Since many people strive for positions of power as compensations for needy egos, it is hardly surprising that the corridors of power are filled with people for whom the compassionate responses will be short-circuited as a matter of course. War simply draws out in stark relief the immense power of our need to be accepted by our peers, which causes us to conform to society’s rules of conduct rather than respond with compassion. In so-called normal life we do these things every day, but we don’t see the results quite so clearly and therefore don’t relate to the remorse. This is because no one grabs us by the scruffs of our necks and shoves our faces into the messes we’ve created while shoring up our images.
When I first joined my company it was operating alone in the high mountains that formed the Vietnamese border with Laos. Our job was to disrupt the Ho Chi Minh trail and find and destroy supply bases and hospitals.31 The company had set up on a hill temporarily and I was asked to take one of my squads out on a security patrol to screen the company position. It was my first combat patrol and I was determined to look competent. I was also nervous as hell. So, I assume, were my troops.
We’d been out several hours, moving ever farther from the company through beautiful untouched jungle, when we heard noise down in a very steep draw. We took cover, silently forming a hasty defense. After a few minutes of tense listening, the squad leader and the artillery forward observer, a young lance corporal who was extremely good at map reading, which was why he was directing artillery fire, turned to me with slight smiles on their faces. “It’s a gook transportation unit,” the F.O. whispered.
I was an NFG32 for sure, but not stupid. So I knew some kind of joke was at hand, though I couldn’t figure it out. “Okay, I’ll bite. There’s no roads for miles around here.”
“Elephants. The gooks use them for packing gear.”
“They do?”
“Sure they do.”
Well, this made sense. I’d read about that back in the world. I tried to ponder what significance this might have for the patrol and me when the artillery observer said, “It’s a legitimate target. I usually call in a fire mission.33 Okay, sir?”
I didn’t want to look soft or indecisive. This was my first patrol, my debut, my coming out. So I ended up looking totally soft and indecisive and said, “You sure it’s a legitimate target?”
“Sure. We do it all the time. The gooks use them just like trucks.” And with that I said okay. My first fire mission in Vietnam was against an unseen “gook transportation unit”—a herd of elephants.
When the first shells came crashing in I heard the screams and the tearing and crashing of the brush by the maddened elephants. I called off the mission. I was so ashamed I didn’t even take the patrol into the draw to see the damage. In the intensity of war we see the ordinary small evils driven by trivial causes, such as not wanting to look incompetent or soft, magnified into horrors, such as the wounding of innocent animals.
For all practical purposes, most of us have already been raised with this “short-circuit training” that enables us to override the more complex neurological wiring of compassion with the simple and direct short circuit of trivial concerns and immediate needs and wants. So how do we mortals overcome this short-circuiting of compassion?
There’s a physical method and there’s a ritualistic method.
The physical method is pretty simple. It requires that we make a conscious attempt to use other senses besides the visual whenever we are faced with making decisions that could result in killing or carnage. Our nonvisual senses haven’t been dulled like our visual ones. A congressional junket to a combat zone is one junket this taxpayer would feel good paying for—as long as it doesn’t stop short at headquarters. Unfortunately most of them do because most junketing members of Congress are there so that they can tell people back home they’ve been there and not to actually see the results or failures of their votes. Walk through a burned-out village where the dogs haven’t been fed and you hear them eating the dead. If this doesn’t snap through your conditioning, then smell human meat rotting. Listen to the wailing of the orphaned child and go mad with it because you can’t get it out of your ears until you either walk away or do away with the child. Pick up chunks of body and feel the true meaning of dead weight. These senses aren’t filtered and dulled by visual media. These channels are much more directly open to the heart. This is another reason why computer-game warfare has no natural checks on its violence.
The second area is that of ritual. Upon reading Homer’s Iliad I was struck with how much time the ancient warriors spent in ritual. If they weren’t offering something to a god or goddess, they were burning some dead comrade along with his armor. In the Táin Bó Cúailnge, the Irish equivalent of the Iliad, virtually every encounter is preceded by some ritual marking of stones utilizing the ogham,34 placing of stakes in streams, placing of heads on stakes. During combat tours time must be carved out in which to reflect. I wish that after each action the skipper could have drawn us all together, just us. In ten or fifteen minutes of solemn time we could have asked forgiveness and said good-bye to lost friends.
Compassion must be elicited consciously in warfare. Our natural tendency is to think of the enemy as an animal inferior to us. This serves to help warriors accomplish very ugly tasks, but it brings on unnecessary suffering if not constantly checked. It takes time to respond with compassion. During combat, when you are actually fighting, you have to use this time for saving your own life. Your already learned survival mechanisms will cut out the compassionate response and you’ll proceed to save your skin. But you don’t fight all the time in a combat zone. You don’t even fight all the time in an actual battle. There is time to be snatched, but unfortunately the way we go about fighting now is that you are most likely to get another sensory input of violence, and have to short-circuit the response to that, before you’ve unblocked the previous delayed response. Do this enough and the circuitry gets jammed completely and you become inured to violence as long as more violence keeps happening. Many years later all the jammed wiring starts coming loose. Rituals must be reinstated, on the battlefield, on the bloody street, immediately, to keep the jamming to a minimum.
