What It is Like to Go to War

by Karl Marlantes

It is critical for young people who return from combat that someone is there to help them, before they turn to drugs, alcohol, and suicide. We cannot expect normal eighteen-year-olds to kill someone and contain it in a healthy way. They must be helped to sort out what will be healthy grief about taking a life because it is part of the sorrow of war. The drugs, alcohol, and suicides are ways of avoiding guilt and fear of grief. Grief itself is a healthy response.

“So there you are. Now, what you had to do was fill out your side of the bargain with a noble heart. It’s your intentions and your nobility in how you conduct yourself in this world of opposites that you’ve got to think about. Did you intend right?”

kith

“It is not right to stand by and watch an injustice being done. There are times when active interference is necessary.”

“Remember, no man can be still, even for a moment. He has to do work. It is a law of nature that man should work... By not working you cannot live. Even the bodily functions need work to sustain them.

“How then can one escape the bondage of work? By performing a sacrifice for the general good. That is the secret of work well done. Work should be done so that others may benefit by it and not you. Dedicate all the work to me, and fight.”

The less clear the justifiable motives, the more difficulty returning veterans will have with guilt.

Even though it is unrealistic to believe one will be able to stay continually engaged in combat at the detached level of Arjuna, an idealized character, and even though Krishna’s advice has snares, such as being caught up in an ideal that one later regrets, it is the best way I know to minimize the guilt about killing in combat.

there will still be less guilt if you kill for these wrong transpersonal reasons than if you kill for selfish ones.

“Let the dead bury their dead.”

we must rely so much on character rather than rules when discussing and experiencing extreme situations like war.

“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.”

The easier the path of destruction gets, the more likely we’ll be to take it.

“It is not good works that make a good person but the good person who does good works.”

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.

Transcendence through violence.

Understand that these armed young men will do, without question, absolutely anything you ask.