STRUCTURE OF THE WEB
There is a web of male kinships and values and desires that determines how and why boys grow up to become warriors, when and how we go to war, what stories we tell and how we tell them when we return from war, how we age as men and warriors, and how old men come to the decision to send their sons, or the sons of others, to war.
The structure and workings of this web are so simple, so obviously present before us, among us, and within us, that its importance eludes us. We stare in bafflement right past the most screamingly obvious and important reason why armies meet in war: that such armies, and the official bodies which raise, fund, and direct them, are made up predominantly of men.
This male web is of blood and spirit: father and son, brother and brother, uncle and nephew, boy and boy, man and man, coach and athlete, veteran and recruit, corporate executive and junior assistant, pastor and parishioner.
It is a web of values: be strong, be brave, be loyal, dominate, prevail, achieve, build, destroy, survive. These values are built around a certain covenant which exists among men at war.
The many versions of the covenant that existed between me and the other Marines during the firefight at the well in the village of Tho An, and among all fighting men in all wars, always, are the common threads of the most important stories that old men tell to young men, or tell among themselves as boys eavesdrop, from the corner of the room or from the next table in a small-town diner, with a kind of attention they never show in school.
That covenant is the web's highest value. It is also the core value of our nation.
The web is above all else a web of male desires: this is the man I want to be, this is how I want to be seen by other men, by women, by children, by history. These are the deeds which I want to be remembered alongside my name. This uniform is my badge of courage.
And the nation itself is a male entity. That is how patriotism got its name. Nations are founded by males, led by males who, at least until recently in the case of the United States, were elected as much because of their war records as their civil leadership abilities - or who, as in the cases of Dan Quayle and Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, must struggle mightily to overcome the taint of not having served, or of less than valorous service.
This male-centrism is also the animating force in our culture. It is the real story in any war movie, cowboy movie, TV-series cop show, adventure movie, "buddy" movie. Themes of national security, the fight against crime, good versus evil are rational overlays - in national political life and in cultural artifacts like movies or television shows - over the emotional core of men fighting for, dying for, seeking the approval of, the other men in their group. Next in importance comes the approval of women, children, parents - society at large.
SOME STRANDS OF THE WEB
Young men are the warriors. Young men populate the realm of interpersonal force in human affairs. It begins with simply possessing more muscular strength than other people, and combines with a natural male propensity to use that strength in play, in sports([1]). But it is when this natural exuberance becomes commingled with and motivated by what I call “big ideas,” that young men become the masters of killing that they become.
Among “big ideas,” I include all politics, nationalisms, ideologies, and religions. Especially patriotism and religion.
Deadliest of all is the combination of patriotism and religion. That is how we slaughter our young.
And once a young man who is inspired by a big idea becomes armed with anything from a machete to a machine gun, and organized into groups who believe and act as units, then we have the bloodbath that is history as we know it.
My use of the etymology of the word “infantry” is neither accidental nor incidental. It screamed at me from my experience: growing up in the McCarthy years, being raised an American boy in the Pacific Northwest, the episode with my stepdad and the Marine recruiter in the gun shop in Klamath Falls, Oregon; Marine Corps training and service; the Vietnam War; journalism travels in Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Honduras, Jordan, the West Bank, Gaza, Israel; my summer of study in Leningrad and Prague...: everywhere I saw young men with weapons inspired by, or pushed by, or controlled by, “big ideas” fed to them by older men.
I have come to see this parade of young men and boys with weapons as being moved around like chess pieces – okay, pawns – because I was one of them. My experience in Vietnam, and the other places I’ve seen the face of war, forced me to see this eternal column of armed boys and men as something abnormal, monstrous, insane. It is all the more insane because of its normalcy and frequency, instead of being just another chapter in the march of human history, as I had seen it in the early stages of my own involvement, most intensely during the “Adeste Fidelis” march([2]) in advanced infantry training at Camp Pendleton in 1962.