Ego loses control when emotion (body) reigns. When you’re sobbing, the body, not the mind, has control of the organism. The ego is a mind thing and it doesn’t like this.
In a later chapter on atrocity I will tell of an incident when some of the kids in my platoon cut off the ears of some enemies we’d killed and pinned them onto their bush hats and helmets. I punished the kids who did this by making them bury the bodies. During the burial, which I assumed to be a totally mechanical task, two of the kids started crying.
Why don’t we bury our enemies with ceremony?
Certainly, immediately after a battle we must set up for the counterattack. The bodies just get shoved aside as best they can be. I’ve used them for temporary sandbags on occasion. I’d still do it. But there always comes a time when you can spare a moment for ritual. It can come when you are set up and your security patrols are out and functioning, or you’re being relieved by the next unit, or when, as it so often did, the order comes to abandon the hill so dearly gained.
Even if the graves are dug with bulldozers, the people who killed these people should file by and throw a handful of dirt on the bodies. They or the leaders should say a prayer, out loud, thanking these dead on both sides for their fully played part in this mysterious drama. We should allow people to curse the dead for murdering their friends, and then, if the younger ones can’t, the older ones, officers and NCOs, should be trained in conducting the rituals of forgiveness and healing. Something like:
Bless these dead, our former enemies, who have played out their part, hurled against us by the forces that hurled us against them. Bless us who live, whose parts are not yet done, and who know not how they shall be played. Forgive us if we killed in anger or hatred. Forgive them if they did the same. Judgment is Yours, not ours. We are only human.
T
here will be those who fear that doing such things will undermine the killer instincts of the troops. Well, if the war is a stupid one it probably will. If it’s not, I wouldn’t worry. Imagine the young NVA soldiers doing it to the young American soldiers laid out before them and ask yourself if in any way such a ritual would have weakened their resolve. Think of Russian soldiers pushed all the way back to Moscow doing it over the frozen bodies of young Germans. Now take those same Russians and have them do it over the bodies of dead Finns whose country they had just brutally invaded. Such rituals will indeed have consequences—all of them healthy.
5
THE ENEMY WITHIN
Under ordinary circumstances the repressed and despised parts of our personalities manifest themselves as small human foibles or weaknesses in character that foster only petty acts with minor harmful consequences. In the crucible of war those same weaknesses and petty acts can lead to consequences of immense horror and evil. The warrior must recognize the moments when circumstances mirror the ugly unwanted parts of his or her psyche. This is the only way to minimize the evil consequences of ignoring these parts. To do this requires recognizing and accepting one’s own despised parts, a form of heroism not taught in boot camp.
In 1968, while still in Vietnam, I recorded in my journal the first instance of a recurring nightmare that, along with similar dreams, took me over twenty years to lay to rest.
Somehow the gook35 and I were left isolated right next to the river. I had only my kabar36 and it looked as if he was unarmed. He saw me and we went at each other. My kabar was dull from chopping branches, so instead of slashing I tried to stab him in the throat. I hit him someplace but didn’t stop him and then we were locked together and rolling into the muddy tepid water. I found out then he wasn’t unarmed. In his right hand were two razor blades. He got me right across the wrist in a slash, and in the warm water I could feel my blood draining, mixing with the warmth around it, robbing me of energy, of life. I stabbed him in the Adam’s apple and felt the hard resistance like a carrot. The knife was too dull to tear his throat, so I pulled it out and stabbed again and again in a mad race against the blood mixing, mixing in the warm brown water. Finally I could see no longer. My mind whirled. My body twisted and spun after my blood, joining it in a dance of entropy, cooling and spinning to the universal semi-warmth of the river.
The doc pulled me out and I awoke on the bank with an IV tube in my arm.
This dream is not about Vietnam. It’s about what got me to Vietnam. I’ve been fighting that “gook,” the enemy inside me, in one form or another, for most of my life. It represents the parts of me I despise. Not only don’t I want other people to see them; I also don’t want to see them myself. These are my weak parts, my indecisive parts, my violent parts, and probably a few parts so deeply buried I can’t name them. The enemy, however, pops up in various forms in dreams. Sometimes he’s a shiftless vagrant. Sometimes he’s a frightening murderer or a crazy person.
Sometimes real people, not just dreams, catch this enemy within, acting like an unrecognized reflection in a mirror. Rather than realize it’s my own reflection, I prefer to think that what I see is really them. This causes troubling encounters. For example, if I see fat people I immediately think badly of them. I myself was a bit fat as a child. I got over that through waging a fierce war against that fat little boy, training hard, running a lot, playing the toughest sports. But I still like to eat ice cream and lie around, so the fat little boy is still with me, stuffed inside where I don’t have to think about him anymore. I can have a negative reaction to a fat person, but when I start to remember that fat little boy I used to be, my reaction becomes more neutral. Eventually it took certain painful war experiences, represented and played out in the repeating dream I just described, to finally make up a nightmare strong enough to get my attention and make me realize that something wasn’t altogether sound at home. There was indeed an enemy within.
