Why this book: Karl Marlantes is scheduled to speak at USD and though I will not be in town, I’ve strongly encouraged several friends to read the book and attend his remarks.  I hope to discuss the book and his remarks when I meet with my friends afterward.  This was my second time reading this book.

Summary in 3 Sentences: In the mid 1960s, Karl Marlantes was a 2nd Lt in the Marine Corps at Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship, when he chose to leave Oxford early and go to Vietnam, even though he strongly disagreed with the war.  The book is his effort 40 years later, to come to terms with the psychological, physical, moral, spiritual trauma that his experiences in Vietnam had on him.  He draws on psychology, anthropology, philosophy, religion, the classics to help him extrapolate from his own experience generalizations about man’s experience in war. He argues that war fulfills fundamental human needs of men and women, and that if we are to seek more constructive/less horrifying ways to fulfill those needs, we need to look at and recognize what it is about human nature that can find war so appealing.

My impressions: While on first blush this book is about war and combat, in reviewing it again, I realize that it is really about life – all of our lives – not just military men in combat.  Marlantes’ bigger message is that combat gives us in a very primal context, many of the same challenges that we face in every day life, but which we often don’t recognized because our every day context is “routine,” while combat  is extraordinarily intense, and the stakes are very high.    Every day each of us faces decisions in which our values are challenged by expediency or what feels right at the time.   If we look closely at  his stories of  high-intensity, high-stakes combat, we see Marlantes shining a light on challenges we all face.  There is much wisdom in this book – not just for warriors.

In league with The Warriors, by J. Glenn Gray (about WW2) and War by Sebastian Junger (about Afghanistan) What it is Like to Go to War is one of the finest books I’ve read that seeks to understand and explain man’s experience in war to a thoughtful reader.  All three of these books are by and about Americans at war; we should therefore be  cautious about drawing too many universal generalizations from them, but I’ve found each to be extremely insightful.   Of the three, I probably relate best to  What it is Like to Go to War, given that Marlantes is generally of my generation, and I spent much of my early adult years in the military trying to absorb and learn from seniors and elders, the lessons of the Vietnam War.

While I have been sent to “war,” and have been on operations where I was prepared to kill or to be killed, I never experienced the intensity of combat that Marlantes or many warriors did in Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan.  I prepared for combat for most of my adult life by intense training, and by reading first person accounts like this one – of how others have experienced and dealt with the fear, stress, horrors, and demands of war.   Marlantes’ book adds not just powerful personal stories, but also gut-wrenchingly honest self-criticism, and insightful philosophical, psychological and spiritual perspectives.

His chapter titles give you a sense for his approach.   Chapter titles such as Killing,  Guilt,  Numbness and Violence,  The Enemy Within,  Lying,  Heroism.  Each chapter draws insights from Marlantes’ own experiences, while also drawing from a wide range of other sources.   His final chapter Relating to Mars bookends his first chapter Temple of Mars, by distilling his key insights about men at war into lessons he believes can help us deal with the challenges we face in fighting today’s wars.

Much of this book is about helping the reader to understand how human nature reacts to the context of combat, and the struggles warriors have juxtaposing the values they have learned in civilized society with the horrors and demands of the battlefield.  In the dynamic interplay between environment and character in driving our behavior, he  emphasizes the power of the combat environment.   The brutality of combat is a strong force which naturally seeks to pull us into a world of amoral carnage and violence.  Marlantes argues that character must  resist the temptation to surrender to ruthless brutality and wanton killing, resist being pulled down into the primal brutality that characterizes so much of combat.   One of the key points of this book I thought was that the conscious, ethical warrior must be aware of this on-going  dynamic between context and character, and to do his best to reinforce character in this constant struggle.  But he has a lot of sympathy for how difficult this can be, sharing his own failings, and those of others.

In a section on atrocities, he shares how one man who he calls “Mike” surrendered to his inner rage and did horrible things to a prisoner.  He says, “I become very uncomfortable when I’m around people with a superior and self-righteous attitude – a conviction that they could never have done such a thing as Mike did.”  After showing some sympathy and understanding for what drove Mike to such cruelty, he says, “Still we can’t let the Mikes of the world off the hook…But when we punish, the correct attitude should be not self-righteousness but sorrow. There, but for the grace of God, go I.” 107

A constant theme throughout the book is that while we must own, understand, and embrace the warrior spirit in each of us,  we must do all we can to channel that power and energy in positive, civilization-enhancing directions.  If we deny and sublimate it,   as many guardians of civilization’s values would have us do, it emerges in often dark and unnecessarily violent ways, and we lose control of it.

“It is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we should grow too fond of it.”  Robert E. Lee

Quotes and Insights (page numbers from hardback edition printed 2011.  This list is rather long because I expect to refer to it regularly in reviewing the wisdom in this book.  I hope this rather extensive list of quotes may also serve you.)