YOUNG MEN, AND ... YOUNGER
War is the way our species eats our young. It’s been so at least since Homeric times – three thousand years, give or take - but probably much longer. The Iliad is considered by many to be the first great work of Western literature, and is, of course, a war story. But reading Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey turns up no mention of 8- or 12-year-old warriors. The warriors in the story were young men, not children. Achilles, Agamemnon, Hector, Patroclus, Odysseus, Paris, Greater and Lesser Ajax - they were all fully grown – if not always grown up. By 1579, the practice of recruiting and conscripting adolescent boys into Europe’s armies had grown to the point that the word used to name groups of foot soldiers was Middle French/German infanterie, Old Italian infanteria, Spanish infantería. Though combat has always been a young man’s game, the phenomenon of child soldiers has acquired a whole new meaning in recent decades. There are now an estimated 300,000 combatants in their early teen and pre-teen years([3]) in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and, especially, in Africa([4]). The youngest soldier I’ve read about was a combatant with the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), in Uganda. He was 5 years old. Not 15; he was 5([5]). The AK47 is a bit heavier and more awkward than the M16, but even a young child can carry one. And anyone has the strength to pull a trigger.
So far, not many U.S. soldiers have been younger than 17([6]); just the ones who lied about their ages. But our soldiers have lately met children in combat. P.W. Singer writes in his book on child soldiers: “U.S. Marines fighting in the battle to retake Falluja [Iraq] in November 2004 reported numerous instances of being fired upon by ‘12 year old children with assault rifles’ and wrestled with the dilemmas it presented.([7])”
Among the many instances of child soldiers cited by Singer is the Indonesian island of Ambon, where “thousands of Muslim and Christian boys have formed local paramilitary units that protect and raid against the other community.” He quotes an aid worker: “’They are so proud of their contribution. It’s a common thing for them to say they’ve killed. Since the government can’t seem to do anything, they all say they have an obligation to protect their families and their religion.’”
During the 1980’s contra war, with President Reagan leading the anti-communist crusade, re-institution of the draft was being widely debated. Because I had written articles in local newspapers about my own military experience and my two trips to Nicaragua as a journalist, more than one young man of draft age asked me for advice about what he should do if the United States went to war in Nicaragua and the draft were reinstated. Part of my response was always that if they enlisted in, or were drafted into, the military, they should be prepared to be looking at 12 year old boys across their rifle sights, based on the ages of some of the kids I had seen under arms in Nicaragua and southern Honduras during the contra war.
It is this deadly mix of young men – or boys - and big ideas which I want to address. With us Marines it was semper fidelis: always faithful. It was “ours is not to reason why, ours is but to do or die.”
I boarded the chopper with the Marine grunts bound for Tho An, having virtually begged to go on the mission, and joined the line of Headquarters Platoon, F/2/7, as we approached the village. I already had my bayonet out of its scabbard and was sliding its ring over the flash suppressor on my M14 rifle to engage the bayonet lug when Captain Love, the “F” company commander, a few paces in front of me, turned around to check on the new guys who had been attached to his company for this operation, saw me fixing my bayonet, and said “That’s it, that’s what I like, gimme some steel on the end of it.”
I was there because of my faith: faith in that confusing entity variously known as God, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit; in my country, and in the United States Marine Corps. Sure, I was nervous and afraid. The firing had already begun in the village, not many paces in front of us. I had been a Marine for 3½ years, but that meant nothing if I did not perform as a Marine today, my first time directly under fire. I was ready to fight. I wanted to hold up my end of the Great Bargain.
The night before, I had prayed as I always did, with that truncated childhood prayer I used because it was the only prayer I knew: “...if I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take....” It wasn’t much, but I hoped it would make up the difference between my own level of personal courage and whatever might be required of me this day. And of course to get me into heaven if I died. That was what prayers were for, right?
