What it is Like to Go to War (29 page)

I was in Germany with my friends Albert and Hilde and their four children. Hilde is from the Prussian aristocracy. We
were visiting a large fortress and castle that had been in the keeping of Hilde’s family for many generations. As I walked down the corridors in the castle, I couldn’t help noticing that many of the portraits of the old warriors hanging side by side, generation by generation, on the walls, looked remarkably similar to Hilde.

Hilde wandered off with the three girls, and Albert and I ended up with his son, Wilhelm, or “Vim,” on top of the wide and exposed castle walls. The fortress was high on a hill in the center of a small city. A large valley with gentle rolling hills stretched out below us. You could see tidy farms and villages out to the green horizon.

Vim, who had barely turned four, was far too young to know anything about the castle or the portraits on its walls. He left us and walked over to the wall’s edge. There was no parapet, no safety fence, nothing between him and the scene stretched before him and death below him. Albert and I stopped talking, frozen.

Vim spread his legs wide apart. Standing only inches from the edge, he put his small fists on his hips, thrust out his chest, and lifted his chin defiantly. In a clear piping voice, suddenly strangely powerful, he called out to that empty space and rolling valley, “Ich bin Deutscher.”
⁸⁹
Something had taken over Vim and it gave me shivers. The ghosts of the ancestors were here. The fierce Germanic god Wotan, the leader of the Wild Hunt, had come.

Albert, who had lost his own father in the Second World War, gently walked over to Vim, knelt beside him, and put his arms around him. Albert is a wonderful man whose respect for traditional values doesn’t stop him from actively supporting the Greens. He looked out at the scene with Vim for a moment. I
can’t translate verbatim, but the words and the tone conveyed something like “Yes, you are a German. It’s beautiful, isn’t it.” He brought Vim back to safety and said quietly to me in English, “The smartest thing you Americans ever did was split us in half.”

Wotan exists. I think Wotan is closer to the surface in some cultures than in others. I think Wotan is closer to the surface in boys than in girls. I know that within me, or all around me, are very fierce and wild forces. These forces have to be channeled and guided. They are too big to dam or damn. These forces, which can come through all of us, are not created in childhood. However, the strength of character required to guide these forces is greatly helped, or greatly damaged, by how we parent our children, particularly when this force appears. Without such character the ego simply abandons ship when it faces this situation. There’s no ego strength left to control the unconscious forces that come ripping through the abandoned channels of the body and mind. The loss of this “I” is, according to most mystical traditions, the way to ecstasy, but it can also be the way to horror.

Homer spoke of the warrior energy nearly two thousand years ago through the voice of Odysseus.

great Ares
⁹⁰
and Athena
gave me valor and man-breaking power,
whenever I made choice of men-at-arms
to set a trap with me for my enemies
.
Never, as I am a man, did I fear Death
ahead, but went in foremost in the charge,
putting a spear through any man whose legs
were not as fast as mine. That was my element,
war and battle. Farming I never cared for
,
nor life at home, nor fathering fair children
.
I reveled in long ships with oars; I loved
polished lances, arrows in the skirmish,
the shapes of doom that others shake to see.
Carnage suited me; heaven put those things
in me somehow
.
⁹¹

The great mothers—Mother Teresa—and the great fighters—Chesty Puller—are simply people who have dedicated their lives to the power that “heaven put into them.” Such people, however, are on an extreme end of a spectrum most of us only share in varying degrees. Women can briefly enter the realm of the Great Mother whenever they give birth. I entered the realm of Mars for a time in Vietnam. Some of us get swallowed alive by these energies or archetypes and some of us reemerge to carry on with other activities. Recognizing that we share these energies, but need not dedicate our lives to them, allows us all to use them, but not be used by them, or be manipulated by society into being used by them. To try to kill these energies through repression and shame is not only impossible but very damaging to individuals and society. A lot of current societal forces and politics try to do just this. But to be used by these energies also damages individuals. Women can more easily be manipulated and consumed by the Mother and men by the Warrior. To strike a healthy relationship we need to first see that “heaven put these things in us somehow.”