Everyone has his or her equivalent of “the gook inside.” It’s what Carl Jung called the shadow. People who say they don’t have one have an even bigger one.
That NVA soldier and I were fighting by the Ben Hai River, the dividing line between North and South Vietnam. This is the dividing line between this world, the world where everyone, especially me, expects I’ll be good at football and get a powerful high-paying job, and the other world, the world where I hide, and then forget, the parts of me I despise.
Although we all have shadows, we all have different ones. My own shadow has many masks. I’m a strong man—my shadow is a weak effeminate whiner. I’m a hard worker—“Sarge” visits me in dreams, a lazy, marijuana-smoking deserter and lover. He’s got two sensuous sleek women friends. I’m not afraid to take on a challenge—my shadow constantly fears failing. What better way to fight these shadows than to join the Marines and prove to myself that they don’t exist? After I left the Marines, I found other similar things to do, over and over again. I made enough brilliant light to keep the shadows at bay and blind myself in the process.
This dream soldier is slashing my wrists with a razor blade, an image of suicide. The more I try to kill him, the more my own blood drains out of me. When I returned from Vietnam I lost some old and dear friends and one woman I loved. I lost them because they said I had become cold. When asked how I was, I’d answer, “I’m cool.” And I was. I was holding down a full colonel’s billet at Headquarters Marine Corps37 and had enough medals to excuse any wayward behavior, and I took full advantage of the situation. Everything looked fine. But I’d died inside.
So to feel more alive and simultaneously avoid the pain of confronting the darkness and dark deeds I now carried with me, I came up with a creative and individual solution. I got into drugs, drinking, and sex. It never got too heavy. I could still hold down my job, and on occasion I did this literally. After a night of doing drugs I would sometimes have to hang on to my desk chair at work the next day while I watched the Key Bridge undulate like a sine wave over the Potomac or used my eyes like zoom lenses, alternating from close-up to distance, close-up to distance. Sometimes the walls would change colors. But Lieutenant Marlantes was “cool.”38
I made friends with a Marine chopper pilot who, ever since his Vietnam tour, was such a serious alcoholic that often I’d have to go over to his apartment to get him into his uniform for work in the morning. We’d go to parties where everyone was too numb to talk and too high to care. I woke up one Sunday morning after one of these parties to answer the telephone. It was the airline-pilot husband of the woman lying next to me. He was calling to see if she was going to church with the kids. I tried to pretend I was the cool lover as I watched her get dressed to go. But I felt so sad and wrong inside. I felt her humiliation. I noticed her skin starting to go loose and dry on her face, and she noticed that I noticed. That was the last time I made love to someone I didn’t know.
You don’t need to go to war to find people fleeing from or fighting their shadows and getting their wrists slashed. I got my act together, got married, stopped the drugs, managed to climb to the top of a smallish heap—large income, first-class hotels, jets to Europe and the Far East. On the surface it was like an ad for Rolex watches—but something was missing.
One evening after dinner at a party in Singapore I joined the men, all corporate leaders of varying nationalities, men whom I still respect for the many corporate hills they’ve charged and taken. We were talking about issues that were important to us at the time. Maggie Thatcher was doing this. Lee Kuan Yew was doing that. The deutsche mark was doing such and such. We were responding this way and that way, all of us intelligent, responsible, powerful in our spheres.
Laughter from across the room pulled my attention away from the conversation. I turned and saw that a group of the wives had gathered around one end of the hostess’s large dining table. Color jumped at me, the mauve and fuchsia of two Indian women in their saris and a Chinese woman in a green silk dress, her face animated as she listened to a French woman whose hands
flashed light as she talked. I looked back at my group, powerful and successful but bloodless.
The first messages are gentle. Ignore them and the volume gets turned up, sometimes painfully high, sometimes to the point where it destroys your sense of hearing. I traveled constantly for about a year after this party. One night I came home from Indonesia around two o’clock one morning and found my ten-year-old son curled up asleep with a photograph of me held against his stomach. The picture was one of me laughing and holding him up over my head when he was about nine months old. He’d taken a ballpoint pen and stabbed out my face.
If you don’t recognize your shadow sides, you’ll be likely to cause a lot of damage trying to do your heroic deeds. How often we see the do-gooder politicians, the community boosters, the heads of charities with ruinous family lives. My own grandmother was an idealistic communist, IWW member, and labor organizer. The longest she ever lived with my mother was something like four months. My mother has carried the consequences of that neglect all her life. I used to condemn my grandmother for this. Then one day I found that my grandmother’s mother was a famous midwife in her part of Finland. She was constantly away as well. When briefly at home, she was constantly irritable, yelling at and slapping her kids in her tiredness and frustration. Yet no matter how tired or how desperately needy were her own children, if there was any difficult case within several days’ journey, she went. So my grandmother, and every one of her siblings, went too, to America. Great-Grandma never saw her children again.