Mystical or religious experience have four common components: constant awareness of one’s own inevitable death, total focus on the present moment, the valuing of other people’s lives above one’s own, and being part of a larger religious community….All four of these exist in combat.  The big difference is that the mystic sees heaven and the warrior sees hell.  7-8

In a combat situation you wake up from sleep instantly aware that this could be the last time you awake, simultaneously grateful you’re alive and scared shitless because you are still in the same situation.  17

What I’m arguing is that the chances of transformative psychological experiences are decreased enormously when you wage war with all the comforts of home. 19

There is a very primal side to me. I suspect we all have this, but are so afraid of it that we prefer to deny its existence.  This denial is more dangerous than acceptance because the “Killer,” that mad primitive chimpanzee part of us, is then not under ego control.  30

Empathy comes with years, and most fighters are very young.  This is why politicians and generals need to see these kids as their weapons and use them with care and  consciousness.  Ideally, I would hope that in spite of the adrenaline, I’d at least stay conscious of a terrible sadness while I burned these people.  But burn them I would.  42

When you dedicate the work… it means acting in the name of a universal spiritual, ethical, or political principle.  Dedicating the work is precisely what I and many others did not do in Vietnam.  55

There will still be less guilt if you kill for these wrong transpersonal reasons than if you kill for selfish ones….If we perform with a noble heart and dedicate our efforts to some higher good, we minimize the suffering of guilt afterward, (but) this unfortunately will not eliminate the suffering of mourning. Guilt is different from mourning. 56

I don’t think (Lincoln) 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.  57

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. 59

Having chosen a side, we cannot do so thinking we are knights in shining armor.  59

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 every day 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.  60

The least acknowledged aspect of war, today, is how exhilarating it is.  This aspect makes people very uncomfortable. Not only is it politically incorrect, it goes against the morality taught in our schools and churches.  62

What’s scary is that it is far easier to take the path of transcendence through destruction than to take the path of transcendence through creation.  63

The easier the path of destruction gets, the more likely we’ll be to take it. This is another reason why warriors, above all, must fundamentally be spiritual people, that is, people who are on a different path to start with. 64

Self – righteousness is one of the best ways invented to fall into the rapture of violence: witness the terrorists who are waging holy war and taking “justified revenge.” 73

Everyone has his or her equivalent of “the gook inside.” It’s what Carl Jung called the shadow.  People who say they don’t have one have an even bigger one. 82

If you go to war singing “Onward Christian Soldiers” you’re going to raise the devil.  87

We all have shit on our shoes.  We’ve just got to realize it so we don’t track it into the house. 88

We have an idea of what is right and wrong.  And we can debate moral issues as ideas.  But moral standards are not ideas; they exist in the form of observable measurable behavior. 112

Behavior stets standards, not ideals….We talk about moral ideas.  We operate on standards. 113

The answer to fallen-standard kinds of atrocities is quite simply to never allow behavior to differ from what is stated publicly. We do this by very quickly punishing even small lapses.  We punish with compassion and understanding. War is cruel. People crack under its pressure.  But we punish – and we try to help the one who failed to unravel the complex feelings afterward.  113

One of the greatest tests of character is telling the truth when it hurts the teller.  114

Why don’t decent people stand up and scream?  It’s because there’s nothing in it for them. They’re in a system in which they wish to survive. 118

When the system starts seeking goals that are out of line with individual values, the individual, who is usually trapped in the system, can either get hurt or survive by lying. We all like to survive and people lie all the time because of this.  119

Cynicism is simply the flip side of naïveté.  You’re no more mature, just more burned. 120

For me, my loyalty was to the mythic/historic/psychological projection called “the unit.”  It has a thousand specific names….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.  141

(on the dark side of great loyalty to the unit) 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 these frightened kids around you or in the battle for corporate survival.  142

The primary reason you don’t make sound judgments in combat is that you too often are exhausted and numbed. There is little that can be done about this except training under extreme duress to learn how to function at such times – one very strong reason why I deplore ignorant attempts by civilians and noncombat veterans to make boot camp more “humane.”  There is nothing humane about dead kids because someone cracked under pressure. 142

We are generally delighted to be cogs. 143

The more narrowly defined the unit, the more often one will get into situations of conflicting loyalties and murky ethical water.  143

Troops won’t fight for oil.  They will fight to stop murder and torture of other human beings and to stop terrorism and threats of mass destruction to their people.  “Diplomacy by other means” is going to have to line up with nineteen year old psychology or it will fail.  This is not at all bad.  150

When you are confronted with a seemingly painless moral choice, the odds are that you haven’t looked deeply enough.  154

