, and all time-in-grade requirements are waived in the war zone. It is certainly understandable that as a professional soldier you might feel frustrated at a military career that did not include ever doing the job you spent your career preparing to do. Practical knowledge, as opposed to book learning, requires you to get combat experience.
If you are pursuing a military career, you can surely sympathize with one unfortunate officer who got stuck in stateside training assignments in World War I, and never even got into the combat zone! His contemporaries came back with rank, medals and boasting rights. He did manage to make some progress, despite his lack of experience, in the next war, World War II. He managed to rise fairly high, namely to Supreme Commander in Europe and then President of the United States. He was Dwight Eisenhower. So missing out on combat experience is not necessarily fatal to your career, but probably the upwardly mobile young warrior would do well to get combat experience if he, or especially she, can.
Japan’s most famous warrior and martial artist is Miyamoto Musashi, who wrote Go Rin no Sho in 1643. The book is a classic, read for insight into martial arts and business alike, available in English in at least ten editions as Book of Five Rings. Musashi was born in a lawless period much like the old west, but earned his reputation dueling with swords, not six-shooters, boasting, “Although I dueled more than sixty times, never once did I lose.” He was at the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600 as a sixteen year old—not out of conviction, but hoping to gain experience and make a name for himself. The Japanese have a term for this, “borrowing the battlefield”. As his translator William Scott Wilson said, “For an unemployed warrior, fighting in battle gave him a chance to be noticed for his skills and, if he excelled, to be taken on as a martial arts instructor under the patronage of the lord whose forces he had joined.” Unfortunately for his plans, but luckily for us—the alternate path might have led to a sinecure and he probably would never have written his book—he had joined the losing side, so he had to lead the life of a Ronin, or masterless samurai. But joining a war for professional experience is not uncommon for professional soldiers. Even terrorists have been known to borrow the battlefield in Iraq to learn skills.
Sometimes one war is seen as preparation for bigger things to come. Col. Meagher, commander of the famous Union Irish Brigade in the Civil War, enticed Irish to join the Brigade with the argument they would learn valuable skills that they could use in the Irish War for Independence from Britain that he incorrectly expected would soon come. At least in the early days of Vietnam, some American officers saw the war there as preparation for the real war, the one to come against the Soviet Union on the plains of Europe. In fact, the Army itself recognized this, and the practice of assigning officers below the rank of general to six-month billets during their one-year tour was a way of cycling as many as possible through combat assignments to prepare the officer corps for the Big One against Russia. Mark Hill, a Navy captain who worked for in the Systems Analysis section of the Pentagon, couldn’t believe how little thought the analysts “gave to the war, the real war, the one the United States was fighting at that very moment.”
The U.S. Army Special Forces Command official motto is De Oppresso Liber, “To free the Oppressed”. At least in rhetoric, Americans are often motivated by a desire to help others, or to protect them from oppressive ideologies like Nazism, communism or Islamic fascism. We fight for freedom and justice. But no war can achieve justice. On occasion, war can end injustice, but it can never achieve justice. As Sandhurst military historian John Keegan says, “Any objective study quickly reveals, however, that most wars are begun for reasons which have nothing to do with justice, have results quite different from those proclaimed as their objects, if indeed they have any clear-cut result at all, and visit during their course a great deal of casual suffering on the innocent.” The unfairness and injustice of war will outweigh any justice it could ever hope to achieve, and so given a choice between peace and justice, choose peace.
But achieving some kind of justice for the oppressed is often given as a reason for war. The presumption is we are in these countries to help the people, but often the individual soldiers don’t even like the people they are purportedly there to help, and few soldiers had a record of helping people in their own country, so it would seem unlikely they would travel half way around the world just to find somebody to help. A sergeant on the peacekeeping mission in Somalia that ended in the Black-Hawk-Down incident in 1993 said: “If I wanted to save people, I’d have joined the Salvation Army or the Peace Corps.”
I’ll use Vietnam as an example, but these observations apply equally well to Korea, Afghanistan and Iraq. Colonel David Hackworth, who served several tours in Vietnam, “truly believed we were right to help the South Vietnamese. It was as good a place as any to take a stand against the Communists, who were behind the Viet Cong (I was an avowed and enthusiastic proponent of the ‘better to fight them in Southeast Asia than on the beaches of Santa Monica’ philosophy), and besides, wasn’t that what America was all about, to help the poor and downtrodden, to help preserve freedom for those who couldn’t do it alone?” In Stanley Kubric’s Full Metal Jacket, a character says, more crudely: “I’m fighting this war because I believe that inside each gook is a freedom loving American waiting to get out.” So many Americans did want to help the Vietnamese. Tobias Wolff gave an example of a lieutenant who deeply cared about the Vietnamese in his memoir In Pharaoh’s Army, and spoke of “his friend’s courage and devotion to the villagers.” “Man, did he love these people.”
