What It is Like to Go to War

by Karl Marlantes

Compassion must be elicited consciously in warfare. Our natural tendency is to think of the enemy as an animal inferior to us. This serves to help warriors accomplish very ugly tasks, but it brings on unnecessary suffering if not constantly checked.

Rituals must be reinstated, on the battlefield, on the bloody street, immediately, to keep the jamming to a minimum.

Bless these dead, our former enemies, who have played out their part, hurled against us by the forces that hurled us against them. Bless us who live, whose parts are not yet done, and who know not how they shall be played. Forgive us if we killed in anger or hatred. Forgive them if they did the same. Judgment is Yours, not ours. We are only human.

Although we all have shadows, we all have different ones.

You don’t need to go to war to find people fleeing from or fighting their shadows and getting their wrists slashed.

If you don’t recognize your shadow sides, you’ll be likely to cause a lot of damage trying to do your heroic deeds.

The more you deny the shadow warrior, the more vulnerable you become to

If you go to war singing “Onward Christian Soldiers” you’re going to raise the devil.

Shadow issues come around and around. There is no defeating the shadow. We have to live with it. It is part of us. But having this shadow is neither bad nor good, although it is very troublesome.

We all have shit on our shoes. We’ve just got to realize it so we don’t track it into the house.

Almost by definition, atrocities result because people in authority let them happen.

There is what I call the “white heat” atrocity, where logic reigns supreme with no feeling or empathy. There is the “red heat” atrocity, where just the opposite happens and emotion, usually rage, rules to the exclusion of all logic and rationality. Finally, there is the atrocity of the fallen standard, where there is a large gap between what is spoken of as a behavioral standard by society back home and what the immediate society in-country actually expects.

Evil floats all around us like a ghost or an unseen, poisonous mist.

First of all, the criteria for being good are switched in combat.

So being bad helps give many males identity as men; it fills a need for esteem. Add to this that in war it helps us survive and you’ve got a very potent motivation system for doing the so-called bad thing. Evil is very ordinary.

Cruelty in warfare is as mundane and common as cruelty in child rearing.

But with my war experiences behind me, and five kids, I can only say I no longer make hard and fast judgments.

When we meet the next test, we can meet it only with the character we have at the time, and in this way we aren’t free. Our freedom lies in the fact that we can continually work to improve our character.

it gets a lot easier to pseudospeciate.

“What now looks wanton or sadic seemed in the field inevitable, or just unimportant routine.”

We talk about moral ideas. We operate on standards. It’s the same in war, where cruelty not only is allowable but often is encouraged.

The answer to fallen-standard kinds of atrocities is quite simply to never allow behavior to differ from what is stated publicly. We do this by very quickly punishing even small lapses. We punish with compassion and understanding. War is cruel. People crack under its pressure. But we punish—and we try to help the one who failed to unravel the complex feelings afterward.

Why don’t decent people stand up and scream? It’s because there’s nothing in it for them. They’re in a system in which they wish to survive.

The pressure for numbers and statistics comes from people who don’t have anything to do, don’t know what it’s all about or how it happens, and are frustrated because they’re left out of what looks to be, at a safe distance, something exciting.

The only meaningful statistic in warfare is when the other side quits.

When the system starts seeking goals that are out of line with individual values, the individual, who is usually trapped in the system, can either get hurt or survive by lying.

Cynicism is simply the flip side of naïveté. You’re no more mature, just more burned.

In Greek and Roman mythology the snakebite is a metaphor for consciousness. Most people can’t stand having someone with a new and different consciousness in the same boat. Society does often isolate people like this.

This was one of the reasons he was a particularly good fighter: he didn’t let the target get obscured by sentiment.

everything had turned into competition, lying for promotion, cynicism, and a total misrepresentation of what was actually going on.

I, like most people, could always use some more self-esteem.

esteem. The more you have, the less you lie.

We who had done the fighting all felt immensely proud of what we’d done. We were proud we held the hill. The staff, however, was stuck explaining a poor kill ratio, the only number that supported the overall strategy of the war.

I call this the lie of two minds. “I” convinced “myself.” The I that did the convincing was the one who needed desperately to justify the entire experience, to make it sane and right and okay and approved. Myself was convinced as the moral self, the part of me I would want to be a judge in a legal system.

The deliberate lie is an intentionally launched piece of misinformation, which, like any other missile, can be launched for good or for evil.

When there are conflicting aspirations, one or more must be put aside.

We are generally delighted to be cogs.

Choosing when to surrender and when to stand alone is an art. There is no science about it and unfortunately the military isn’t the greatest place to gain this sort of now-a-cog, now-not-a-cog wisdom.

To be effective and moral fighters, we must not lose our individuality, our ability to stand alone, and yet, at the same time, we must owe our allegiance not to ourselves alone but to an entity so large as to be incomprehensible, namely humanity or God.

The ghosts of acts of kindness like these haunt all fighting units.

“There has been a great deal of talk about loyalty from bottom to top. Loyalty from the top to the bottom is much more important, and also much less prevalent. It is this loyalty from the top to the bottom which binds juniors to their seniors with the strength of steel.”

on. If the unit’s integrity or safety is at stake, then you will do what the unit needs to do to save itself.

No military person can come to terms with loyalty until he or she comes to terms with Bushido, both its light side and its dark side.

Loyalty should always be to the higher cause.

In combat, one should be very suspicious of painless moral choices. When you are confronted with a seemingly painless moral choice, the odds are that you haven’t looked deeply enough.

Combat magnifies small acts terribly.

To succeed, an assault depends on all-out fury focused at the smallest possible point.

I have heard Napoleon quoted to the effect that an army runs on its stomach and ribbons.

Wanting a medal in war is just killing yourself at a faster pace, for all the same wrong reasons.

I can’t remember the man’s name. If I could, I’d thank him personally. He called my shit.