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

neutral you help one side or the other, because withholding help is helping the other side win. By not helping one side or the other, you influence the outcome.Jesus put this very succinctly when he said, “He that is not with me is against me.” 18
    Having chosen a side, we cannot do so thinking we are knights in shining armor. As I have clearly indicated, I supported the decision to go to war to kill or capture Osama bin Laden and remove Saddam Hussein from power. What scares me is the attitude we chose to do this with. And I mean we. There was just as much self-righteous knight-in-shining-armor idiocy going on with those opposed to the Iraq war as with those who supported it. Going on a crusade to eliminate evil, whether you think it is Saddam Hussein and his Baathist cronies or George Bush and his oil cronies, is very different from reluctantly and sadly eliminating evil because it is a loathsome task that a conscientious person sometimes has to do. When the dog gets rabies it is a sad event, especially for the dog, yet the dog still must be killed. Killing the dog and crowing about it on TV is wrong. So is calling the man who put the dog down an animal hater and picketing his front lawn. Being a knight in shining armor only results in our unrecognized dark side roaring out of control. Donald Sandner puts it as follows: “If man is to sacrifice the intensity of his animal nature he must also sacrifice his divine pretensions.” 19 A warrior must try his or her best to be on the “right” side but shouldn’t naively expect to choose wisely all the time. None of us, from the president on down, has complete information. Even if we did have it, how many of us are able to step outside our upbringing and bring only clear intellect, devoid of cultural prejudices, to bearon the decision. Any cause, no matter how well intentioned, may indeed be in vain. Think of the noble fighters in the communist revolution in Russia, the early Baathists in Iraq, the wonderful humans who fought for the Confederacy. Think of the difference between a young German who went to war for his fatherland and another young German who went to war to rise in rank and power in the new Reich. Although both lived to see their cause exposed as a lie, the former has far less to deal with than the latter.
    There is no foolproof formula for choosing the right side; there are only guidelines. The warrior operates in extreme zones. The more removed a situation like combat gets from everyday life, the less applicable the guidelines get. This is why we must rely so much on character rather than rules when discussing and experiencing extreme situations like war.
    Warriors will always have to deal with guilt and mourning. It is unfortunate that the guilt and mourning reside almost entirely with those asked to do the dirty work. Choosing to fight for the right reasons can assuage this guilt. Mourning can lessen it. But all warriors or erstwhile warriors will need to understand that, just like rucksack, ammunition, water, and food, guilt and mourning will be among the things they carry. They will shoulder it all for the society they fight for.

4
NUMBNESS AND
VIOLENCE
     
The ethical warrior must avoid getting crushed between falling in love with the power and thrill of destruction and death dealing and falling into numbness to the horror. Numbness is learned in our society from an early age. The numbness protects us. We want it. The warrior of the future, however, will have to break away from the conditioned numbness, opening up to all the pain, and at the same time recognize the danger of opening up to the rapture of violent transcendence
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    I have a friend who was a Navy A-4 pilot with two carrier tours bombing North Vietnam. These were some of the toughest bombing assignments ever experienced in the history of air warfare. Combine these missions with night landings on a tossing carrier deck and you begin to appreciate that, truly, these pilots were brave