Are You a Warrior, Too?

--Unstable Yellow Pigs,
Olaf Breuning

All life is a blur of Republicans and meat!
--Zippy the Pinhead

I am a sick man . . .
I am an angry man. I am an unattractive man.
I think there is something wrong with my liver
--Notes from the Underground,
Fyodor Dostoevsky

Democracy is more vindictive than Cabinets.
The wars of peoples will be more terrible
than the wars of kings
--Winston Churchill

Fuck my shit.
That's what war adds up to
--Ernie Pyle
_________________

Warriorhood has been establishing itself in our pleasant democracy lately, both in military and entertainment circles.

Michael Hastings writes in his recent book "The Operators", General McChrystal "appeared to represent a new kind of military elite, a member of a warrior class that had lost touch with the civilian world" (and vice versa, p. 74). Yet less than a lifetime ago, keen Infantry observer Ernie Pyle wrote, "They were really the hunters, but they looked like the hunted. They weren't warriors. They were American boys who by mere chance of fate had wound up with guns in their hands, sneaking up a death-laden street in a strange and shattered city in a faraway country in a driving rain. They were afraid but it was beyond their power to quit. They had no choice."

Archaeology Magazine ("The Gladiator Diet,"April 2012) mentions that gladiators were called "warriors", though they had no war-fighting functions. (Though often captured warriors, their actions were now constricted by the rink for entertainment purposes alone.) Gladiators fought for no higher good than to do the bidding of their masters and to amuse the crowds. Their deaths were gore fests, with tools of brutality often exclusive to the fighting ring. Among various gladiatorial weapons used only in the arena was the trident -- now a symbol on the elite Navy SEALs badge.

Have we morphed our soldiers into warriors because we see them as providing us gladiatorial entertainment? How do we benefit as a society by calling our soldiers "warriors"?

Does this indicated a regression to a more primitive state?

_______________

And a Monday poem:

Ready to Kill

by Carl Sandburg

TEN minutes now I have been looking at this.
I have gone by here before and wondered about it.
This is a bronze memorial of a famous general
Riding horseback with a flag and a sword and a revolver
on him.

I want to smash the whole thing into a pile of junk to be
hauled away to the scrap yard.

I put it straight to you,

After the farmer, the miner, the shop man, the factory
hand, the fireman and the teamster,
Have all been remembered with bronze memorials,
Shaping them on the job of getting all of us
Something to eat and something to wear,

When they stack a few silhouettes
Against the sky
Here in the park,
And show the real huskies that are doing the work of
the world, and feeding people instead of butchering them,

Then maybe I will stand here
And look easy at this general of the army holding a flag
in the air,
And riding like hell on horseback
Ready to kill anybody that gets in his way,
Ready to run the red blood and slush the bowels of men
all over the sweet new grass of the prairie.

Guys Gone Wild!

Look me in the eye, GI,
and tell me you're not tired
I'm tired to death sir,
I'm tired till it hurts
This s.... couldn't get much worse
--Starship Troopers (redux),
The Herd

Come on. Spring Break.
Spring Break!
--Girls Gone Wild (2005)

The compassionate warrior will be the winner,
and if compassion is your defense you
will be secure
--Tao Te Ching, Verse 67
_____________________

The day would never come that Ranger would call himself a warrior, so the current "warrior" fervor rankles. I have more self-respect than that. My soldiering days had a dignity beyond the violence.

The trial of Lance Corporal Harry Lew is making its way through the legal system with as little fanfare as possible. Lew committed suicide after alleged hazing by his fellow Marines:

The prosecution claims Lance Cpl. Carlos Orozco III put his foot on the back of Lance Cpl. Harry Lew, 21, ordered him to do push- ups, and poured sand into Lew’s face. Orozco has been charged with assault, humiliating Lew, and cruelty and maltreatment. A lance corporal pleaded guilty to assault and was sentenced to 30 days in jail and demoted to private first class; Sgt. Benjamin Johns was acquitted by a court- martial jury (USA Today).

Imagine a Lance Cpl. ordering another to perform pushups. Strange in itself since this was at unit level and not a training scenario. Is this how warriors treat their own? Is the loss of a stripe and 30 days in jail correct punishment for this behavior? The Sergeant involved was acquitted; where were the officers?