Given that this responsibility rests on our individual shoulders, how are we to bear this load? How are we to recognize and acknowledge the evil within, yet not give in to it and act it out? How are we to be warriors who essentially perform violent acts yet still maintain our humanity? Our only hope is to see this Mars
energy clearly so we can be aware of ourselves as distinct from it yet a part of it. There is no hope for limiting the tragedy of warfare and violence if we don’t see it. It will take us over, obliterate our egos, turn us all into people overwhelmed by our dark sides. “Command yourself” is the second great principle of the ethical conscious warrior.

Our response to the problem of keeping the beast in check while we are still waging frightful war has been the typical flip-flop of extremes that people usually adopt when faced with seemingly irreconcilable demands. At the one extreme we say things like “War is hell,” excusing ourselves as we ride the beast over Tokyo, firing paper houses and burning civilians, or ride it a quarter century later, doing the same things with napalm in Vietnam. At the other extreme we make extraordinary efforts to keep the warrior leashed, mistakenly hoping that somehow if we leash the warrior the beast will also remain leashed. But at this extreme all we can do is wring our hands and point fingers while all the things we hold dear, our children, our ideals, our values, are ground into the mud by the beast unleashed by the opposing side. It seems an impossible situation. How can we kill to protect without releasing the dark warriors of pseudospeciation, racism, hatred, and slaughter?

This dilemma isn’t a new one.

Our greatest protection against falling into the thrall of the beast is children raised without shame and suppressed rage. This will ultimately demand a revolution of respect in child rearing.
⁹²

To deal consciously with the warrior aspect of small children, our task as parents is to recognize that aggression and the warrior energy are as natural and as problematic as sexuality.
There is a biological base to them, the strength of which varies from individual to individual. Just as some people like to make love more often than others, some people are naturally more aggressive than others. Just as virtually all people like to express sexuality, so too with aggression. Natural aggression, like sexuality, can either be repressed, to eventually emerge ugly and out of control, or it can be guided into healthy and productive uses.

One day our son Alex, when he was three, got accidentally locked out of the house. My wife and I were upstairs cleaning his brother’s and sisters’ bedrooms. We could hear him pounding on the door, shouting for us to open up, but we were in the middle of trying to reverse the laws of entropy with the toys and decided he could wait a minute or two.

We heard a shattering of glass.

I ran down the stairs. Alex was standing in the living room with glass all around him, door wide open, a large stick in his hand. He was radiating. He had smashed the window in the door to unlock it from the inside.

I gently took the stick from his hand and carried him up to his room for a quiet talk. I was so dumbfounded I couldn’t think of what to say. I suppose I should have told him how frustrated he must have felt when he couldn’t get in and how strong he must have felt to solve his problem all by himself by smashing in the window. Then I should have told him that his strength needs to be used for different sorts of occasions, for instance if he were really endangered, or a friend were endangered. At least I didn’t go into a rage and make him feel ashamed of his natural, albeit misplaced, vitality.

One of the results of repressing natural aggression in children is that aggression gets blocked permanently and is replaced by passivity. This has traditionally happened to women. We’ve actually gotten ourselves into such a state with repression of natural
aggression in women that many women are now going to classes to unlearn the shutdown imposed on them by society. They can’t even draw on this natural energy that the gods put in them to save their own lives. I worry that the same thing is now happening to men. It’s the wrong response to the problem of violence. Repressing natural aggression until it becomes passivity works only temporarily; the aggression will be released as unconscious rage years later, through either physical violence or ugly, damaging verbal aggression.