(Bill) Moyers then asked (Joseph) Campbell, “Doesn’t heroism have a moral objective?” Campbell replied, “The moral objective is that of saving a people, or person, or idea. That is the morality of it. Now, you, from another position, might say that ‘something’ wasn’t worth it, or was downright wrong….But that doesn’t destroy the heroism of what was done.  171

The psychology of the young warrior is, I think, almost entirely related to hearth and kin. 179

The hyper masculine warrior energy has to be balanced by feminine energy, but it must come home to this. 186

It is primarily women who reintegrate the warrior back into society, the energy of the queen, not the king.  Women carry this queen for most young men.  Joking about men getting in touch with their inner woman aside, this is healthy, but it usually doesn’t happen until they’re quite mature, at least in their forties.  When a young man comes home from war, he’s all testosterone and he’s scary.  190

There is also a deeper side to coming home.  The returning warrior needs to heal more than his mind and body.  He needs to heal his soul. 196

The spiritual component, however, must never take second place to the physical – always a danger in a society dedicated to separating religion from government and a culture conditioned to favoring the practical over the impractical.  Training must move beyond here’s how you kill. It must include why you kill, and here’s how killing fits in the great scheme of things, and here’s how you are likely to feel afterward.   202

You’ve got to engage the bodies of these young warriors, before you engage their spirits. 206

When the child asks, “What is it like to go to war?” to remain silent keeps you from coming home.  207

If you can’t or won’t talk about it, you can’t get clear about it.  213

Warrior energy is fierce and wild. It upsets men who don’t have it, and women who are afraid of it, primarily because the only form of it they know is the negative one that is a result of repression. 218

Society needs veterans to express all sides of their experience, the guilt and sorrow and the pride. Cut off one and you cut off the others.  218

Without integration of the positive and negative sides of war, the experience isn’t transmitted in any practical and meaningful sense, and we will continue to seek the glory of war unchecked by wisdom about all the costs of war.  219

Choosing sides is the fundamental first choice that a warrior must make… The second fundamental choice of the warrior is to be willing to use violence to protect someone against intended or implied violence. 222

Doing the above eliminates any need to use the adjective “ethical” in front of the noun “warrior.” A warrior, by my definition, acts ethically.  Using violence other than to protect makes a person a bully or a murderer.  222

This is the warrior’s dictum: “No violence except to protect someone from violence.” 223

A warrior cannot commit to combat tentatively. 225

Without such character the ego simply abandons ship when it faces this situation.  There’s no ego strength left to control the unconscious forces that come ripping through the abandoned channels of the body and mind.  The loss of this “I” is, according to most mystical traditions, the way to ecstasy, but it can also be the way to horror. 235

“Command thyself” is the second great principle of the ethical conscious warrior. 237

How can we kill to protect without releasing the dark warriors of pseudo-speciation, racism, hatred, and slaughter? 237

Repressing natural aggression until it becomes passivity works only temporarily; the aggression will be released as unconscious rage years later, through either physical violence or ugly, damaging verbal aggression. 239

The message is that aggression is bad.  It doesn’t recognize the healthy aspects of aggression. 239

We also need to teach the difference between empathy and sentiment.  Warriors need empathy but a warrior must not fall into mushy sympathy.  241

Women choosing the military as a profession are going to have an immense struggle not to become pseudo-men.  It’s not just a woman’s problem, however. There are a lot of male pseudo-men in the world, still behaving like forty year old frat boys. A pseudo-man, whether male or female, can be an effective killer but cannot be a conscious warrior. 243

We will find ourselves increasingly embroiled in wars where the primary goal is to restore or even establish for the first time, civil order and a workable system of justice, not to defeat a clearly defined enemy who is trying to harm us.  It behooves us to recognize the difference in order to make it clear whether troops are acting in the role of warriors or the role of police… Warriors choose sides.  Police cannot choose sides; they must be on the side of the law.  252

The offspring of Ares and Aphrodite is Harmonia, harmony….what I think the mythology is telling us is that inner harmony, personal harmony is the result of the union of Aphrodite and Ares, the integration of love, sex, justice and war.  Without this union there is no harmony. 254

(After a battle…) Leaders should say a prayer, out loud, thanking these dead on both sides for their fully played part in this mysterious drama. We should allow people to curse the dead for murdering their friends, and then, if the younger ones can’t, the older ones, officers and NCOs, should be trained in conducting the rituals of forgiveness and healing. Something like:

Bless these dead, our former enemies, who has played out their part, hurled against us but the forces that hurled us against them. Bless us who live, whose parts are not yet done, and who know not how they shall be played. Forgive us if we killed in anger or hatred.  Forgive them if they did the same. Judgment is Yours, not ours. We are only human.  79