LIFE AND DEATH

In 1992 I decided I wanted to hunt again, after many years of not being around weapons. But the thought of firing a high powered rifle at a deer or elk still made me queasy. The local archery range was a wonderful system of trails through a forest of redwoods and manzanita brush a short distance from Santa Cruz. My friend Walter Smith and I spent long hours there, and my boyhood love of archery was rekindled.

     That fall Larry Yien and I went for an archery elk hunt on a ranch in the Colorado Rockies. One morning we were out of our tents and in the woods before daylight, and split up to hunt separately. As the Eastern sky took its time going from starry dark to faint light, I crested a gradual rise and stopped to be quiet and listen and look.

   As the light became lighter, the fir branches surrounding me visibly drooped with dewdrops. As the first orange sliver of sun pushed its tiny arc above the mountain to the East, a dewdrop in front of my nose caught that sunlight and became a rainbow that for a long moment occupied my entire vision. Awake now, and having just been taught by the world around me to notice such a thing, that world exploded quietly, with a patience that moved slowly yet wasted no instant, into a galaxy of rainbows refracted in the dewdrops. 

     This stuff happens to me all the time; the world just flat knocks my socks off. And anything that birds do – especially flight – amazes me. Pelicans circling with one eye on the water, then diving for dinner in a collapse of wings, a comically ungainly splash and a struggling takeoff, or flying in V formation along the California coast, never fail to remind me of Robinson Jeffers’ line in his poem “Boats in a Fog” about watching a file of fishing boats bucking waves and wind offshore: “...a flight of pelicans/ is nothing lovelier to look at...” Or Canada geese, in Oregon where I live now. A few years ago Kit and Kim Phelps hired me to build a small addition to the old farmhouse on their place. One wintry evening I was working alone on the roof, trying to get the plywood sheathing in place before dark. It had been raining off and on all day. With the quick temperature changes we’re used to in that place, sometimes the surface of the plywood would turn icy as I was nailing it in place. Timm Turrentine, my friend and helper, was sick that day, but I was almost done. Just a couple more sheets...

     In the last light of day, the western sky did what it often does there in the open spaces around Lostine: it burned. With the urgency of getting the roof covered before dark, and getting out of my freezing coveralls, I wasn’t in the mood to pay attention to the sky.

     Neither was the sky in a mood to ignore me. Clouds in bulbous, tubular streams stretched from the southern to the northern horizon, then flamed pink, orange, red, purple, charcoal, against the azure-going-to-indigo sky. The scene gave me a shiver that was not from cold.

     Then I heard them, coming out of the sunset: a V of Canada geese, forced close to the ground by low clouds, were headed straight for me, kneeling there on the roof. Okay, some things you can ignore, some you can’t. They barely cleared the ridge of the roof I was working on. As they passed a few feet above me I watched individual feathers on their wings move. I heard the sibilance of those feathers’ sliding across one another as they did the work of flight, against the very nearby symphony of their honking.

     The violent wonderment in the way I saw and heard the sky and the geese was a direct result, 40 years on, of another moment in Tho An, a couple of hours after the moment of the screaming baby boy and the old man’s hateful stare that ended my religion and all the other Big Ideas that made up the fabric of my life before that April day in 1966. That was the infinite moment when the burst of automatic fire went between those of us standing around the well, and I saw in a blinding lapse of my habitual stupidity (as in “young and stupid”) how easy it is to die, how lucky I was to still be alive, and how precious life is, every moment of every day.

     Religion was replaced, in that moment of my life, by a greater gift: a  love of life as we have it, from rainbows in dewdrops to geese in flight to simply breathing, walking, kissing.... 

      If you ask me, I traded up.      

     Since that change in the way I see things, Life is what matters: the blood and breath coursing through me, through other humans, through my dog and my friends’ horses and other creatures who live with us and by us. And just the living of it: working at something that serves life, such as providing food or shelter; playing music or playing with children, and of course loving. Not fighting. Loving.

   I don’t believe in anything else: no ism, no ology, just... life. Any idea which I see as tending towards life, I support. Any idea which I see as trying to pull humans towards conflict – especially in the name of any ism or “national interest” (which usually means defending some sort of economic interest), I oppose. Any idea that wants to put a weapon in the hands of young men, or boys, or young women, or girls, and assigns a human target to that young armed person, I oppose. The way I see it, all those ideas lean towards, or march towards, or sprint towards, Death.