The first time the child smashes the window to get inside the locked door you must recognize and check your own fear of the violence that act invokes in you. Then you must recognize, and help the child recognize, how good and strong that must have felt. Never cut the child off from his or her warrior feelings, particularly by statements such as “You don’t really feel that way.” Once you affirm that the feelings are honest, you then immediately say how that strength and those feelings should be used for something better than smashing windows.

When a child grabs a playmate’s toy, or defends himself violently against someone else who is grabbing the toy from him, you show both children what warrior energy is used for by immediately protecting the victim of the aggression, innocent or guilty. Then you help the little warriors see clearly what happened and how they feel. “That made you mad. That anger helped you feel strong. You may need that strength someday when there is nobody else to help. But you didn’t need it here. You can get your toy back without hurting someone.”

Preschool teachers constantly repeat the convenient shorthand “Use your words” when a child gets aggressive. The overriding message is that aggression is bad. It doesn’t recognize the healthy aspects of aggression. Unrecognized, the healthy drive frequently goes over to the dark side. There are times when physical aggression
is an appropriate response. When you meet the serial killer on the jogging path, words are going to fail you.

At home, parents should wrestle with their children, showing them physical aggression under control. It’s fun to wrestle. It’s fun to pin Dad (or Mom). It’s fun to cause him a little pain. And Dad has some fun pinning the kids too. But the kids learn that the fun stops at painful chokeholds or arm bars. They learn that little brother starts crying if his three older siblings pile on top of him.

Roughhousing often ends up with someone crying at some point. This is because crying is a child’s sign that things have gone too far. Children are learning. They have to push to this point to find out when enough is enough. A normal reaction to games that evoke crying is to ban them because they hurt people. What should be banned is not the rough games but continuing beyond the point where the child signals that things have gone too far. Young children will understand what going beyond that point means only when they have pushed to the point where they see, hear, or feel the consequences for themselves. And they will push to that point time and time again.

What needs to be taught is that the aggressor must stop when the opponent asks for the fighting to stop. Parents must attempt to link the feelings of the child being hurt to the memory of similar feelings on the part of the aggressor child. The best way to do this is to continue the game, because, sooner or later, everyone ends up on the bottom of the pile. The bottom of the pile is the best place to learn empathy.

Empathy can be taught and learned. Traditionally we learn it the hard way. When I was in grade school, I never got into a fight thinking I was going to inflict pain on someone. I especially
never got into a fight thinking I’d have the pain inflicted on me. I just got into a fight. Pain was the last thing on my mind.

Along with teaching empathy we also need to teach the difference between empathy and sentiment. Warriors need empathy, but a warrior must not fall into mushy sympathy. My great-uncle Charlie raised cattle. The summer I was seven I got the job of feeding a little bull calf who’d been rejected by his mother. I imaginatively named him Ferdinand. I remember petting the hot coarse hair on his bony spine and talking to him, looking at his broad white face, noticing how his eyes rolled white when he tried to see me coming up behind him. I used to tag around with him, dodging mother cows and cow pies. I’d feed him from a bottle. I brought Ferdinand anything I could think of, flowers, candy, hay, rolled oats from my great-aunt Sandra’s cupboards.

One already hot morning Ferdinand was gone. I went back to the house. “Aunt Sandra, where’s Ferdinand?” She looked at me, flour on her hands from making bread. “Go talk to Kalle Sita.” So I found Uncle Charlie, who was on the John Deere 40 haying, and asked him the same question. He asked me if I’d like to ride the pickup into town for a milkshake. There at the counter, beneath the paper straw sleeves hanging down from the ceiling where kids had blown them with gum attached to the ends, he explained the economics of ranching, including where the spending money came from to buy my milkshake.

I cried. Charlie just put his hand on my shoulder. When we got back, he said something to his daughter, my aunt Lydia, in Finnish, and she took me over to my cousins’ farm to go swimming in the river. There was no mystery. I knew Ferdinand had been turned into meat. And I knew why. Money sends kids to college, not sentiment. If the air support comes loaded with napalm, you burn your enemy and save your recon team.