My feeling? I had been elated! I shouted to the team, “We got Crispy Critters all over the hill!” Crispy Critters was a popular breakfast cereal at the time.
If, back then, I had been who I am today I would have felt differently. There would have been no elation. But back then I was just like the battalion staff that had cheered our victory on the hill. I identified with the reconnaissance team, whose lives were very much in doubt. Psychologically I had become identified with the threatened group, and the advancing enemy was no longer human. I didn’t kill people, sons, brothers, fathers. I killed “Crispy Critters.” It could have been krauts, nips, huns, boche, gooks, infidels, towel heads, imperialist pigs, yankee pigs, male chauvinist pigs... the list is as varied as human experience. This dissociation of one’s enemy from humanity is a kind of pseudospeciation. You make a false species out of the other human and therefore make it easier to kill him. The touchdown feeling combined with dissociating the enemy was in full glorious effect.
We directed in one more pass of snake and nape, but this one was hardly necessary. The NVA were now content to fire at the aircraft from the cover of the surrounding jungle rather than go after the team. The first flight returned to base. We got a second flight of A-4s up and kept them on station until a very brave chopper pilot from MAG-29 got into the zone.11 Everyone on our side made it out safely. We were delighted.
I’m still delighted. Do I delight over this out of some sort of depravity? Some sort of warping in my childhood? I don’t know. I may just be built this way. I can feel that old excitement as I write this. How similar I am to others I also don’t know. Few will ever have to run the test. I suspect I am not very different. All I know for sure is that, at the time, I didn’t feel sickened or horrible about it. I was doing a good job of saving some fellow Marines.
And how do I feel now? I can still indulge in the excitement—and it is indulgence. It sells billions of dollars worth of entertainment. But I can also bring some consciousness to this past action of mine, and when I do, I find myself amazed at the many other feelings lying hidden there that this excitement masks and helps us deny.
Primarily it’s a matter of identity and age. I am now in relation to both the team and the enemy. I now think of what was “the enemy” as human beings, so I find it hard to crow about burning them to death. I’m also very aware of the genuine cost being paid by those NVA soldiers and that reconnaissance team for me to get those feelings of excitement and pleasure.
I’d still do the same thing, only I would be aware of a horrible dilemma. I would be much more reluctant to use napalm now, knowing I could get the job done a lot more humanely with bombs. But scrambled aircraft arrive on station loaded with what they’re loaded with. Once I had decided to be in that situation, I couldn’t then decide that the team should sacrifice itself for my misgivings about using napalm. I wouldn’t let the team down. I would have chosen to be on their side, totally. I don’t believe in pulling punches during a fight to the death. But there would certainly be no excited calls over the radio, no Crispy Critters language. I’d hope that I’d remember to respect my enemy’s pain and agony.
Could I empathize like this while up in the airplane? Unlikely. Empathy comes with years, and most fighters are very young. This is why politicians and generals need to see these kids as their weapons and use them with care and consciousness. Ideally, I would hope that, in spite of the adrenaline, I’d at least stay conscious of a terrible sadness while I burned these people. But burn them I would.
The ideal response to killing in war should be one similar to a mercy killing, sadness mingled with respect. A few years ago I came across a sick seagull on the beach. Dogs were harrying it. Both its wings were broken. Still, it defended itself, bravely slashing with its beak to try to keep the barking dogs away. People kept walking by, not wanting to look at it. I chased the dogs off and wrung the bird’s neck. I felt no elation, only regret for the events that led up to the situation, and a sort of wistful “Why me, Lord?” as I did what no one else wanted to do.
When my German shepherd, Sancho, grew old, he got overly protective of the front porch. My kids would bring in their little friends, who would occasionally trip on him. Sancho started to snap and snarl, something he’d never done with kids when he was younger. (I can relate.) One day he snapped and snarled at a three-year-old who was trying to get out of the car. The mother freaked out, grabbed her child, and slammed the car door. Later she phoned to tell us that she wasn’t coming over anymore. It’s hard to blame her. Sancho weighed 134 pounds. We tried everything we could think of. Took him around kids on a leash. Talked to behavior experts. Moved his food away from the front door. Had him checked out for hearing problems, eye problems. I lay down next to him in the little mudroom where he slept one night and talked to him, tears in my eyes, asking him to change. He didn’t change. One day Alex, my youngest son, then three, tripped and fell on him. He snapped at Alex, biting him on the cheek.
I took Sancho to the vet and lay next to him with my arms around him as she injected him with sodium pentothal. I made a tombstone out of concrete and we buried Sancho down by the trees at the edge of the field.
As I said, it is unlikely young soldiers will feel about killing in war the way I felt, decades older, on a beach with a seagull or at the vet’s with my dog. It just goes against the nature and level of development of the mostly young people who will do our nation’s killing. Still, I think we fall far short of our potential. We don’t even strive for it with the youngest, and we can definitely instill a great deal of this sensibility in the older professional noncommissioned and commissioned officers. Even then it is difficult because the oldest people who are likely to be directly involved with killing the enemy, or directly supervising those who kill, are still usually in their twenties or early thirties. My company commander in Vietnam was twenty-three.
