Exuberance: The Passion for Life (35 page)

War brings out a disturbing side of human passion, including that of violent exuberance. Clearly, for some—no one knows how many—the thrill of pursuit and pleasure in the kill are truly intoxicating. Theodore Roosevelt, like many before and after him, exulted in his brief experience of war: “
All men who feel any power of joy in battle,” he wrote, “know what it is like when the wolf rises in the heart.” Of his charge up San Juan Hill, he said, “
we were all in the spirit of the thing and greatly excited”; the men were “cheering and running forward between shots.” Roosevelt himself, wrote one friend, “
was just revelling in victory and gore.” Henry Adams noted in Roosevelt a disquieting combination of energy and restlessness: “
Power when wielded by abnormal energy is the most serious of facts,” he wrote, “and all Roosevelt’s friends know that his restless and combative energy was more than abnormal … he was pure act.” Roosevelt lived, said Adams, in a “
restless agitation that would have worn out most tempers in a month.” It may be that such exhilaration in the hunt, such pleasure in the fight are necessary in order for war to occur at all. Certainly it must confer advantage to those whose energy and enthusiasm are needed to lead the battle and sustain the fight.

For some, combat is the most intense experience of their lives:
the stakes are the highest for which they will ever play, and their senses are alert as they will never be again. During the Civil War, one young officer, who in civilian life was an attorney from Indiana, wrote home to his fourteen-year-old sister after fighting at Chickamauga Creek, a battle that resulted in more than 35,000 Union and Confederate casualties. In response to her question of how it felt “
when in the hottest of a battle,” he wrote that as soon as a soldier begins firing at the enemy he becomes animated. He forgets danger: “The life blood hurries like a race horse through his veins, and every nerve is fully excited.… His brain is all alive; thought is quick, and active, and he is ten times more full of life than before.” Despite his reason’s awareness that he might die, the soldier’s feelings seem to “give the lie to it. He seems so full of life that it is hard for him to realize that death is so near.” Adrenaline assures the attention and quickness essential to survive; a sense of vitality provides the denial necessary to continue fighting.

In
The Pity of War
, the Oxford historian Niall Ferguson cites the experiences of soldiers for whom the intensity and adventure of war made all else pale. One said that war was the greatest adventure of his life, “
the memories of which will remain with me for the remainder of my days, and I would not have missed it for anything.” Another compared war to a mistress: “
Once you have lain in her arms you can admit no other.” He missed, he said, the “living in every nerve and cell of one’s body.” Chris Hedges, a
New York Times
reporter who covered wars in the Balkans, Central America, and the Middle East, said that for him war became a “potent addiction.” He describes an unforgettable intensity: “
There is a part of me—maybe it is a part of many of us—that decided at certain moments that I would rather die like this than go back to the routine of life. The chance to exist for an intense and overpowering moment, even if it meant certain oblivion, seemed worth it in the midst of war.”

For some, the excitement of war is in the hunt or in the sheer exuberance of killing. The Vietnam War correspondent Laura Palmer interviewed American helicopter pilots a month after the Christmas bombing of Hanoi in 1972. These were, she acknowledged, some of the most disturbing interviews she had ever done. One of the pilots who, like the others, did not want to return home, told her, “
I’ve been having a blast, killing dinks, chasing them. Getting shot at. It’s fun. It’s exciting. If you ever do it sometime, you’ll like it.” Another pilot, asked what it felt like to kill someone, said: “
First, when they start shooting at you, it feels good.… It’s fun chasing ’em. You go flying over a fighting position or something else and a
2001
space odyssey comes flying up at you, tracers and everything. It’s neat. Looks like the Fourth of July. We let ’em shoot at us first. Then we kill ’em.” Palmer remarked that until she had interviewed these pilots, “
I never knew there was more than one way to die in Vietnam. You could die fast, or you could die slow. After endless nights, who can be blamed for finally befriending the dark?”

The American helicopter pilots were by no means unique in their delight in killing. The screenwriter William Broyles, Jr., a Marine officer in Vietnam and later the founding editor of
Texas Monthly
and a past editor of
Newsweek
, wrote a harrowing account of his combat experiences. He loved war, he said, “
in strange and troubling ways.” Some feel an excitement in war which is real and odious. After one battle, when many enemy soldiers had been killed and their naked bodies had been piled together for removal, Broyles saw a look of “
beatific contentment” on his colonel’s face, a look “I had not seen except in charismatic churches. It was the look of a person transported into ecstasy. And I—what did I do, confronted with this beastly scene? I smiled back, as filled with bliss as he was. That was another of the times I stood on the edge of my humanity, looked into the pit, and loved what I saw there.”

Joanna Bourke, a historian at the University of London, writes in
An Intimate History of Killing
that commanding officers are praised if they manage to sustain a “
joy of slaughter” in their troops. She quotes soldiers who found, in sticking the enemy with a bayonet, an “exultant satisfaction” and others who described the “sickening yet exhilarating butchery” as a “joy unspeakable.” She cites a particularly chilling passage from Henry de Man’s book
The Remaking of a Mind
, published shortly after World War I. “
I had thought myself more or less immune from this intoxication [of slaughter],” de Man wrote, “until, as trench mortar officer, I was given command over what is probably the most murderous instrument in modern warfare.… One day … I secured a direct hit on an enemy encampment, saw bodies or parts of bodies go up in the air, and heard the desperate yelling of the wounded or the runaways. I had to confess to myself that it was one of the happiest moments of my life.” He added that he could have “wept with joy.”