I can assure you there were soldiers in Vietnam who truly loved the people and the country, and were willing to face death to help them. But frankly, I was not one of them. I was willing to die for my country, and because of my personal background, might have voluntarily risked death to help Japanese or Irish, but I was neutral about Vietnamese. I had grown up in Asia, but I wasn’t even familiar with the word Vietnam, having heard the area referred to as French Indochina, or more specifically as its components Tongkin, Annam or Cochin China. So I had no particular love or hate for the Vietnamese people. In my observation, many combat troops were not just indifferent to them as a people, they actively disliked them. Michael Lanning, a platoon leader in Vietnam, said that at first his “opinion of the people of Vietnam was not high. It would become even lower with more experience.” A Rifleman with the First Cavalry Division stated his feelings more bluntly: “I hated Vietnamese men.” This dislike of Vietnamese was encapsulated in a joke that was current when I was there: “What you do is, you load all the Friendlies onto ships and take them out to the South China Sea. Then you bomb the country flat. Then you sink the ships.” Others had mixed feelings about the Vietnamese. Even Col. Hackworth, quoted above from his 1989 book as believing it was right to go to Vietnam to help the poor and downtrodden South Vietnamese, says in his 2002 book: “I didn’t trust the South Viets any more than their guerrilla brothers and cousins.”
Bing West pointed out in The Village: “The officers were aware from their own surveys that over 40 percent of the Marines disliked the Vietnamese. The problem was particularly acute among the small unit leaders—the lieutenants and sergeants—whose opinions had considerable effect on their men.” Surveys “suggest that of our squad leaders graduating from NCO Leadership School less than one in five marches forth with a positive attitude toward the ARVN and PF, and that probably one-third go forth with a strong dislike for the local people.”
In Iraq, Kayla Williams points out that she sometimes felt hostile toward the Iraqis, despite having once had a Muslim boyfriend, and being especially respectful of Middle Eastern culture: “I speak the language, and I have Arab friends, so I believe I’m better equipped than most soldiers to see these civilians as people. Not simply as the enemy. But even for me there are times I am feeling overwhelmed by the situation. God, why can’t we just kill everyone—or leave them to fucking kill each other?”
Sometimes initial enthusiasm becomes disillusionment over time. Hack says, “There is something in human nature that seduces us into reducing war and its offspring into clearly divided teams of good and evil.” There is a tendency to assume that anyone who is a victim of prejudice must be innocent of prejudice. But this is often not the case. Victims of ethnic persecution often grow up in an environment of hatred and are steeped in prejudice themselves. The Jews in the Holocaust were unique in that they were persecuted by people against whom they held no hatred and to whom they were no threat: the Jews were not going to round up the gentiles and send them to death camps. But in most ethnic conflicts, there is no moral superiority: each group could, would and has persecuted the other. This is expressed in Bertrand Russell’s “view that the oppressed look admirable only until they win”. And tolerance can be particular, not universal. Don’t be at all surprised to hear a victim of racial prejudice express bigotry against women, or gays, or another religion. We want to be on the side of good, “But on any given day it could be hard as hell to tell the good guys from the bad guys.”
In other cases, the enemy is more abstract, not an army, but a concept—like Hopelessness, often said to grow from poverty. The argument is that poverty breeds anger and resentment that will eventually lead to a war against us. That actually isn’t likely. No one need fear people in poverty. Growing up in true, crushing poverty, poverty that means malnutrition, does not breed angry fighters. It breeds people who are weak and listless, people who are easily controlled. If it’s malnourished, the body adapts to deprivation with the a strategy that evolved to preserve every spare calorie, and war burns a lot of calories. This affects not just the body, but the mind and psyche as well. The person becomes lethargic. The actual affect of starvation is indifference, not aggression. Give them an adequate amount of food, however, and see what you get. That’s why revolutions do not occur among the totally oppressed, but rather among those who are coming out of oppression. As things begin to look up, it seems possible to eliminate the oppression. Where there’s no hope, there’s no war.