     I take this stance as a warrior. I am not a pacifist. I would still fight – fiercely and well - to defend my wife, my friends, my neighbors. But our nation is now using wars in such a way as to increase the numbers of people who call us “the enemy,” along with the strength of their resolve to destroy us.

     For anyone who has read Sun Tzu’s 2,500-year-old (give or take)The Art of War, or who has studied martial arts for twenty-plus years as I have, our current politico-military posture in the world is just plain lousy military strategy. It robs us of our money, our blood, our youth, even of the vast reservoir of international good will which we (North) Americans owned after World War II. 

     As a warrior, I oppose it.

WE MEN, WE WARRIORS...

     A major portion of the human male spirit has been woefully, cruelly, out-of-balance for millenia. We all know men who would never think of reaching for a weapon to solve a problem, who simply work hard to support families, raise their kids as best they can, and go fishing on weekends if they’re lucky. But the world also knows many more who do, or have, reflexively resorted to force, or offered their persons to an armed group who used force. And force is the boss in human affairs. Force owns a terrible leverage: it magnifies itself until patently baseless arguments and ideas carry the day.     

     Another way of saying this is that it’s easier to destroy than to build. It takes months of sweaty work to build a house; to destroy it, all you have to do is light a fuse. Throughout history, men have been both builders and destroyers. Too often, the latter.

     When something dark and terrible and bloody happens - when a Lee Harvey Oswald or a Charles Manson or a 

Jeffrey Dahmer gets loose among us - we tend to call the deed and the doer "evil," shake our heads and say we don't understand, or analyze it under that heading, asking ourselves earnestly, Where does this evil come from, this way of being that is so foreign to us?

     Sure, there are evil people in the world, people who need to kill in order to satisfy something in themselves. But the body count accomplished by such people is paltry compared to that stacked up by organized armies of nations whose leaders, citizens, and soldiers thought they were doing good. And these people - that is, you and I and our parents and children and brothers and sisters and relatives and neighbors - think we are doing good, not in the three-quarter-hearted way a person holds an opinion about a politician or a style of dress or music, but with that deep spiritual conviction that is required in order for young men to stand up, fix bayonets, and walk into the firing.        

     Going to war is sometimes a necessity, for defenders. More often it is a choice, which we contort to make look like a necessity, as in the Tonkin Gulf “incident,” which was falsely made to look like it had been necessary, and which needlessly cost 4 million human lives, give or take.

     We men - we warriors - can and must make some other choice. If we are to do that, two things are required of us. 

     The first is that we must see our own natures and motives for what they are. This book is my attempt to do that, for myself. Others may or may not recognize parts of themselves, of their personal experiences, in my stories.

     The second is that we must tell true stories, without embellishment or self-censorship, so that boys and young men, and their parents, may know how terrible war is before they sign up for one, how little it has to do with the reasons governments give for going to war, or with the reasons we warriors give ourselves.     

     Evil isn't what we have to fear. It isn’t “terrorism,” or “communism,” or “al Queda,” or Osama bin Laden, or some other designated evil. Our definition of what is good is what we should fear, especially including our deepest  beliefs. 

     These are the beliefs and ideas we are willing to fight over. They are the beliefs and ideas which inspire us to send our sons - and now, some of our daughters - to war. They are the ones which cause us to be willing to trade the lives of kids barely out of high school for a piece of red, white, and blue cloth folded into a tidy triangle. 

     Those deep beliefs constitute the human mechanism which we use to slaughter our young. Doing this, we create committed and powerful enemies around the world, eager to do battle with a new generation of our youth.

     This set of deeply held beliefs about what is good-especially that deadly nexus of religion and patriotism - is what we should study until it breaks open to the light.

END

WHAT IS GOOD

     A major portion of the human male spirit has been woefully, cruelly, out-of-balance for millenia. We all know men who would never think of reaching for a weapon to solve a problem, who simply work hard to support families, raise their kids as best they can, and go fishing on weekends if they’re lucky. But the world also knows many more who do, or have, reflexively resorted to force, or offered their persons to an armed group who used force. And force is the boss in human affairs. Force owns a terrible leverage: it magnifies itself until patently baseless arguments and ideas carry the day.     

