Men and the Military
by
Larry Pesavento
Copyright © 2003
I have been struggling this whole past
year with the question of how does a healthy, initiated man respond to
the call for war. How does he respond as a combatant. How does he
respond as an elder who may be asked to guide a young soldier.
The first thing that strikes me is the
danger in sending uninitiated men into war. Traditional initiation is
a process of a boy finding his gifts, his life direction, his deepest
values with the help of his elders. Initiation always takes a boy
in extremis, to the very edges of his fear, where his epiphany and
transformation take place. He is taken to a place where death and
spirituality are brothers. This is a place where he learns the fear of
illusion and the illusion of fear. This is where learns to cleave to
his deepest values in spite of fear. This is where he finds his
manhood.
Elders facilitate a process of this
discovery without controlling it. Both elder and initiate are open to
a higher power, a higher wisdom, that is the basis of their culture.
The community counts on the discovered values of its young initiated
men to keep it from becoming stultified, rigid, spiritually lost. (See
www.christoscenter.com/toward.html)
An uninitiated man, when asked to
soldier, is not in a position to choose from his own values base. He
has not gone through the difficult process of finding those values.
His archetypal need for elders and initiation usually causes him to
mimic the older men in authority as the only way he knows to find his
own manhood. He doesn't find his gifts and life direction. He is given
them. In times of war he is issued values and purpose like he is
issued an M16.
What I have found out about war is that
uninitiated men wear their issued values loosely, as they do the rest
of their equipment. For them, war is not about values. War becomes
more the game of manhood, the uniform a kind of pseudo badge of
courage. War becomes their chance for initiation, but without guidance
and without the inner resources to face their own death. The
assumption that pervades this culture is that the military makes men
out of boys. I can't blame young men for choosing this way and this
answer. They are looking for their manhood in one of the few places
society has given them.
The danger comes when an uninitiated boy soldier
faces the many deaths of war. The imminence of death, physically,
emotionally, spiritually, is always a trigger for initiation. The
imminence of great loss triggers the necessity of great change.
Traditional initiation involved the facing of death directly, within a
context structured by elders. Boys were prepared by elders who
understood the gravity and sacredness of the ordeal.
A boy soldier who faces death without the
preparation of elders is soon terribly overwhelmed. Overwhelmed is not
a strong enough word. He is traumatized, emotionally shocked into a
chronic primitive state where survival is the highest value. And the
trauma leads to consequences that are neither transformative for the
boy, or likely to be of service to any community.
Trauma laden soldiers are forced into an altered
state where free will or moral judgment are severely diminished. Any
animal or man who is backed into a death corner is hardly rational or
moral, unless he has looked into the eyes of death before and found
his ground. As Paul Fussell writes, "In war it is not just the weak
soldiers, or the sensitive ones, or the highly imaginative or cowardly
ones, who will break down. All will break down if in combat long
enough." (See www.theatlantic.com/unbound/bookauth/battle/fussell.htm)
An uninitiated man in that corner will fight desperately with no sense
of morality, or will flee into an altered state that is a kind of
physical as well as moral paralysis.
The uninitiated boy who desperately fights, causing
death instead of facing it, is not moral or immoral, but in a
traumatized amoral state. Most boys will feel revulsion at killing,
often feeling as much an identity with the boy soldier shooting back.
In the battlefield, a boy soldier's motivation to kill will be less
for the values of a country 5,000 miles away, but in loyalty to his
partner 5 feet away. As the 1943 U.S. Officers Guide goes on to
instruct, "Physical courage is little more than the ability to control
the physical fear which all normal men have, and cowardice does not
consist in being afraid but in giving away to fear. What, then, keeps
the soldier from giving away to fear? The answer is simply -- his
desire to retain the good opinion of his friends and associates . . .
his pride smothers his fear." The courage men find in protecting their
brothers shows the basic goodness of men, and the need men have for
each other. That is where the military wants any sense of initiation
to stop. That is where shame starts for most soldiers.
The most dangerous boy soldier is the one who causes
death, feels no shame, and spends the rest of his life trying to
rationalize his behavior. Some of these men even find a kind of ego
boost in knowing they had power over another man, and survived.
Morality is questionable here. As a banner in my basic training hut
read, "No war is won with compassion or conscience." Moral
rationalization, disguised as patriotism, can be another piece of
equipment issued to each uninitiated soldier.
The traumatized boy soldier who starts to come out
of his altered state most often feels a great sense of shame and
sadness. He knows he has been in some type of other world. He starts
to realize he did things that he hadn't really thought out. He
realizes he acted out of primitive instinct rather than sacred intent.
His shame and sadness is really his badge of courage and the sign he
is ready for initiation. He has lost, or been stripped of, his
adolescent bravado and macho fantasies. Yet he most often has nowhere
to go with these awful feelings.
Sometimes this heavy sadness, combined with his
experience of surviving death, does cause an initiatory
transformation. This man will be neither proud nor "patriotic". He may
still be a soldier, but he will be quite a different soldier. He will
be an initiated soldier.