A few hours later, after the long moments with the screaming baby boy and the screaming mothers and the silent old man with his stare of hatred and after the firefight when I was ordered to move up([8]) because I had the only automatic rifle in the group, and to stand alone in the open and cover the other Marines as they pulled back, that cloak of faith had already begun to slip from my shoulders. Not because of fear, but because my experiences were showing me that faith wasn’t working.
The cloak of faith would continue to slip for the rest of my tour. The burst of rounds from an automatic weapon that snapped past my ears – they were close enough to hit one man standing nearby, and to puncture at least one of the canteens held by a Marine standing near me at the well – had contributed to my loss of faith. So, earlier in the year, had my failure to get a medevac chopper to the desperate platoon when my efforts had been met with an accusing “You’re too late,” meaning we had lost a man, and his buddy the radio operator blamed me.
My faith would take an especially big hit two months after Tho An during the night-long mutual slaughter between Staff Sergeant Jimmie Earl Howard’s 18 Recon Marines([9]) and two battalions of NVA, a few kilometers from our base at Chu Lai. I had the midnight-0400 watch in the DASC that June night. We helped coordinate helicopter and fixed wing air support for Howard’s men. When I stepped outside our radio shack shortly after four in the morning, I saw flares and tracers from the firefight off to the west, still at its height.
One man standing near me at the well in Tho An had been hit; I had not. Some people find Jesus, or some other holy being, in combat. Others, even in the same group, have that connection violently and forever severed. I was among the latter. The 23-year-old who had prayed his final childhood prayer the night before looked around for his Christian God during the firing at the well and saw that such a being either did not exist or was very, very far away. This was because I was doing something which I suddenly saw to be wrenchingly, brutally wrong, while acting precisely on my values as a Christian, a patriot, and a United States Marine.
[1] I audited a course in ancient Greek language in graduate school at University of California, Santa Cruz, so I could follow translations of some of the classics, especially Homer and Plato, in the original Greek. During the 10-year Trojan War, at least once when the warriors were taking a break from the fighting, they did so by having athletic contests, including boxing and wrestling. In the Greek, there was hardly a distinction between “warrior” and “athlete.” Soldiers have always come from among athletes.In Vietnam, we played football at my outfit in Chu Lai.
[2] See above, p. 102.
[3] See “Child Soldiers: The New Faces of War,” by P.W. Singer. http://www.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/issues/winter05-06/singer.htm; also Council on Foreign Relations, “Child Soldiers Around the World,” http://www.cfr.org/publications/9331/ by Eben Kaplan
[4] P.W. Singer, Children at War, Pantheon, 2005. Singer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, cites such references as UNICEF and Human Rights Watch reports, John Keegan’s A History of Warfare (New York: Knopf, 1993), etc.
[5] Ibid., p. 20.
[6] The youngest U.S. soldier on record as having been killed in Vietnam was 15. His name was Dan Bullock. The Website for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (“The Wall”) (http://thewall-usa.com) in Washington, D.C. says that 5 Americans aged 16 were killed there, and 12 aged 17. The same site says that more than 25,000 aged 20 or under were killed in that war.
[7] P.W. Singer, Children at War. University of California Press, 2006; p. 24.
[8] Actually, I wasn’t directly ordered to move up. In those days before 1st MarDiv units in my area were issued M16s, one man from each infantry squad would be issued a selector for his M14, and be designated that squad’s automatic rifleman. As far as I knew, neither Captain Love nor the First Sergeant who had just now called for an automatic rifleman to move up knew that I, a stranger to their company as of that morning, had the selector on my rifle. Since the detail was a pickup group of guys who had volunteered to return to the well for water, no provision had been made to include specific weapons in the group, because Tho An was considered secured. No matter. The order applied to me because I had a selector, and if nobody else present knew this, I did.
[9] Actually there were 16 Marines including Howard, and two Navy Medical Corpsmen. That night, they were all Marines. See Wikipedia, “Jimmie E. Howard.”
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