     Another way of saying this is that it’s easier to destroy than to build. It takes months of sweaty work to build a house; to destroy it, all you have to do is light a fuse. Throughout history, men have been both builders and destroyers. Too often, the latter.

     When something dark and terrible and bloody happens - when a Lee Harvey Oswald or a Charles Manson or a 

Jeffrey Dahmer gets loose among us - we tend to call the deed and the doer "evil," shake our heads and say we don't understand, or analyze it under that heading, asking ourselves earnestly, Where does this evil come from, this way of being that is so foreign to us?

     Sure, there are evil people in the world, people who need to kill in order to satisfy something in themselves. But the body count accomplished by such people is paltry compared to that stacked up by organized armies of nations whose leaders, citizens, and soldiers thought they were doing good. And these people - that is, you and I and our parents and children and brothers and sisters and relatives and neighbors - think we are doing good, not in the three-quarter-hearted way a person holds an opinion about a politician or a style of dress or music, but with that deep spiritual conviction that is required in order for young men to stand up, fix bayonets, and walk into the firing.        

     Going to war is sometimes a necessity, for defenders. More often it is a choice, which we contort to make look like a necessity, as in the Tonkin Gulf “incident,” which was falsely made to look like it had been necessary, and which needlessly cost 4 million human lives, give or take.

     We men - we warriors - can and must make some other choice. If we are to do that, two things are required of us. 

     The first is that we must see our own natures and motives for what they are. This book is my attempt to do that, for myself. Others may or may not recognize parts of themselves, of their personal experiences, in my stories.

     The second is that we must tell true stories, without embellishment or self-censorship, so that boys and young men, and their parents, may know how terrible war is before they sign up for one, how little it has to do with the reasons governments give for going to war, or with the reasons we warriors give ourselves.     

     Evil isn't what we have to fear. It isn’t “terrorism,” or “communism,” or “al Queda,” or Osama bin Laden, or some other designated evil. Our definition of what is good is what we should fear, especially including our deepest  beliefs. 

     These are the beliefs and ideas we are willing to fight over. They are the beliefs and ideas which inspire us to send our sons - and now, some of our daughters - to war. They are the ones which cause us to be willing to trade the lives of kids barely out of high school for a piece of red, white, and blue cloth folded into a tidy triangle. 

     Those deep beliefs constitute the human mechanism which we use to slaughter our young. Doing this, we create committed and powerful enemies around the world, eager to do battle with a new generation of our youth.

     This set of deeply held beliefs about what is good-especially that deadly nexus of religion and patriotism - is what we should study until it breaks open to the light.

END

I CHING TO POGO

     But governments always lie. Sure, that’s part of the picture. I spent a couple of decades of my life studying the lies of presidents and other politicians, especially concerning the mechanisms of our national security apparatus and the processes by which it leads us into armed conflicts. 

     Forty- plus years after I left Vietnam, and more than thirty years after that first NVA tank drove over the gate to the American Embassy in Saigon on April 30, 1975, and our nation had lost the war that we were always bound to lose, that is still not okay with me. So much needless and wrongful death is never in the past. To put it in a larger context, Nanking is never in the past. Leningrad and Treblinka, even Sand Creek and Wounded Knee and My Lai, are never in the past. People remember - families remember - as Muslims remember the crusades.

     So studying the great lies of my time – of the Kennedys, the Dulles brothers, Johnson, McNamara, the Rostows, the Bundys, the Lodges, Nixon and Kissinger - felt satisfying for a while, giving me someone to blame and avoiding the need to look in the mirror. But now I’m more interested in the rest of the picture, the part that’s “in front of our noses,” to paraphrase Orwell, but not really seen, because it’s so close. Having studied political thinkers from the I Ching to modern times, my favorite philosopher these days is Walt Kelly’s cartoon character Pogo the Possum: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

SOME STRANDS OF THE WEB

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(41). 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 

41 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.

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. In the early stages of my own involvement, I saw our silly, grotesque parade of boys and men burdened with our hardware of canvas and steel as being just another noble but tragic chapter in the march of human history, as I had seen it most intensely during the “Adeste Fidelis” march(42) in advanced infantry training at Camp Pendleton in 1962.


