Free What it is Like to Go to War by Karl Marlantes Page A

but if they are not, there will still be less guilt if you kill for these wrong transpersonal reasons than if you kill for selfish ones. The more one kills for personal reasons, such as anger, revenge, fame, career, or political advancement, the heavier will be the guilt.
    While Campbell and the
Mahabharata
are certainly correct in saying that if we perform with a noble heart and dedicate our efforts to some higher good we minimize the suffering of guilt afterward, this unfortunately will not eliminate the suffering of mourning. Guilt is different from mourning.
    In virtually all warfare, other than a direct confrontation with terrorists or with totally uncoerced professional soldiers when there are no bystanders around, the warrior must understand that almost all those he kills, civilian or military, will probably not be there by their own choice. Even with that wonderful moment of absolution from Joseph Campbell, I still carry considerable emotion over killing conscripted young men ultimately no different from my own sons. But I have grown to understand that in the cases where I killed to help or save my fellow Marines I don’t feel guilty. I feel sad. The warrior of the future will simply have to take on this pain and perhaps realize before doing the killing that it will be a cost worth paying. Look at depictions of Abraham Lincoln’s face at the end of his presidency and you’ll get some idea of what I mean. I don’t think he felt guilty about fighting to save the Union or end slavery. He mourned the dreadful cost. If I were able to choose, I’d choose sadness over guilt.
    On the surface, Campbell’s and Krishna’s answers about having to act in the world of duality, into which you had no choice about being born, seem to let people off the moral hook. “Well,” one might say, “if it’s all just a cosmic game and a matter of chance where you end up fighting, then what the hell?” Once you understand this answer more deeply, however, rather than being let off the moral hook you end up with it firmly set in your mouth. That moral hook is conscious awareness. If it wasn’t something you were aware of previously, you have just now had the hook set. It will hurt. You now know that you are on one side and your enemy is on the other. You are conscious that you have a choice to make about killing that other person. You have to choose to do
something
. Even refusing to think deeply about it is choosing to do something. You must decideto pursue action with a noble heart or not. Doing nothing is an action. You can’t get out of this.
    I don’t know whether or not George Bush went to war with a noble heart. Only George knows. I do know that he knew, as did we all, there was a risk that a sick man with a lot of power and money could help destroy tens of thousands of Americans. Because he, and we, knew about the torture and rape cells, he had to choose whether or not to allow torture, rape, and horrible deaths to go unchecked. Whatever his true motives, it is clear that the president chose to do what the United Nations chose not to do. Those diplomats had the same problem he and all of us had, and I only hope they all took the problem seriously.
    I know that more than twenty people are dead directly as a result of my behavior, but the people they killed are dead too. Saying I was right and they were wrong, or vice versa, isn’t going to make me feel better, or their mothers and sisters, or the mothers and sisters of the ones they killed. I understand why Jesus said, “Let the dead bury their dead.” 17 It’s the future killing that counts now. All any of us can do is wrestle with our own noble and ignoble intentions so that when we are asked to consider life-and-death issues, we’ll do it honestly.
    In the divine play of opposites the warrior knows only one thing for certain, that a side must be chosen. Once a side is chosen, the actions have to be dedicated to what is beyond the world of opposites. Even by remaining