The perversity of war is nowhere more eloquently addressed than by T. E. Lawrence in his masterpiece,
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
. He writes of war’s brutalizing influence and its intimate, proximate delights: “
The everlasting battle stripped from us care of our own lives or of others’.… We lived always in the stretch or sag of nerves, either on the crest or in the trough of waves of feeling.… Gusts of cruelty, perversions, lusts ran lightly over the surface without troubling us; for the moral laws which had seemed to hedge about these silly accidents must be yet fainter words. We had learned there were pangs too sharp, griefs too deep, ecstasies too high for our finite selves to register. When emotion reached this pitch the mind choked; and memory went white.” The disappearance of moral law encouraged a descent in which Lawrence found comfort. “
I liked the things underneath me and took my pleasures and adventures downward. There seemed a certainty in degradation, a final safety. Man could rise to any height, but there was an
animal level beneath which he could not fall. It was a satisfaction on which to rest.”

The excitement of killing is not limited to our species; indeed, there are many examples of it among our closest kin, the great apes. In
Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence
, Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson give a particularly graphic example of chimpanzees attacking another of their kind:

Ritualistic behaviors leading up to contagious excitement are common among young mammals and, as we have seen, often preparatory to group activities which entail risk and require social cohesion. Play followed by hunting is widespread in animals, whether African wild dogs, apes, or humans. The rewards for competing or killing have to be intensely pleasurable in order to excite
the dangerous behaviors required to survive, and they necessarily involve highly activated if not overtly exuberant states. This is a disturbing but not unexpected reality. War is the ultimate test of survival; in its ultimate stakes is the possibility of ultimate pleasure.

Chuck Yeager, who was the first pilot to break the sound barrier and is believed by many to be the greatest American aviator ever, describes the ancient delight of the hunt: “
That day [during World War II] was a fighter pilot’s dream. In the midst of a wild sky, I knew that dogfighting was what I was born to do. It’s almost impossible to explain the feeling: it’s as if you were one with that Mustang, an extension of that damned throttle. You flew that thing on a fine, feathered edge, knowing that the pilot who won had the better feel for his airplane and the skill to get the most out of it.… Concentration was total; you remained focused, ignoring fatigue or fear.… You fought wide-open, full-throttle. With experience, you knew before a kill when you were going to score. Once you zeroed in, began to outmaneuver your opponent while closing in, you became a cat with a mouse. You set him up, and there was no way out: both of you knew he was finished. You were a confident hunter and your trigger finger never shook.… When he blew up, it was a pleasing, beautiful sight.… The excitement of those dogfights never diminished. For me, combat remains the ultimate flying experience.”

If war is to be used to defend territory or governments, there must be enthusiasm for it. Yeager, whose name means “hunter,” was an enthusiastic warrior and immensely valued for it by his country. Conviction is demanded, and a measured fanaticism requisite, if the young are to be asked to die for a cause. But exuberance for war must be held in restraint lest it become atrocity, and passion for a cause must be kept in line lest the enthusiast turn fanatic.

Who is to say, however, when the line has been crossed? In the
heat of war, in the face of death, can any line be made inviolable? The passions of war require a complex use of spur and bit in ways that those of ordinary times do not. With war, observed T. E. Lawrence, “
a subtle change happened to the soldier. Discipline was modified, supported, even swallowed by an eagerness of the man to fight. This eagerness it was which bought victory in the moral sense, and often in the physical sense, of the combat.… Eagerness of the kind was nervous, and, when present in high power, it tore apart flesh and spirit.” To incite emotions to fever pitch during war required a counterpoised use of restraint in times of peace, argued Lawrence: “
To rouse the excitement of war for the creation of a military spirit in peace-time would be dangerous,” he said, “like the too-early doping of an athlete. Consequently discipline, with its concomitant ‘smartness’ (a suspect word implying superficial restraint and pain) was invented to take its place.”

Not all warriors respond to discipline: two of the most renowned military leaders of the twentieth century, General George S. Patton and General William “Billy” Mitchell, famously did not. In their defiance lies the permeable border between fanaticism and visionary leadership; in their vehement enthusiasm lies the realization that a great man is not necessarily a good man.

Patton and Mitchell had much in common. Both were born to privilege; both were passionate and scathingly intolerant of those not sharing their enthusiasms. Thwarted exuberance tipped easily into anger and self-righteousness. They were fiery leaders, impetuous, vain, and brave beyond question; both were incendiary advocates for innovative warfare. Both were regarded by their superior officers as loose cannons, publicly rebuked for insubordination, and at times considered mentally unstable (indeed, both the Patton and Mitchell families had histories of mental instability). Temperamentally they were far better suited to war than to peace. They led with exuberance and they misled with its excesses. Neither was willing
to settle for anything other than his own vision of how armies and men ought to perform. They sought glory and they made history.

Patton’s enthusiasm for war was early and unqualified. “
God but I wish there would be a war,” he wrote to his future wife while still a cadet at West Point. War, he said, was life. He expressed his passion for combat, and his disdain for those who disagreed, in verse: