At recent count, the United States is involved in three shooting wars. That's not counting any CIA or covert ops or "training" missions we may be involved with. Given that, Karl Marlantes' new book, "What It Is Like to Go to War," is a welcome treatise on the effects of war on soldiers and the way we treat returning veterans.
Let's be clear: Marlantes is by no means "anti-war." He draws on his experiences in Vietnam -- the same experiences that show up in his recent novel "Matterhorn" -- to portray both the horror and the intensely spiritual experience of war. Some people may quibble at the use of the word "spiritual," but he makes a credible case: "Mystical or religious experiences have four common components: constant awareness of one's own inevitable death, total focus on the present moment, the valuing of other peoples' 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."
On the other hand, Marlantes is not a gung-ho militarist. He thinks Vietnam was a mistake; he thinks the invasion of Iraq, based as it was on false premises, was wrong. Marlantes is against what he calls "pseudospeciation," where one side convinces itself the other side is subhuman in order to justify killing them; he's against treating the enemy with disrespect; he's against the killing of civilians (except accidentally).
But Marlantes also argues: "As long as there are people who will kill for gain and power, or who are simply insane, we will need people called warriors who will kill to stop them." He draws on mythological sources via Joseph Campbell and Robert Bly to talk about why he thinks warfare is a necessary evil and how we need to create warriors who can approach combat mindfully, with a sense of what is right and what is wrong, what is ethical and what is inhumane.
Marlantes never clearly explains why he uses the word "warrior" so much, rather than "soldier," though a discussion near the end of the book may shed light on the difference in emphasis: "[T]he warrior is ... willing to use violence to protect someone against even intended or implied violence ... accepting the risk of death and maiming that usually results from the decision to use violence against violence." He continues, "[But] a warrior, by my definition, acts ethically. Using violence other than to protect makes a person a bully or a murderer. ... This is the warrior's dictum, 'no violence except to protect someone from violence.'"
It's the willingness to kill that makes someone a warrior: Marlantes is emphatic that people who don't believe in violence (including those who would use it, but only to protect someone from being physically attacked) cannot be warriors. But a warrior needs to use violence only to protect. At the same time, the civilian heads of the military -- the president and the secretary of defense, for example -- are warriors because they make decisions to wage war and therefore must take on that ethical code.
It's in passages like these that Marlantes' abstraction from the real political world -- and even the military -- troubles me. When he talks about warriors protecting against "people who are willing to kill for gain or power," I imagine a group that includes some of our own national leadership and wonder what Marlantes' warrior would do about them. When Marlantes suggests that political leaders need to use "their imagination so that they can get into the right relationship with the decision to wage war," it's hard not to laugh. And I can't imagine most soldiers being in a position to make the ethical choices that Marlantes advocates, though I have known veterans who refused to kill when they were in Vietnam because they did not believe it was an ethical war. But it's clear that those aren't the kind of people Marlantes is talking about.
In fact, Marlantes doesn't have anything to say about veterans who have returned home from wars and joined the peace movement, even though arguably some of them are exactly the warrior types he's talking about -- having lived through combat, having fought an enemy to protect their comrades and having decided that there needs to be a more ethical basis for killing. Marlantes seems unfamiliar with the peace movement at best, and at worst blames it for shabby treatment of returning veterans, rather than understanding that, just as the atrocities committed in Vietnam didn't mean all soldiers were child-killers, the way some young people treated veterans in the 1960s, didn't mean the whole peace movement was anti-veteran.
Marlantes does well in doing what his title promises -- portraying what it's like to go to war -- as well as in talking about what returning veterans need if they and society are going to heal from their experiences. For this reason, if no other, the book should be read, especially by people in the peace movement. As a philosophical treatise about how to make war, though, his argument is scattered and often unconvincing.