Karl Marlantes

Bill Moyers had an interview on TV this last week with Viet-Nam war veteran Karl Marlantes. Marlantes has written a book entitled What It's Like toGo to War and he and Moyers talked about it, particularly about “Post Traumatic Stress Disorder” after the wars in Viet-Nam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

The discussion of the book fascinated me at first and resulted in my going to the local Barnes and Noble bookstore to read as much of it as I could. But the interview and book felt distractive after a short while. Everything that was said was very familiar to me from the decade of the 1970's when I taught sociology and social psychology to many returning Viet-Nam soldiers. Even the body language was very familiar to me from those years, even the look around the eyes.

The crucial part of the interview for me was also the crucial part of those 1970's discussions of what it was like to go to war – namely, the truth that if you are going to kill someone, if you are going to kill lots of people, you better have a rock-solid reason for doing so, or it will destroy you and your society and your descendants.

Marlantes gets at it like this:

“'Thou shalt not kill’ is a tenet you just do not violate, and so all your young life, that’s drilled into your head. And then suddenly, you’re 18 or 19 and they’re saying, ‘Go get ‘em and kill for your country.’ And then you come back and it’s like, ‘Well, thou shalt not kill’ again. Believe me, that’s a difficult thing to deal with,” Marlantes tells Bill. “You take a young man and put him in the role of God, where he is asked to take a life — that’s something no 19-year-old is able to handle.”

I feel, with great respect and admiration and appreciation for Marlantes and the veterans whom I know personally, that this statement comes close to the issue, but misses. 'No cigar,' as the expression is.

Firstly, is it really true that “you just do not violate” any of the ten commandments? It happens all the time. In fact, it seems more accurate to me to say that nobody really follows the rules just because they are rules, but because they see some reason for the rules. And further, the actual commandment usually cited by conscientious objectors is not “Thou shall not kill” but rather “Thou shall have no other gods before thee.”

And that brings my second doubt about Marlantes' statement above, which is perhaps related to having no other gods before thee: Is it really true that an 18- or 19-year boy can't handle the decision as to whether or not to kill someone? One of my students, who killed people in Viet-Nam and had lots of trouble about it on returning to the States, told me in answer to my asking this question: “My mother would have killed me if I didn't go,” which had extra force because he came from a strong Italian-America family. This man was very close to me and we talked many hours together about such questions. He also cited John Wayne a couple times and wanting to be a hero like John Wayne.

I, of course, do not know the answer to this question as to whether or not an 18-year-old boy in such circumstances can make the decision. My tilt is toward believing that he can. He can handle aircraft in the jungle, handle search and destroy infantry missions and all kinds of difficult situations in combat in a strange land, operate very complicated weaponry, survive in almost impossible circumstances. He might then be capable of deciding whether or not to go to war in the first place. Thoreau would have no trouble with the question. Still, I just don't know. 

Another thought that comes to me on reading Marlantes is that working over in your mind the meaning of what you have done after going to wars like those in Viet-Nam, Iraq and Afghanistan takes a whole lot of time and anguish and effort and depth and knowledge and repentance and humility and openness to the possibility that not only you but almost everyone in control of things in society were murderously insane.  That is asking a lot of anyone, not just an 18-year-old.