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Larry Pesavento is a member of the TMC Advisory Council, a therapist, an author and the Founder of CHRISTOS - A Center for Men located in Covington, KY.
"In 1993 I started a men's center to help initiate a dialogue about how a man in this confusing, elderless world can find a sense of identity, place and pride. I had been counseling men for close to 25 years and learned a lot from their struggles as well as my own. I then decided to write a book about the internal journey that a man must take in order to find a sense of peace and generativity. I felt called to write a book to share what I learned as part of my own journey and struggle with manhood. I will be publishing chapters from this book monthly, along with thoughts that pop up during the month. Thoughts may come from my practice, from the chapter of the book highlighted that month, from my own life, or maybe from the lives of readers that e-mail me."
For more info about Larry Pesavento, visit his web-site, http://www
.christoscenter
.com/
E-mail:
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2000
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Men and the Military
by
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
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