The poor aren’t the problem. Osama bin Laden grew up rich and privileged; Mohamet Atta was quite well to do, from a comfortably middle class family, better off than most Americans. Look at Iraq. The Iraqi’s standard of living is better than that of two-thirds of the people on earth, and 98 percent of anyone who ever lived.
I’ve often heard it said that the U.S. was in Vietnam to help the people. This is not entirely true. It always struck me that if we were there to help the Vietnamese people, then we should have been acting in line with the pacification program. But once I realized they wanted to kill me, I didn’t especially want to help them. So I suggested: Let’s go home! But actually, I don’t believe the Vietnam War was about Vietnam.
If I ever write a book about the Vietnam War, one of its purposes will be to refute the myth the Vietnam was a lost war. We didn’t lose in Vietnam. In fact, I don’t think Vietnam was a war, but a campaign in the larger conflict, the Cold War. And we won the Cold War. Henry Kissinger, who as Secretary of State was deeply involved in American policy at the time, said: “America’s initial motivation in involving itself had been that the loss of Vietnam would lead to the collapse of noncommunist Asia and to Japan’s accommodation to communism. In terms of that analysis, in defending South Vietnam, America was fighting for itself, regardless of whether South Vietnam was democratic or could ever be made so.” And Ward Just, looking back from the year 2000, said: “Successive American administrations insisted that fundamentally it wasn’t about Vietnam at all. It was about communist expansionism. It was about dominoes tumbling to Singapore. It was about the Soviet Union and what the Red Army would do in Europe if the American army failed to hold the line in South Vietnam.” Martin Dockery, who served as an advisor in South Vietnam, understood that “The United States believed we had to meet the communist challenge wherever it occurred because our freedom and way of life were ultimately at stake. That is the reason we were willing to help South Vietnam, which had a non-communist, totalitarian government, defend itself. It was thought to be in our own interest.” And although the war was to prevent a communist takeover of the South, that did happen anyway, and when it happened it actually made very little difference to Americans.
But the campaign had far-reaching effects against the “evil empire”. If there had been no Vietnam War, The Wall wouldn’t have fallen in 1989 like it did. That’s why I think there should be a Cold War Victory Medal issued. Those who participated in World War I got a World War I Victory Medal in addition to any other campaign ribbons, and after World War II, the participants were awarded a World War II Victory Medal. The Cold War was even more important than the two World Wars. The Axis did not have the capability of directly destroying the United States; the Soviet Union did. So I want my CWV Medal!
If most soldiers don’t fight for love of foreign friends, maybe they fight because they hate the enemy. Stephen Graham witnessed the mobilization at the outbreak of the First World War in a Russian village, mostly populated by Cossacks. The villagers “burned to fight the enemy. Who was the enemy? Nobody knew.” The telegram ordering mobilization had overlooked to mention that minor detail. At first the villagers thought it must be Japan, then decided the enemy was certainly China, and they would join with Germany fighting against “the yellow peril”. Later they settled on England as the enemy. It wasn’t until the fourth day of the war that they learned they were on the same side as England against Germany, and China and Japan were not involved. Many English were likewise indifferent to the identity of the enemy. Major Tom Bridges of the 4th Dragoon Guards said that in 1914: “We’d as soon as fought the French or Belgians as the Germans.” He believed in the Cavalry’s motto: “We’ll do it; what is it?” And on the German side, Ernst Jünger had tried to join the French Foreign Legion the year before the War started but a year later he went off to dutifully fight the French.
The same has been true in American history. In the months preceding the War of 1812, it was an even bet as to which would be the enemy and which the ally, France or England. Daniel Ellsberg, later to gain fame (or shame) for releasing top-secret documents containing embarrassing facts about the conduct of the war in Vietnam that became known as “The Pentagon Papers” served as a Marine company commander with the Sixth Fleet during the Suez Crisis in 1954. They knew they might be deployed to help either Egypt, or Israel; they worked up plans for both contingencies. Ellsberg said: “” Although my father was proud of his Irish heritage, and dreamed of retiring there, he always said he’d not hesitate a moment to fight Irish if the U.S. went to war with Ireland.
Not only can hatred be directed almost at will, it can be re-directed. After World War II, occupation troops in Germany and Japan found themselves in idyllic circumstances amongst a cooperative, helpful populace. Many a veteran of bitter combat married one of the enemy and loved her ever after.