In war, we have to live with heavy contradictions. The degree to which we can be aware of and contain these contradictions is a measure of our individual maturity. You can’t be a warrior and not be deeply involved with suffering and responsibility. You’re causing a lot of it. You ought to know why you’re doing it. Warriors must touch their souls because their job involves killing people. Warriors deal with eternity.
My first encounter with knowing this consciously came during an operation where the company was dropped by itself into a barely known area of thick jungled mountains just below the extreme western part of the DMZ.12 Three days into the op we’d stumbled into an NVA outpost. The NVA triggered a command-detonated mine that had been lashed to a tree at waist height, killing our point man. He always kept a picture of his girlfriend, who was a year younger than he and still in high school, in his breast pocket for good luck. The piece of shrapnel that stopped his heart went right through her face. Somehow, when I pulled the picture from his pocket and looked at it, it stuck with me, this beautiful, young face obliterated by the same random piece of steel that had stopped her lover’s heart.
A series of firefights ensued while the NVA tried to keep us at bay. We kept probing forward in the jungle to get at what they were protecting. Normally, with nothing at stake, the NVA would have pulled back to escape the inevitable artillery fire we would call in. Two hours of off-and-on firefights and several artillery missions later, we came to the edge of a very steep drop-off above a small beautiful valley. We followed a steep zigzag path to the bottom, where we found underground bunkers containing tons of ammunition, food, and other supplies and half a dozen large thatched-roofed open-air sheds that served as meeting places, mess halls, and so on. There was a pretty little stream running right through the center of the camp. There were smaller bunkers with the sleeping pads and personal items still lying around and hastily abandoned cook sites with half-prepared food. In the bunker I occupied were two bowls of half-eaten rice and a still-smoking bamboo water pipe neatly placed on the floor, as if the occupants had stepped outside for a pee or something. The whole thing gave me the impression of
a macabre bamboo Brigadoon just waiting for the hundred-year return.
My lessons in eternity weren’t over yet. That night, all was completely hidden in a creeping fog that you could feel but not see. We had our own ambush teams out on all the approaches, waiting in the cold darkness. I’d just relieved Doc Southern, one of our two platoon corpsmen, for radio watch. He hung around, obviously unable to sleep in that spooky atmosphere, wanting to talk, which suited me just fine. Our other corpsman, Brailier, was asleep in the captured bunker next to us. Brailier was a quiet kid, very near the end of his tour. Even though he was only twenty, I always sensed something very deep in him, deep and troubling perhaps. In the course of our quiet conversation that night I asked Southern about Brailier. Was he always this way?
Doc Southern looked out the opening of the bunker and started to talk, very quietly, his soft voice mixing with the fog that hung just outside the black hole.
“I was just new to the platoon,” he said, staring into the past. “We was out northwest of Con Thien. We’d been in the shit off and on for a couple of days. There was this point-to-point firefight. No one got hurt but this one gook. He was a mess. M-79 shotgun round right in the stomach. You could hardly tell what pieces were what. The spine was pretty much gone, so he’d been a basket case for sure if he did live. But the problem was he was still alive. And we didn’t know if he’d be dead in twenty minutes, or two weeks, or two years.
“The louie13 kept asking Brailier, ‘Is he going to die? Is he going to die?’ We was all anxious to get the fuck out of there. Shit was still happening and, like I said, we was in the middle of fucking nowhere and the company had to move on. It meant we’d have to leave a squad back to protect the LZ if we was going to medevac the gook. And believe me, no one wanted to be that squad, not no one, not then.”
I could well understand the lieutenant’s need to know if the NVA soldier was going to die anyway. If he was alive, then ethics said medevac him, but that risked losing the chopper crew and the squad protecting the zone, and for what? Death in a day or two anyway? A life as a basket case? It’s very hard to say when one becomes morally and legally responsible for a prisoner’s life, given that such decisions often involve risking the lives of your own people. Leaving him there to die, however, could mean days of agony for the wounded man, and that was really not much different from murder. But to murder a prisoner outright was certainly wrong and could send the lieutenant to jail for a long time.
Doc Southern was going on, still looking into the blackness. “I remember looking up at Brailier and the louie. I was holding in pieces of this gook’s pancreas and stomach, trying to get him ready for the chopper if that’s what they decided to do, and trying to ease the pain. He was in a real bad way. You get to know when it really hurts, and this guy hurt, sir.
“There was this moment. You know. This moment. Then Brailier said, ‘He’s going to die.’
“That’s all the louie needed and he started rounding up the squads and moving them out and I packed up my gear and started off after them.” He stopped talking for a moment.
“Only Brailier went off by himself for a few minutes. I don’t know if he was praying or taking a piss, but he came back and shot the man right through the head.”
We didn’t say anything for a long time. I never asked Brailier about it.