42 See earlier post, "Adeste Fidelis, Semper Fidelis," in Archive.

STRUCTURE OF THE WEB

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.

Paragraphs after the Wars

Paragraphs after the Wars (1)

     When something dark and terrible and bloody happens - when a Lee Harvey Oswald or a Charles Manson or a Jeffrey Dahmer gets loose among us - we tend to call the deed and the doer "evil," shake our heads and say we don't understand, or analyze it under that heading, asking ourselves earnestly, Where does this evil come from, this way of being that is so foreign to us?

     Sure, there are evil people in the world, people who need to kill in order to satisfy something in themselves. But the body count accomplished by such people is paltry compared to that stacked up by organized armies of nations whose leaders, citizens, and soldiers thought they were doing good. And these people - that is, you and I and our parents and children and brothers and sisters and relatives and neighbors - think we are doing good, not in the three-quarter-hearted way a person holds an opinion about a politician or a style of dress or music, but with that deep spiritual conviction that is required in order for young men to stand up, fix bayonets, and walk into the firing.       

     Going to war is sometimes a necessity, for defenders. More often it is a choice, which we contort to make look like a necessity, as in the Tonkin Gulf “incident,” which was falsely made to look like it had been necessary, and which needlessly cost 4 million human lives, give or take.

     We men - we warriors - can and must make some other choice. If we are to do that, two things are required of us.

     The first is that we must see our own natures and motives for what they are. This book is my attempt to do that, for myself. Others may or may not recognize parts of themselves, of their personal experiences, in my stories.

     The second is that we must tell true stories, without embellishment or self-censorship, so that boys and young men, and their parents, may know how terrible war is before they sign up for one, how little it has to do with the reasons governments give for going to war, or with the reasons we warriors give ourselves.    

     Evil isn't what we have to fear. It isn’t “terrorism,” or “communism,” or “al Queda,” or Osama bin Laden, or some other conveniently assigned evil. Our definition of what is good is what we should fear, especially including our deepest religious and political beliefs.

     These are the ones we are willing to fight over, the ones which inspire us the to send our sons - and now, some of our daughters--to war over. They are the ones which cause us to be willing to trade the lives of kids barely out of high school for a piece of red, white, and blue cloth folded into a tidy triangle.

     Those deep beliefs constitute the human mechanism which we use to slaughter our young. Doing this, we create committed and powerful enemies around the world, eager to do battle with a new generation of our youth.

     This set of deeply held beliefs about what is good-especially religion and patriotism-is what we should study until it breaks open to the light.

END

THE WEB (CONCLUSION): A GREATER GIFT

     In 1992 I decided I wanted to hunt again, after many years of not being around weapons. But the thought of firing a high powered rifle at a deer or elk still made me queasy. The local archery range was a wonderful system of trails through a forest of redwoods and manzanita brush a short distance from Santa Cruz. My friend Walter Smith and I spent long hours there, and my boyhood love of archery was rekindled.

     That fall Larry Yien and I went for an archery elk hunt on a ranch in the Colorado Rockies. One morning we were out of our tents and in the woods before daylight, and split up to hunt separately. As the Eastern sky took its time going from starry dark to faint light, I crested a gradual rise and stopped to be quiet and listen and look.

     As the light became lighter, the fir branches surrounding me visibly drooped with dewdrops. As the first orange sliver of sun pushed its tiny arc above the mountain to the East, a dewdrop in front of my nose caught that sunlight and became a rainbow that for a long moment occupied my entire vision. Awake now, and having just been taught by the world around me to notice such a thing, that world exploded quietly, with a patience that moved slowly yet wasted no instant, into a galaxy of rainbows refracted in dewdrops.

