THE WEB part 3: FAITH AND FIGHTING

When I threw my weapons and 782 gear on the truck to leave Chu Lai in August of that year (1966), I was a troubled, angry, and nearly faithless young man. By the end of the year, some months into my intensive studies at Colorado College, I was a “born again atheist,” a state of mind and heart that had begun to exist while guarding the  women and children and the old man at the well in Tho An earlier in the year. I’m still an atheist. Of the many instances of phenomenal luck that have allowed me to survive being both a combatant and a journalist in the Vietnam War, hitchhiking up the Mekong through Cambodia and Laos at the height of that war, through some close calls at sea aboard fishing boats, and later in construction work, as well as some dicey journalism situations in Central America, that day in Tho An was the luckiest of my sweet life. Not because I escaped death – that’s happened many times - but because of what I learned.                                           

     More importantly, because of what I unlearned.

    

     Since those days, when I see a public appearance by anyone in garb

intended to impress people with the sacred, therefore exalted, therefore authoritative, status of the wearer - I call them “long robes and funny hats” - the cynic in me says, “Okay, here comes the bullshit.”

     I am a cynic, but of a certain ilk.

     I get itchy and edgy whenever anyone talks about “pride.” I feel that way when I’m in the bank parking lot in my home town in northeast Oregon surrounded by the red, white, and blue bumper stickers handed out as freebies by the bank that say “Proud to be an American.”

     Don’t get me wrong. I’m okay with being American. I love the stubbornness of our independence, our rascality, the creativeness that has given the world jazz, Motown, and Elvis; some great and many pretty good movies, some great and a lot of good literature, Walt Disney cartoons([1]). I especially love that shining gift our people gave to the world, the United States Constitution. I love and am inordinately proud of the circumstances of the American Revolution, and the Declaration of Independence and other events in the desperate time which birthed that Constitution. Every year on November 10^th, I celebrate the Marine Corps Birthday with a few buddies, in person or by email. Some of these guys I would die for, at the drop of a hat. We often combine that day with the next, Veterans’ Day. We thank entities from Jesus Christ to “shit-house luck” for the fact that we are still alive.

     I, of course, am in the latter group. The guys all allow me that; some agree with me and some disagree, with varying degrees of stridency, regarding questions of patriotism and religion. This is done with the same respect with which I allow some of them their continued belief in Jesus Christ: we all came by, or solidified, our deepest beliefs under the gun.

     In the presence of public patriotic celebrations, I get uncomfortable if there is more than one flag, or if it’s deliberately oversized; if the speakers’ voices seem overwrought with too much sincerity, or use too many over-generalized phrases that draw an ideological line in the sand between “us” and “them.”

     And I become downright angry when a speaker, especially a public official or clergyman, extols faith as something to sustain our soldiers in combat.

     Faith is what we use to take up the slack between what we know and what we hope for, or what we wish were the case. Or what we pray for. Of all the emotions along the spectrum from the most sincere to the patently phony, which constitute the fabric of human feelings and beliefs we use to send young men – and, now, young women – to war, faith is the killingest.

     Having viewed what we humans do for 40 years now from outside religion, what I see when organized religion is at play is people telling one another what to do: how to behave, whom to obey, whom to love and whom not to love, whom to hate, and whom to kill - all by claiming to speak for a higher power that is unimpeachable, yet at the same time non-specific. For me religion became like a greased pig at a carnival: impossible to get ahold of.

     Since no one, in my view, has ever seen the God who is the source of these commandments, it falls to God’s messengers to do the heavy lifting. To me, those people are nothing more than an ancient but ever-renewing parade of older males in long robes and funny hats who claim to have been sent by God, and to have been told by God how to instruct the lesser humans below them: do this, don’t do that. Pray. Obey. Do what I say, because God, or this or that Holy Book, told me to tell you to do so.

     I don’t believe any of that. But what continues to astonish me is that so many people do believe it, in the face of so much evidence in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that the people we fight against are inspired by, commanded by, driven by, ideas which are nearly interchangeable with ours. Not mine any longer, but ours.

     Here I can’t help but note that Abraham, the religious patriarch featured in the Kierkegaard essay “Fear and Trembling”, is regarded as a prophet by Christianity, Islam, and Judaism: the very people who are now killing one another with such conviction in the Middle East. Kierkegaard’s essay is the one which got me in such hot water with J. Glenn Gray (see above, pp. 298-305), when I was so angered by Abraham’s being prepared to sacrifice his son because God told him to, and by Professor Gray’s use of the word “sublime” to describe Abraham’s faith. I even wrote my own version of Genesis, Chapter 22, where God commanded Abraham to kill his son: “And Abraham raised both fists to the heavens, middle fingers extended, whence had come the voice of God, and screamed at the sky: ‘FU-UUUCK YOU! What kind of god would command a man to kill his own son? C’mon, Isaac. Let’s go home.’”

     I downloaded from the Web a photo of the belt buckle worn by Wehrmacht soldiers in WWII. It has an eagle perched on a swastika, and the by now well-known motto GOTT MIT UNS: GOD IS WITH US. Hitler’s soldiers, the perpetrators of the Siege of Leningrad, of Treblinka, of Sobibor, of Babii Yar, of Auschwitz-Birkenau and Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald – were praying to the same god our soldiers prayed to.

     The same God I prayed to, the night before I entered Tho An with “F” Company, 2^nd Battalion, 7^th Marines. The same god about whose loyalties Steve McLaughlin and I had been so confused as we listened again and again to Joan Baez sing Bob Dylan’s song “With God on Our Side.”

    

     We need to look at how we look at things.

     Combat is specific. It is excruciatingly specific. But faith is nonspecific. The moment a bullet or an explosive device rends tissue and separates life from death in a young person is the moment when, in this so-common human event, the specific and the general diverge, and somebody dies.

     The bullet is not aware. It has no faith, is not directed or deflected by faith. It goes where it goes. The bullets that snapped past me on April 19^th, 1966, did not know or care where they were going. I simply happened to be standing in a lucky, rather than unlucky, place. That’s all there is to it.

     But faith is general: “The Lord will protect us.” “God’s will be done.” “Masha’allah (God has willed it)”. “There is a divine purpose....” Or that most general of all: “The Lord moves in mysterious ways.”

     Well. Bullshit. All that means to this very lucky veteran is that we don’t know what the hell we’re doing, and we try to bridge the gap between reality and what we know of that reality with phrases that we cling to in desperate, willful ignorance, in the absence of knowing what we’re doing.

     It happens with 23-year-old individuals (and now, in some armies, with 8-year-olds), with squads, platoons, companies, nations, alliances... it is how humans have done business for these millenia.

     It is how history has been built.

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[1] Upon arrival in Managua, Nicaragua, in October 1983, I caught a ride into the city from the airport on the back of a flatbed pickup driven by some Sandinista teenagers. I noticed as I climbed aboard the truck that it had Bugs Bunny mudflaps. The boys’ antics as we drove through the city seemed to have more in common with the mudflaps than with either side in the 4-year-old war between the fledgling Sandinista government and the Reagan-backed contras.