So ask the now twenty-year-old combat veteran at the gas station how he felt about killing someone. His probable angry answer, if he’s honest: “Not a fucking thing.” Ask him when he’s sixty, and if he’s not too drunk to answer, it might come out very differently, but only by luck of circumstance—who was there to help him with the feelings during those four long decades after he came home from war. It is critical for young people who return from combat that someone is there to help them, before they turn to drugs, alcohol, and suicide. We cannot expect normal eighteen-year-olds to kill someone and contain it in a healthy way. They must be helped to sort out what will be healthy grief about taking a life because it is part of the sorrow of war. The drugs, alcohol, and suicides are ways of avoiding guilt and fear of grief. Grief itself is a healthy response.
3
GUILT
War is the antithesis of the most fundamental rule of moral conduct we’ve been taught—do unto others as you would have others do unto you. When called upon to fight, we violate many codes of civilized behavior. To survive psychically in the proximity of Mars, one has to come to terms with stepping outside conventional moral conduct. This requires coming to terms with guilt over killing and maiming other people.
T. E. Lawrence wrote in Seven Pillars of Wisdom:14
Some of the evil of my tale may have been inherent in our circumstances. For years we lived anyhow with one another in the naked desert, under the indifferent heaven. By day the hot sun fermented us; and we were dizzied by the beating wind... The everlasting battle stripped from us care of our own lives or of others’. We had ropes about our necks, and on our heads prices which showed that the enemy intended hideous tortures for us if we were caught. Each day some of us passed; and the living knew themselves just sentient puppets on God’s stage... The weak envied those tired enough to die... Gusts of cruelty, perversions, lusts ran lightly over the surface without troubling us; for the moral laws which had seemed to hedge about these silly accidents must be yet fainter words. We had learned that there were pangs too sharp, griefs too deep, ecstasies too high for our finite selves to register. When emotion reached this pitch the mind choked; and memory went white till the circumstances were humdrum once more.
What now looks wanton or sadic seemed in the field inevitable, or just unimportant routine.
When I was in Vietnam killing people, I never felt evil or guilty of sin—and I was raised a Lutheran, so I definitely would have known a guilty feeling when I had one. However, when I returned to the States I got the message. Somebody had done something quite bad in Vietnam and it must have been us, since we were the only ones there.
One day my wife talked me into attending a fairly typical 1970s encounter group therapy weekend. This was mostly because I wouldn’t talk about anything emotionally laden, not just the war. At the retreat I was asked to role-play talking to the mother and sister of the NVA soldier I’d killed when he threw the hand grenade at me. You’ll recall our eyes had locked. I recognized he was human. I was conscious, right then, that he was young and terrified—like me. Then he tried to kill me and I killed him. I know today that I did far worse things, burning men with napalm, shelling men with “Willy Pete,” shells that spewed burning white phosphorous that was impossible to put out and that burned deep holes right through men’s bodies. But this one was the tough one because most of my other kills were made when I was in the frame of mind that I was killing someone from another species. It was more like killing animals, bad enough, but not horribly guilt provoking. They were the enemy. This time I killed a human.
I was asked by the leader of the therapy group to apologize to this imagined mother and daughter for killing their son and brother. Part of me was angry that I was asked to do this in front of a group of near strangers. Of course, I could have declined, but I didn’t; once a Marine always a Marine. Within a minute of starting the apology I broke down wailing like a frightened child. Out came a torrent of terrible memories and remorse. This was the first time I felt any emotion about having killed. It was about ten years after the action. I sobbed and ran snot for hours that day, walking and running alone in the woods, my childhood place of solace. My ribs ached. The crying started again the next day, and would start again days and even weeks afterward and go on for hours at a time. Even at work the faces of dead friends and mutilated bodies on both sides would come unbidden to mind. I’d have to make excuses to go outside where no one could see me shaking, throat aching to hold back the sobs, walking down a city street or hiding in some corner of a parking garage. It went on like this for months, until I quit my job. I got into something new and everything went away, until next time. This pattern
went on for nearly three decades.
The group was well intentioned but woefully ignorant, as was I, of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. I never joined another therapy group again. Although the exercise got me “in touch with my feelings,” it was a damaging experience because no one was there to help me figure out how to handle those feelings in a healthy manner. It not only triggered extreme PTSD emotional symptoms, such as constant unstoppable crying, but also crystallized one of my enduring problems with the war, guilt. Did I really need to apologize?
About five years and two jobs later, still groping, I was fortunate enough to have dinner with the lecturer and mythologist Joseph Campbell. I’d seen him in the bar of the hotel where we were both staying and, overcoming my fears of rebuff, I asked if I could buy him a whiskey. Although he was certainly well known to people interested in the study of mythology, this was long before he became a popular figure, so my offer perhaps wasn’t the intrusion it might have been later. He said how could any good Irishman refuse a whiskey.
What followed was dinner, more whiskey, and lots of wonderful talk. We got into the Vietnam War. I talked about my feelings of guilt.
He said, “Look, you just found yourself on one side of the world of opposites. You think the other guy’s side was all right and yours all wrong?”
I had to admit both sides were no angels.
“Don’t you see the other guy’s fate put him on the opposite side from you?”
I nodded.
“So there you are. Now, what you had to do was fill out your side of the bargain with a noble heart. It’s your intentions and your nobility in how you conduct yourself in this world of opposites that you’ve got to think about. Did you intend right?”