Memorial Day is a perfect time to commend and defend the soldiers whom we as a country have burdened with tasks risky to their bodies and souls. It goes without saying that, if our country is at war then the people on the front edge of executing that war deserve our love. This does not mean that we are happy to be at war, so Memorial Day becomes also a perfect time to clarify for ourselves just what it is we have asked of soldiers and why and what the rest of us owe our country. Or the world. Or our God.
My effort to understand all of this has been aided tremendously by a long but profound and enlightening Brookings essay by Phil Klay, a man who served with the Marines in Afghanistan. Early in this remarkable piece of writing, entitled The Citizen-Soldier, Klay points out that joining the Marine Corps or any branch of the military is not just exposing oneself to the trials and risks of combat, “…it’s also about exposing yourself to moral risk.” He says that a soldier gives up “any claim to moral purity.” Joining means, he said, “getting your hands dirty.”
He goes on to talk about this moral burden that we place on our soldiers and how it rightly should be shared by the rest of us, declaring that to criticize or condemn or praise a soldier for joining a war is really to express praise or censure of ourselves for being part of a nation that engages in war.
Explaining this, he says, “Joining the military is an act of faith in one’s country—faith that the country will use your life well.”
A soldier has really made a commitment that costs him some of his individual rights. He has given up his own opinion, his own right to choose his battles and his role in those battles. He has trusted his country to use him in an honorable way. In the military, Klay points out, calling someone an “individual” is a slur. Every soldier is part of a team; to act in one’s personal interest, even for one’s ethical comfort, is a betrayal of the team and could lead to betrayal of the country.
This is precisely why it is so important that we civilians, who on some level have retained the right to individual opinions, understand the moral significance of acts of war. For years I have been deeply aware of this, having experienced in the Middle East the Six-Day War of June, 1967, the war between the Jordan army and the Palestinian militias, the long, long civil war in Lebanon, and the Israeli invasion in the middle of it. I came home with a personal and visceral antipathy toward war. Able to make long lists of reasons to hate it, reasons originating in painful memories, (many narrated in my book, In Borrowed Houses) I seek always the intellectual and spiritual explanations for the prevalence of such great evil.
It is clear, I suppose, that war is a means of achieving something which may be in itself an excellent thing. The question is whether or not killing people and destroying their property is the only way to achieve that end. And could we avert the need for such drastic actions by relating to the world in a different way?
In conversation with a gentleman in a California church, I mentioned that a certain group of people had attained territory by invading and taking it from their neighbor. And this Christian man casually pointed out to me, “This is the way the map of the world is made.” He was right, of course. He had found a succinct way to say that we live in a world in which violence is reflexive, automatic. And, whether or not, he meant to, he was telling me that American Christians have accepted the world’s way of doing business.
I think that citizens who are keenly aware of the moral issues of war are the ones who are aware of this acceptance and of the complexity of the military culture. We speak against war not to belittle or condemn our soldiers but to make the nation think of what it is doing. As civilians we have the privilege of being individuals. We can argue with one another. We are part of the decision-making structure. The nation is hardly able to fight wars without the support of the population. Unless we are willing to go to war, men and women will not volunteer to fight.
We are responsible for everything the military does, while usually spared the bloody, sweaty details.
I once asked a man who had fought in Korea, “What was the hardest thing you had to do in that war?” Without hesitation he said, “Shooting the children.”
He explained, as I remember, that American troops were moved by train, and like children everywhere, the Korean kids would stand by the railroad tracks to see the powerful engine, the windows full of soldiers, etc. The enemy bribed some of these children with food and gave them hand grenades to throw at the trains. This had made it necessary for our soldiers to stand on the steps of every troop train with rifles and shoot the children who came out to watch. Who could know which one had a grenade?
That’s “getting your hands dirty.” That’s why soldiers come home and drink and lie awake nights or have nightmares and discover they hate themselves, sometimes to the point of committing suicide.
We all know someone who has not lived easily with his memories. In Lebanon I knew a boy of twenty who sometimes, after battles, looked forty. “I meant to be a priest,” he told me, “and instead I became a killer.”
I still wonder what became of another young man who, participating in a massacre, threw down his rifle and ran home, to beg his parents, “Get me out of here; I am becoming a beast!”
Klay, brought up as a Catholic, recalls the time when Christians developed the concept of “just war” and the church supported the participation of Catholics but required soldiers to do penance afterwards for enemies they had killed, clearly reflecting discomfort with their official position and awareness of the burden that soldiers carried in their souls.
Quoting a humanities professor, Klay attempts to draw a much bigger circle of responsibility. Robert Emmett Meager said, “How many American presidents or members of Congress have suffered from PTSD or taken their own lives rather than live any longer with the burden of having declared war?”
Do you know one? There you have it. Neither our government decision-makers, nor we, have walked in the boots of those who carry out the orders. We have not accepted the seriousness of our own role.
A soldier is committed to “support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” Every obligation to kill in obedience to an order is part of that commitment. But we, too, all of us as citizens carry this same responsibility. We are a part of the gigantic machine that makes the decisions and sends soldiers to war.
Klay concludes his powerful essay with these words: “No civilian can assume the moral burdens felt at a gut level by participants in war, but all can show an equal commitment to their country, an equal assumption of the obligations inherent in citizenship, and an equal bias for action. Ideals are one thing—the messy business of putting them into practice is another. That means giving up on any claim to moral purity. That means getting your hands dirty.”
In other words, if any soldier comes home unable to live with the memory of what he has done, we, who by our vote or our innate animosity or our lazy assent participated in making the decision to go to war, should also spend sleepless nights and ask God’s forgiveness.
And it is appropriate on Memorial Day or any day to thank those who have done the suffering in our behalf.
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