Most people in combat can identify with the enemy on the other side, and many recognize a common plight. David Hackworth (1921-2005) joined the army at 15, and saw combat in Korea and Vietnam. His book covers tout him as “one of America’s most decorated soldiers”, having received some 110 decorations during his career. He has written several books that I quote in this book, including his classic military autobiography, About Face. I call him “Hack”, out of respect for him as a warrior and a writer, not familiarity. He said of the enemy: “Among professional soldiers there is seldom hate down at the dying level.” “We must kill him, of course, before he kills us.” “But when the shooting is over, most grunts have more in common with other grunts, even old enemies, than they ever will have with the politicians who sent them.”
“Tactical stability springs from the psychological conditions that induce men to face life, conditions such as loyalty, friendship, confidence and responsibility to others.” The military experience leads to friendships and camaraderie you don’t usually find in civilian life. Friendship grows from shared experience, and the military offers the most extreme gamut of experience imaginable. I’ve often said that as an army brat I grew up in a small town. It’s just the small town kept moving. It was in the Philippines, in Texas, in Tennessee, in Japan. It was a small town in the sense that if you said to co-workers, “I went to the movie last night” they would usually reply “Oh, who else was there?” In my civilian life in the big city, that would be a silly question, because only rarely did I ever run into someone from work outside of work. In a military community, you tend to live, work and play together, so you get all the advantages—and, yes, the disadvantages—of a small town. This unit cohesion is vital to a unit’s success.
James M. McPherson called his book about the soldiers in the Civil War For Cause & Comrades. McPherson discovered that Civil War soldiers might have joined for the cause, but they fought for their comrades. In the heat of battle they fight for each other. They care about their buddies’ good opinion. They are concerned with their personal honor, and do not want to be seen as a coward. But they are more interested in each other’s welfare than any ideology. Garland Godby, who had been a company commander in World War II, when asked what he thought was the most significant factor in making soldiers restrain their fears and perform their duty, did not hesitate: “Brotherhood”. Brotherhood, which can apply to our sisters-in-arms as well, is a vital component of unit cohesion, that elusive essential to any fighting unit. Shakespeare understood this when he had Henry V refer to his army at Agincourt as a “Band of Brothers”. “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; For he today that sheds his blood with me Shall be my brother.”
Hack, re fighting in Korea says: “Sure, I was fighting for America, all that was “right” and “true”, for the flag, the national anthem, and Mom’s Apple Pie. But all that came in second to the fact that the reason I fought was for my friends.” Even in that most ideological of wars, World War II, ideology took a back seat to concern for buddies. “U.S. troops fought to preserve the lives of men in their primary group while ideological reasons were of much less importance.” A Sergeant Colbert in Iraq on the verge of the invasion in 2003 had this mindset. “As a professional warrior, politics and ideology really don’t enter into his thoughts about why he is here in the desert, waiting to invade a country.” “Our objective is to kill him before he kills us. Out here, there are no international politics.”
In philosophy and international law there is a distinction made between what are called in Latin Jus ad bellum and Jus in bello. Jus ad bellum is “the justice of the war”. This means the war must be fought for just reasons, and examines the decision to go to war. Jus in bello, on the other hand, is “Justice in a war” and regulates how the war is fought. It is possible to fight a just war unjustly and vice versa, but once war has started, the reason why is above the soldier’s pay grade.
A job applicant was once given a questionnaire that contained a blank page on which to answer the question “What did you do in the military?” He wrote two words in big letters: “As told!” Understandably, many soldiers take the view that it is their job to do as told. It’s hard to decide the rights and wrongs, wisdom and folly, of any war. The issues are complex, and it’s in one sense impossible to know what’s right. Justice is often in the eye of the beholder, both sides think they are fighting for an equally noble objective, and throughout history, opinions have changed about what is just and unjust. A simple soldier can’t be blamed for saying, “Politics is not my concern. I’ll do what my country asks of me and let the historians sort it out, and I will kill everyone who looks like he’ll kill me and let God sort out the good from the bad.”