     This stuff happens to me all the time; the world just flat knocks my socks off. And anything that birds do – especially flight – amazes me. Pelicans circling with one eye on the water, then diving for dinner in a collapse of wings, a comically ungainly splash and a struggling takeoff, or flying in V formation along the California coast, never fail to remind me of Robinson Jeffers’ line in his poem “Boats in a Fog” about watching a file of fishing boats bucking waves and wind offshore: “...a flight of pelicans/ is nothing lovelier to look at...” Or Canada geese, in Oregon where I live now. A few years ago Kit and Kim Phelps hired me to build a small addition to the old farmhouse on their place. One wintry evening I was working alone on the roof, trying to get the plywood sheathing in place before dark. It had been raining off and on all day. With the quick temperature changes we’re used to in that place, sometimes the surface of the plywood would turn icy as I was nailing it in place. Timm Turrentine, my friend and helper, was sick that day, but I was almost done. Just a couple more sheets...

     In the last light of day, the western sky did what it often does there in the open spaces around Lostine: it burned. With the urgency of getting the roof covered before dark, and getting out of my freezing coveralls, I wasn’t in the mood to pay attention to the sky.

     Neither was the sky in a mood to ignore me. Clouds in bulbous, tubular streams stretched from the southern to the northern horizon, then flamed pink, orange, red, purple, charcoal, against the azure-going-to-indigo sky. The scene gave me a shiver that was not from cold.

     Then I heard them, coming out of the sunset: a V of Canada geese, forced close to the ground by low clouds, were headed straight for me, kneeling there on the roof. Okay, some things you can ignore, some you can’t. They barely cleared the ridge of the roof I was working on. As they passed a few feet above me I watched individual feathers on their wings move. I heard the sibilance of those feathers’ sliding across one another as they did the work of flight, against the very nearby symphony of their honking.

     The violent wonderment in the way I saw and heard the sky and the geese was a direct result, 40 years on, of another moment in Tho An, a couple of hours after the moment of the screaming baby boy and the old man’s hateful stare that ended my religion and all the other Big Ideas that made up the fabric of my life before that April day in 1966. That was the infinite moment when the burst of automatic fire went between those of us standing around the well, and I saw in a blinding lapse of my habitual stupidity how easy it is to die, how lucky I was to still be alive, and how precious life is, every moment of every day.

     Religion, in my life, was replaced by a greater gift: an appreciation of life as we have it, from rainbows in dewdrops to geese in flight to simply breathing, walking, kissing.... if you ask me, I traded up.     

     Since that change in the way I see things, Life is what matters: the blood and breath coursing through me, through other humans, through my dog and my friends’ horses and other creatures who live with us and by us. And just the living of it: working at something that serves life, such as providing food or shelter; playing music or playing with children, and of course loving. Not fighting. Loving.

     I don’t believe in anything else: no ism, no ology, just... life. Any idea which I see as tending towards life, I support. Any idea which I see as trying to pull humans towards conflict – especially in the name of any ism or “national interest” (which usually means defending some sort of economic interest), I oppose. Any idea that wants to put a weapon in the hands of young men, or boys, or young women, or girls, and assigns a human target to that young armed person, I oppose. The way I see it, all those ideas lean towards, or march towards, or sprint towards, death.

     I take this stance as a warrior. I am not a pacifist. I would still fight – fiercely and well - to defend my wife, my friends, my neighbors. But our nation is now using wars in such a way as to increase the numbers of people who call us “the enemy,” along with the strength of their resolve to destroy us.

     For anyone who has read Sun Tzu’s 2,500-year-old (give or take)The Art of War, or who has studied martial arts for twenty years as I have, our current politico-military posture in the world is just plain lousy military strategy. It robs us of our money, our blood, our youth, even of the vast reservoir of international good will which we (North) Americans owned after World War II.

     As a warrior, I oppose it.

     Recently I was re-reading “The Good Old Days: The Holocaust as Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders.”([1]) The book's title is a phrase handwritten into the photo album of one Kurt Franz, from his days as deputy commandant, then commandant, of the Nazi extermination camp at Treblinka.

     The book contains reproductions of a number of black and white photographs, from Treblinka and other camps and execution sites. Many are so grainy and badly focused as to show very little. Yet they show everything: Jewish women being forced to undress before the eyes of their captors, trying to cover their nakedness with their hands, being shot, lying dead in crumpled piles as the few only wounded by the first volley are finished off by a soldier standing among them with a submachine gun.

     As I turned the pages, one of the pictures([2]) stopped me. I shuddered. The shudder settled in my stomach and became a vague nausea, a physical feeling of dread. This photo shows a single soldier, his rifle slung underarm, guarding a cluster of Latvian Jews who have been gathered for execution. The photograph is too grainy to be sure, but the prisoners look to be all women and children.

