Recently, I’ve been reading one of the most important books I will likely ever read. I’d say I have almost finished it–only a few pages left–but I suspect I’ll be reading portions of Karl Marlantes’ What It Is Like To Go To War (Grove Press, 2011) for years to come (or at least however many “reading years” I have left).
In recent years, mental health professionals have identified another dimension in the PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) symptoms of combat veterans they’ve been treating. They call it “moral injury,” which manifests in characteristics of “guilt” and/or “shame,” as much as “fear.”
And Marlantes’ book is being termed a “classic” in its description and interpretation of such “moral injury.”
Karl Marlantes is a veteran of the Vietnam war. Upon graduating from Yale University, he was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University in England while also having been commissioned a Second Lieutenant in the United States Marines.
Interrupting his studies at Oxford, Marlantes volunteered for active combat duty in Vietnam and subsequently became a highly decorated veteran of that war–having been wounded on both the outside and inside of his young life–both physically, as well as emotionally, morally and spiritually.
While What It Is Like To Go To War offers a remarkable first-hand (“worm’s eye” vs. “bird’s eye”) view of the horror of military combat, it also interprets the experience from the perspective of Jungian psychology, assorted ancient ethnic/tribal rituals and the ethics of various religious and cultural traditions, including Marlantes’ own kind of Christianity.
I was particularly taken by a portion of a chapter in the book entitled “Loyalty”–enough at least to want to share it in this, my weekly blog. Perhaps my reason for being so “taken” is because, of my few virtues, one at least is “loyalty”–to, I suspect, a fault.
Here are some of Karl Marlantes’ observations on the subject, written in and out of the terror he experienced as a young lieutenant in Vietnam. He writes:
“It is easier to disobey orders in some systems than in others. This doesn’t change the morality, but it changes the anguish and the cost. Anguish and cost are significant factors in making moral decisions. We agree that to kill is wrong. Yet most would agree that to kill someone who is torturing you is right. The difference is the anguish of the person being tortured.
In nations such a Baathist Iraq or Nazi Germany, the consequences of disobeying orders were extreme, like death by torture . . . not only for the individual, but for his family . . . Identical moral choices can require far more personal courage in some instances than in others . . . .
An individual in the military service of a Western democracy has considerable freedom to disobey orders. Non-military people will be surprised at how often, particularly in combat, you can work things around . . . you can make a mistake . . . not understand . . . lose communication. You can even tell the idiot that you think he’s an ass, you won’t obey his stupid order, and you want a transfer. There are very few officers who want to have the question of whether or not they are stupid asses debated in a court martial.
Even in circumstances where I could have very likely escaped punishment, however, I followed the ‘stupid’ order. I even did it in circumstances where any possible punishment later compared with what I was being asked to do now looked trivial. Surely the risk of death through a court martial in 1968 was nearly non-existent, compared with the extremely high risk of death through assaulting a hill. Why did I follow patently stupid orders to my own detriment and the detriment of my men? To whom or what did I give my loyalty? Obviously, it wasn’t to my own men. They would pay as dearly as I would. Nor was it to myself, because good lieutenants in battle have even higher casualty rates than their men.
. . . my loyalty was to the mythic/historic/psychological projection called ‘the unit.’ It has a thousand specific names. It’s the Marine Corps, the Legion, the 82nd Airborne, the Gordon Highlanders, the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry. It’s all those flags, all that history, all that dying. We’d like to make it something simple, like an internalized parent whom we are used to obeying. Certainly, this is part of it, but it is far more than that. Ignoring this mythic/historic/psychological projection ignores reality. You know that tens of thousands of people before you have listened to thousands of similar asses and still gotten the job done. You would be letting down all those bighearted ghosts who waded in and did the job in spite of the idiots. Because of them we alter our actions. Those ghosts are as real as the hill.
A warrior must learn to recognize that this intense feeling of loyalty to the unit comes from the warrior’s own psyche and nowhere else. What actually exists, physically, is mud, fire, mangled corpses and anxious, frightened people. He must also learn that individuality must not be suppressed, even though individual action is subordinated. One is very vulnerable when joining the unit, whether military, corporate, charitable or governmental, voluntarily surrendering individuality to a greater ideal and feeling wonderful for it.
Eric Hoffer, in The True Believer, had this pegged decades ago. This surrender is intoxicating. The more history, glory and psychological resonance the unit has, the bigger you feel; the more glory, the more glorious. You don’t have to join the Foreign Legion to understand what I mean. Think of it as playing for the Yankees . . . not just a group of overpaid athletes on the field today . . . but Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle . . . titanic struggles against the Dodgers . . . all long gone, yet so real.
There’s a dark side to this surrender, however. You impair, and in some cases lose altogether, your ability to make sound judgments as an individual, whether in the mud of war with all those frightened kids around you or in the battle for corporate survival. You are more likely to engage in groupthink. You are far more likely to go along with bad assumptions . . . bad perceptions. The primary reason for this abandonment of the individual viewpoint is simply that with so much pain and grief gong on, who would want to make individual judgments? This would entail taking responsibility for the pain. I certainly never wanted to feel responsible for all the death, misery and destruction I was in fact responsible for in Vietnam. That would entail coming to terms with just exactly why I was doing what I was doing, and in my case, in Vietnam, this presented some very ugly facts.
We are generally delighted to be cogs.
Nor is this entirely bad. I doubt the great cathedrals of Europe would have been built if individuals hadn’t given up their individuality and made the enormous sacrifices those buildings required. I also doubt that Europeans, and certainly doubt that Americans, could today do the equivalent. And this isn’t all bad either.
Choosing when to surrender and when to stand alone is an art. There is no science about it, and unfortunately the military isn’t the greatest place to gain this sort of now-a-cog, now-not-a-cog wisdom. In fact, the military idealizes and strives to inculcate the surrender of individuality. It is equally tragic that too many of our national leaders are also the least experienced in living as individuals. The very essence of being a winning politician is to behave so that one’s actions are in accord with public opinion, the unit chosen by most politicians and precisely defined by their pollsters. There is an argument that by following the polls, politicians are only doing what the people want. It is after all a democracy. Where this breaks down is when the people want something stupid.
It is precisely because we have a choice about which unit to identify with that issues of loyalty and following orders cause such difficulties. This choice was at the heart of Nuremberg. Was your unit humanity, the German state, Aryans, the Gestapo? The more narrowly defined the unit, the more often one will get into situations of conflicting loyalties and murky ethical water. The smallest unit is the individual, and we’ve seen the consequences of this loyalty all too often, in business, politics and war.
To be effective and moral fighters, we must not lose our individuality, our ability to stand alone, and yet, at the same time, we must owe our allegiance not to ourselves alone, but to an entity so large as to be incomprehensible, namely humanity or God. As mere mortals who can’t grasp the incomprehensible, we limp along with allegiances to various stepped-down versions of the incomprehensible that seem to suit us, such as the Marine Corps, the family, France, the Baptist Church or the Order of the Eastern Star. We must strive, however, always to see these smaller entities as only pieces of the larger one we’ll never comprehend. That is because when the moment comes for a tough decision, we can make it in light of the larger ghosts, even if we are scared to death in the mud with all those frightened kids around us.”