In the movie Sand Pebbles, a China Sailor, Jake Holman, played by Steve McQueen, says disgustedly of a dinner-table debate about the whys and wherefores of the U.S. Navy’s patrolling the Yangtze River in the 1920s, “Politics”, spoken as if it were a dirty word, implying the reasons are not his concern. In war both sides can be wrong, but both sides can also be right. To take an example distant enough that it’s unlikely to raise hackles, consider the Punic Wars that pitted Hannibal against Rome. It isn’t clear that Rome was any more admirable than Carthage, or that the world would be a better or worse place today had Carthage won instead of Rome. Centuries from now, who knows what side people will conclude was right in our wars. All we can do is our best, and recognize that although our nation might not always be right in the specifics, it always is in general, and that a soldier must obey orders.
U.S. law does not recognize a right of conscience about a specific war. During the Vietnam War, the U.S. Supreme Court denied conscientious objector status to some individuals who said that although they would have fought in World War II, they felt the Vietnam War was immoral, and objected to fighting there as a matter of conscience. The Supreme Court rejected that argument, saying you could only be a C.O. if you were opposed to all wars—you can’t pick and choose your wars. The decision is a little troubling, since the principle would condemn the German soldier who resisted Nazism, or the Russian who resisted Communism, but that is the principle that soldiers operate under in most countries—your country right or wrong. Treason is the greatest crime. Essentially it underscores the idea that the soldier should be apolitical.
The U.S. military is designed to be apolitical. In fact a law, the Hatch Act requires the uniformed military to stay out of Politics. The Commander in Chief, the head of the Department of Defense, and the heads of each of the services are all civilians. This principle of civilian control is a good one—witness the military dictatorships that we’ve seen throughout history. The concept is that the Army should stay out of politics. For most of our history, soldiers were not even encouraged to vote, and frequent transfers were seen as a way to prevent becoming too involved in the politics of any community. As a young lieutenant colonel named Norman Schwarzkopf said in the immediate aftermath of the Vietnam War, “I took an oath saying that I’d protect this country from all enemies foreign and domestic—I didn’t say I’d determine who the enemies were!”
James Stewart relates a tale of a dinner Captain Hill attended at the house of a Vietnamese woman he had befriended in 1968. He sat down, unarmed, at the table when in came two North Vietnamese soldiers. He assumed he would soon be dead, but his two enemies sat down at the table, and began making dinner conversation! When asked why he was in Vietnam, Hill replied: “I’m a professional soldier. They say ‘go’ I go. The politics of the war, that’s not my job.” The dinner concluded amiably, and since it was late and the roads in enemy hands at night, Hill was nervous about driving back to his base at night. The NVA assured him that that night he was safer than he would ever be in his life, and were true to their word, since he got back without incident using a road no American could possibly have survived any other night. The NVA believed in the profession, and extended professional courtesy.
The slogan “Hate the war, not the warrior” has a false corollary, love the warrior equals love the war. The warriors themselves would often like to come home, and don’t care for the cause in question. Certainly many, toward the end most, soldiers in Vietnam did not believe in the war, but Vietnam was not unique. In every war ever fought there were probably a few who did not agree with the war aims. Certainly by the end of World War II the majority of German and Japanese officers knew the war was lost and thought it should be ended, but soldiered on out of honor and habit.
For each of the reasons to fight we’ve looked at, we’ve seen that some soldiers have been motivated by them, and some have not. Michael Scheuer points out the harsh reality. “The U.S. military’s men and women are professionals; they are soldiers by choice; it is their chosen career. For whatever reason they joined—love of country, money for college, avoiding jail, a taste for violence, a desire to travel, shelter from a competitive economy, or a hundred other reasons—the contract is as it was in ancient times: In return for getting what you sought by enlisting, the nation sends you where you are needed and you die if necessary.”
The lesson for you is that you needn’t feel you’re abnormal if you do, or do not, find any motive in yourself, or even if you sometimes do and sometimes don’t. Even the worst of soldiers have some good motives, and the best have some bad motives, so don’t be hard on yourself. The same is true of your leaders. Your country might be doing things that don’t square with its ideals, since “Liberalism at home and a pragmatic, at times ruthless policy abroad have not been uncommon in the history of some empires.”
So don’t feel ignoble if some of the more noble motives aren’t really why you fight. Why a nation says it goes to war is not always really why it goes to war. And why a nation goes to war is not always why its soldiers go to war. And that’s okay. As for the morality of any given war, that is not a fair burden for the individual soldier. He’s burdened enough by the demands of courage, the subject of the next chapter.
Copyright ©2009 Patrick McDermottFor Your Buddies
Above My Pay Grade
Ours is Not the Reason Why
The Notes for this chapter.
Currently under Construction.
A hard-copy is in progress and will be published in a few months.