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. The hard truth is that ever since I can remember I have loved thinking about war—and I wasn’t the only one. I played it in the woods with my friends. I read about it, and people wrote what I read. I saw it in movies, and people filmed what I saw. As a college student I played strategy board games—and people designed and sold those games. In Vietnam there were times when I swelled with pride at the immense destruction I could deal out. There is a deep savage joy in destruction, a joy beyond ego enhancement. Maybe it is loss of ego. I’m told it’s the same for religious ecstasy. It’s the child toppling the tower of blocks he’s spent so much time carefully constructing. It’s the lighting of the huge bonfire, the demolition of a building, the shattering of a clay pigeon. It’s firecrackers and destruction derbies on the Fourth of July. Part of us loves to destroy. Nietzsche says, “I am by nature warlike. To attack is among my instincts.” Richard Ellmann, the great biographer of Yeats, has the right answer. He says this feeling is just the other face of creativity, in Jungian terms, the shadow side of creativity. “The urge to destruction, like the urge to creation, is a defiance of limits; we transcend ourselves by refusing to accept completely anything that is human, and then indomitably we begin fabricating again.”21 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. And the destructive path gets easier as technology improves, while positive creating, whether spiritual, artistic, or commercial, is just as hard as it ever was. Corporations that took decades to build can be “raided” and “unbundled” in weeks. Books that take years of toil and sacrifice to bring to fruition can be burned in minutes. 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. Kierkegaard says, “It is not good works that make a good person but the good person who does good works.” It’s probably why Bushido required the samurai to practice daily a meditative art form, such as the tea ceremony or writing haiku. It is through meditative practices that you observe your own mind. You can’t be a good person until you observe how bad you are. It is only when the evil is conscious that it can be countered. Torturers during the Inquisition thought they were doing good.
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Even the motivation for inurement to violence is the same in war as in everyday life, that is, ego survival. We mistakenly assume that bodily survival has a higher precedence than ego survival. This is simply not generally true. Ego will happily destroy body for its own sake. Look at overweight executives headed for heart attacks on the way to getting their pictures in Fortune or anorexic models suffering slow starvation on their way to getting their pictures in Vogue. Protecting the ego is the general case. In war, as in normal life, there are still far more cases where the body is not threatened but the ego is. For those in positions of authority, and farther from the action, ego survival is the key factor. If pilots begin to weep whenever they’re on a bombing run they might soon find that their proficiency would start to drop. Such pilots will hardly be the ones chosen to become squadron leaders. If becoming squadron leader is an ego need, then the ego will override the compassionate response. It’s no different for the lieutenant trying to become company commander, the colonel trying to make general, the White House staffer trying to get a cabinet post, and the politician trying to ensure reelection. Since many people strive for positions of power as compensations for needy egos, it is hardly surprising that the corridors of power are filled with people for whom the compassionate responses will be short-circuited as a matter of course. War simply draws out in stark relief the immense power of our need to be accepted by our peers, which causes us to conform to society’s rules of conduct rather than respond with compassion. In so-called normal life we do these things every day, but we don’t see the results quite so clearly and therefore don’t relate to the remorse. This is because no one grabs us by the scruffs of our necks and shoves our faces into the messes we’ve created while shoring up our images.
Karl Marlantes
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