The great majority of men close to battle will
suffer from significant post traumatic symptoms. War, like the
patriarchal, elderless culture itself, breaks most men inside. The
closeness to death causes a death inside. Trauma , untreated, releases
great shame and causes great pain. Broken men, not given the chance
for initiation in an elderless culture, medicate the pain with some
addiction, including towering rage. Some find death the only release,
turning their rage inward. More Vietnam veterans have died from
suicide since the war than were killed in the war. Vietnam vets went
from the death jungles to the death denying city streets in one day,
with no respect for their courage or their inner struggles. An elder
culture shows the highest respect for a man's inner life. An
uninitiated male culture does not.
Can an initiated man become a soldier? I believe the
answer is a qualified yes. But what kind of soldier. The problem is
that an initiated man must become a questioning soldier. To the
military a questioning soldier is an oxymoron. This is why in the
Vietnam war those in the military wanted 18 year olds, not 26 year
olds, in their draft. Older men start to question. Younger men are
more worried about proving their manhood than questioning the manhood
of their superiors.
For a man to become initiated and a soldier, he must
see a direct correlation between his own unique values and the values
he is asked to fight for. He must also be clear about his elder
responsibility to insure that the spiritual values of his culture are
not betrayed in war, even in the face of death. The initiated soldier
must question. He must also be listened to in the process of deciding
on war. If war is a necessary evil, only initiated men can be a party
without being contaminated by the evil itself.
The initiated soldier, I believe, would be more like
the ideal samurai. The samurai was called on to defend his leader, his
daimyo. His code of bushido saw violence as a last resort. If a
samurai had to draw his sword, it was a defeat. He should have been
able to be wise enough, through years of study and discipline, to have
identified and worked with impending conflict so that violence was
unnecessary. He had faced death often. He was initiated into his
craft. He was neither overwhelmed nor surprised nor even afraid of
death. He was morally free within the context of his mission. His ego
was not seduced by power.
The warrior in every man understands the desire to
protect that which is sacred to him and to his community. The warrior
is the boundary setter. He protects personal and family boundaries as
well as national ones. To be a healthy warrior he must defend the
values of a healthy king. He must use his warrior energy to question
and question until he finds that king. Initiation, to mix a metaphor,
is the process of finding that king inside. The uninitiated boy
warrior doesn't even realize the questions. He will fight for the
unquestioned king, calling this patriotism.
Wise elders encourage questioning in the course of a
deep inner search. Patriarchal military leaders encourage obedience
without thought or search. Patriarchs say trust me. Elders say trust
yourself.
The initiated man soldier would defend the
sacredness of life, not lifestyle. He would not fight for every man's
right to drive an SUV. He would not fight for the rights of McDonalds,
when others in the world were starving. He has found that most of the
fear driven activity leading to war is a camouflage for the fear of
death, in the form of big and unknown change. He is not afraid of
change, even painful change. Initiation has taught him that death in
the form of change is the prerequisite of transformation.
The country, like the traumatized soldier in war, is
in a continuing traumatic state after 9/11. In many ways it is in the
same amoral, desperate state. Fear of annihilation has driven many not
to question, just to trust. Fear has caused people to support striking
out, not looking within. Trauma drives people to an amoral, but
dangerous, despair. Initiated soldiers would be able to keep their
center, as well as their questions, in the midst of this turmoil. They
would calm the community, not be infected by its fears. They would
encourage the community to question the wisdom of war, not each
other's patriotism.
Initiated soldiers would not desperately rush into
battle. They are the ones who would caution against first strikes and
immediate action, inured to idealistic calls to battle, knowing there
is little glory or manhood making in war. Like many soldiers who have
been to war, they would counsel caution, knowing the true devastation
war has, especially on those called to fight, knowing what chance a
war has for creating lasting peace. (See www.theatlantic.com/unbound/bookauth/battle/fussell.htm)
When all you have is a hammer, then all your
problems start looking like nails. If the military and soldiering is
only about war, then war and other organized violence seems the
immediate, right decision for most international conflicts. Initiated
soldiers know better.
As some veterans have written, "Our experiences in
the military caused us to question much of what we were taught. Now we
see our REAL duty is to encourage you as members of the U.S. armed
forces to find out what you are being sent to fight and die for and
what the consequences of your actions will be for humanity. We call
upon you, the active duty and reservists, to follow your conscience
and do the right thing." (See www.calltoconscience.net)
Like the samurai, an initiated soldier would have to
be satisfied that every other means was exhausted before he would use
violence, would use his sword. He would see himself as more a
peacemaker than a warmaker. He would demand to be used for the
purposes of avoiding war as a normal part of his orders. He would see
the many uses for his warrior energy, like the samurai, in creating an
environment where he need not draw his sword. He would see peacemaking
as the greatest protection for his country. Going to war would be his
first defeat.
Most soldiers do not fight, do not face death
directly. For every man in the field there are at least ten behind him
providing support. Then there is a whole country behind those
soldiers, providing support and rationale. I am afraid that the
traumatized, uninitiated in this country are sending the not yet
traumatized, uninitiated soldier into war because of a fear that will
never be healed by war, even successful war. Any country, like the
military, which is not full of men and women who have faced inner
initiation will never feel an outer security. The answer is not
security from great change and death. The answer comes after death has
been faced and change embraced. The initiated soldier understands
this. The initiated soldier witnesses to this. The question is how
many initiated soldiers does America have, especially at the top?
Larry Pesavento ©2003