In the other loo case, the Marines who urinated on recently killed bodies demonstrated the desire to inflict extreme humiliation, but they have not been indicted because boys (=warriors) will be boys. When we revel in treating others this way, we have lost our basic goodness.

Warriorhood allows for this desensitization. Ranger understands Marines are not following Emily Post, but the recent violations getting press are opposed to the collegiality shared by older veterans.

The U. S. Marine Corps history in World War II is that of fighting on brutal, isolated Pacific battlefields. Today, we are not fighting on constricted battlefields or aboard ships; the days of fighting slug-fests on remote rocky outcroppings are gone.

Men like those Marines, or like my father who fought on discrete battlefields (aboard ships), were only fighting enemy soldiers intent on killing them. This is just and fair for both sides. But bombing a ridge line on Iwo is different from destroying Fallujah, or any other target in-theatre today. We no longer have isolated battlefields. Because of this, today's military efforts require more humanity, not less.

As unimaginably horrible as their fighting was, even on Okinawa the Marines attempted to save civilians intent upon suicide. Their humanity was intact; that is what is in danger in today's warrior world.

For the men who returned from those constricted battlefields, fighting had a certain clarity (if not always sense). Today's warrior mindset does not allow for the discrimination needed when dealing in a more ambiguous terrain.

WWW, or World Wide Warriors

--fr. Maus, A Survivor's Tale,
Art Spiegelman

And anything that happened
to me afterwards,
I never felt the same about again
--Guests of the Nation,
Frank O'Connor

I know that I shall meet my fate

Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate
Those that I guard I do not love
--An Irish Airman Forsees His Death,
W. B. Yeats

Save my soul from evil, Lord
And heal this soldier's heart
--I'm Done with Bonaparte,
Mark Knopfler
__________________

We as a society have crossed a frontier fraught with tanglefoot and minefields aplenty when we are comfortable with the concept of Long Wars and being called a "warrior" nation.

Soldiers -- even Reserve Forces -- have morphed into warriors, while the concept of the citizen soldier has been relegated to the dung heap of history, or so it seems. The acceptance of hatred as a basis of and motivator for war fighting was one of the first indications of the change.

Along with hatred comes the inevitable dehumanization of our adversaries, and the choice of vindictive and punitive war blithely as a first response. Soldiers need not act humanely if their opponent is not human. Opponents in past wars were seen as men; today, they are vilified and vermin-ized.

Can we define what we are or are becoming, as a society?

• How do we define "warrior hood?"

• How do we define "soldier"?

• Is warrior hood a valid designator for the soldiers of a liberal democratic nation?

• If we are a warrior nation, why not create a mercenary Foreign Legion?

• Is the warrior's code of conduct the same as that for a soldier?

• Is warrior hood compatible with the 21th century?

What are your thoughts on the matter?


NEXT: Sin, Sin, Sin!

The Asunción

Men prefer sorrow over joy
... suffering over peace!
--Ran (1985)
________________

Ranger is tired of the warrior ethos overlaid upon our soldiers. Why the need to apotheosize their human undertakings? As though their transubstantiation from soldier to warrior will ennoble the entire corrupt undertaking.

Everyone offers the doxology. Purple Heart Magazine awarded a Special Leadership award this year to senator Jim Webb, for among other things, his legislation to create a new G.I. Bill.

"Webb's legislation. . . will make it possible for today's young warriors and their families to live the American dream (Purple Heart Magazine, Mar/Apr)."

Sen. Webb is a great advocate for veterans issues, and it is through no fault of his that the New York Review of Books calls him a "warrior-intellectual" (imagine -- a thinkin' warrior?) though he has never referred to himself or our soldiers as "warriors" (aside from discussing the so-called "Wounded Warrior Project.)

Unfortunately, the P.H. Magazine and by extension, the Military Order of the Purple Heart, is endorsing a warrior mentality which is the opposite of the beliefs of our Founding Fathers.

The American dream used to be peace and prosperity and adherence to a set of core values. Both the concept of being a warrior and arriving at the American dream through warfare are gross distortions of the concept of a democracy.

George Washington, the originator of the Purple Heart, never branded himself or his soldiers as warriors. Like the insurgents of Iraq and Afghanistan, Washington fought only in a defensive posture. This is not the stance of the warrior!

Washington left office warning of the dangers of entangling foreign alliances.

We have run afoul of his vision.