     That photo isn't nearly so horrible as some of the others in the book.

     What caused the physical nausea in me was not so much the ill-focused image of the women who were seated on the ground, with their children, who would all be shot minutes after the picture was taken.

     It was the angle at which the rifle of the soldier guarding them hung under his arm. It was the same as the angle of my M14 rifle as I guarded the women and children and one old man near the village well at Tho An. The angle was the same for a simple reason: both of us soldiers had our rifles slung underarm with the muzzles down, which soldiers often do to keep the rifle’s action and trigger ready to hand.

     It's especially convenient when we’re guarding people who are sitting on the ground.

     The awful click in my mind when I noticed the angle of that soldier's rifle (I don't know whether he was a Latvian policeman collaborating with the Nazis, or a German soldier), while it proves nothing, can point to a whole hidden universe, or at least did for me.                                

     That hidden universe is the continuum of male violence. I've seen that continuum in things I've done and witnessed, from shooting the robin as a boy with my bow and arrow, to my need to become adept with guns, to be a hunter as the men I knew were hunters, to the fun-seeking scrappiness of the "townies" I nearly tangled with in Colorado Springs, to my readiness to "kill at least one” of them, to the spark of agreement that arced around our circle of Marines' faces at Chu Lai when one said, "I'd sure like to kill just one gook before I leave this fucking place," to the beatings by angry husbands and fathers of the women and children I met at the battered women's shelter where one little girl asked her sister if I was going to hit them, to the gleam in the eye of an American mercenary in Central America as he told his story of “reloading face to face,” to superpower-induced guerrilla warfare in Central America.

     A major portion of the human male spirit has been woefully, cruelly, out-of-balance for millenia. We all know men who would never think of reaching for a weapon to solve a problem, who simply work hard to support families, raise their kids as best they can, and go fishing on weekends if they’re lucky. But the world also knows many more who do, or have, reflexively resorted to force, or offered their persons to an armed group who used force. And force is the boss in human affairs. Force owns a terrible leverage: it magnifies itself until patently baseless arguments and ideas carry the day.    

     Another way of saying this is that it’s easier to destroy than to build. It takes months of sweaty work to build a house; to destroy it, all you have to do is light a fuse. Throughout history, men have been both builders and destroyers. Too often, the latter.

     When something dark and terrible and bloody happens - when a Lee Harvey Oswald or a Charles Manson or a Jeffrey Dahmer gets loose among us - we tend to call the deed and the doer "evil," shake our heads and say we don't understand, or analyze it under that heading, asking ourselves earnestly, Where does this evil come from, this way of being that is so foreign to us?

     Sure, there are evil people in the world, people who need to kill in order to satisfy something in themselves. But the body count accomplished by such people is paltry compared to that stacked up by organized armies of nations whose leaders, citizens, and soldiers thought they were doing good. And these people - that is, you and I and our parents and children and brothers and sisters and relatives and neighbors - think we are doing good, not in the three-quarter-hearted way a person holds an opinion about a politician or a style of dress or music, but with that deep spiritual conviction that is required in order for young men to stand up, fix bayonets, and walk into the firing.       

     Going to war is sometimes a necessity, for defenders. More often it is a choice, which we contort to make look like a necessity, as in Tonkin/Vietnam.

     We men - we warriors - can and must make some other choice. If we are to do that, two things are required of us.

     The first is that we must see our own natures and motives for what they are. This book is my attempt to do that, for myself. Others may or may not recognize parts of themselves, of their personal experiences, in my stories.

     The second is that we must tell true stories, without embellishment or self-censorship, so that boys and young men, and their parents, may know how terrible war is before they sign up for one, how little it has to do with reasons governments give for going to war, or with the reasons we warriors give ourselves.    

     Evil isn't what we have to fear. Our definition of what is good is what we should fear, and should study until it breaks open to the light.

                                                  END                                                     

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[1] Edited by Ernst Klee, Willi Dressen, and Volker Riess. The Free Press, a division of Macmillan Inc. Translation by Deborah Burnstone, 1991.

[2] Ibid., p. 130.

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.