This talk and the one immediately following by my good friend Eugene Sledge, a former United States Marine,
I think you'll find illuminating about what actually happens in war, which is by no means an abstraction.
My friends and I sometimes play a game that you might enjoy too.
We call it oxymoron. The object is to come up with phrases which, while superficially plausible, prove on skeptical examination to involve intellectually comical contradictions in terms, like, for example, creation science.
How about the journalistic ethics?
That's right up there with the Maoist concept of a cultural revolution.
How about the phrase scholar-athlete, or, looking toward the university faculty instead
of the Students, the phrase Scholar Activist. That's actually a phrase the Washington Post
saw no contradiction in when it recently designated that way the newly appointed president of
the University of the District of Columbia. And speaking of that sort of thing, some deeply
cynical players of this game oxymoron contemplating the compromised, uncertain and sentimental
The title, sane, of much of the higher learning today might go so far as to propose as the winning oxymoron the phrase, college education.
Now I start this way because my title, The Culture of War, might be regarded as that kind of flagrant oxymoron.
And so it would be if I were invoking the term culture in any artistic or intellectual sense,
implying within the armed forces a considerable amount of viola playing, classical acting,
liberal drawing and painting and modeling, poetry and fiction writing, and difficult reading.
But actually, it's not things like that I'm trying to suggest by the word culture.
I'm using it in a quasi-anthropological sense, the way T.S. Eliot used it when he wrote a book called
Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, a book in which he considered the possibility of a healthy and interesting society
based on something like religious principles.
In that book, Eliot understands how much, as he puts it, how much is embraced by the term culture, a term designating not merely artistic or ennobling activities, but the general forms and usages and techniques of a given society, including military society.
To Eliot, culture includes, as he says, all the characteristic activities and interests of a people, and using the British people and their culture as his examples.
He goes on to instance, as components of British culture, these things, Derby Day, Henley regatta, dog racing, dark boards, boiled cabbage cut into sections, a rather disgusting idea, surely.
19th century gothic churches and the music of Sir Edward Elgar, and he adds the reader can make his own list.
Well, in the same way, probably any one of us could make a list of things comprising the culture of war.
But at the outset, I should warn you that the items I'll mention are collected not by any military strategist or theoretician or historian or scholar.
There are the views, some of them doubtless embittered, of a superannuated, badly wounded
former infantry lieutenant, a one-time rifle platoon leader who fought the Second World
War in Europe, commanding 40 terrified young Americans, many of whom were killed or cruelly
wounded.
Thus, if the word culture presents some problems, the word war will present even more.
The truth is that very few people know anything about war.
In an infantry division, for example, fewer than half the troops actually fight, that
Mises with rifles, mortars, machine guns, grenades, and trench knives.
The others, thousands on thousands of them, are occupied with truck driving, mimeograph
machine operating, cooking and baking, ammunition and ration supplying, and similar housekeeping
tasks.
Now those things are no doubt necessary, but they're hardly bellicose, and they hardly
provide the sort of experience which can issue as trustworthy testimony about what the word
war might mean.
This is a reason why most combat veterans tend to smile cynically and sardonically
at veterans' reunions when those reunions are attended by very large numbers.
For most soldiers participating in the Second World War, the war meant inconvenience, rising
sometimes to hardship, enforced travel and residence abroad, unappetizing food, absence
of tablecloths, and often bedsheets. But for those unlucky enough to be in the forward combat
Units, the war meant death or maiming and in extraordinarily dirty and undignified circumstances.
At the very least, for most it meant a rapid and shocking metamorphosis from boyhood innocence
to adult cynicism and bitterness.
is an experience remembered vividly even at this distance that has inducted me into my
understanding of the culture of war.
It is a culture hard for civilians to understand, and it's not their fault that they can't,
because civilians occupy a world, thank God, which is in large part rational and predictable,
A world which makes sense in an old-fashioned way.
Now let me illustrate what I mean.
A while ago, I was telephoned by a lawyer in New York City.
He indicated that he was conducting a course for cadets at West Point, a course in the
relation between language and violence.
This course focused on the deformations of language required for the registration of
of Non-Rational Violent Behavior
For example, what euphemisms, if any, were employed in these after-action reports?
What were the temptations that I felt to provide rational motives for violent or inexplicable
events?
As this phone call went on, I confessed to an outburst of extreme angry discourtesy, the
The sort of thing that's common among infantrymen reinstalled in an optimistic and unimaginative civilian culture.
I asked with some passion, I asked this lawyer, have you ever been in combat?
He answered, no.
I then explained with elaborate sarcasm that I never heard of such things as after-action reports from small assault units.
How, after all, could one pull oneself together to compose an after-action report with pencil
and paper when you had the following after-action features to attend to?
First, the question of what to do when the six German prisoners the assault has just
yielded.
How can one keep a very angry private who had seen his buddy's eye shot out from doing
what he very much wanted to do, to kill all the prisoners?
Second, after action you had to clean up the mess.
This meant taking care of the wounded, some of whom were in intense pain and the morphine
is already exhausted.
Three. After action, you had to reposition your soldiers to repel a German counter-attack,
and you had to jolly them up to make them want to continue fighting the war in the prescribed manner.
Fighting the war after action is going to be very difficult because your sergeant is over there crying.
Fourth, how could a junior officer like me write an after-action report when his hand was covered
with the blood of one of his men whose wound in the back I had ineffectively tried to bandage
while the bullets and shell fragments were flying around? Given all this, and this is item five,
given all this, how could such a person have waited a day or so to file his after-action report
In a calmer mood, when a third of the men whose testimony would be required were gone,
killed or wounded, and where would he find the quiet to write it?
By that time he'd be engaged in further violence himself.
The point is that producing after-action reports is the privilege of leaders who are non-combatants,
and the usefulness and authenticity of such reports can already be sensed to be adjacent
to the usefulness of works of fiction.
My point is less that than the instructive naiveté of the lawyer, a very representative
human being.
One would expect a lawyer in New York City, especially, to be quite sophisticated about
the facts of life.
And here is one who imagined that the conduct of combat was rational.
He was a victim of what I call inappropriate rationalism, with a bit of inappropriate optimism
as well.
Those who find it hard to understand how often soldiers kill their own comrades, I'm talking
about Friendly Fire episodes are victims of the same intellectual and emotional error.
The culture of war, in short, is not like the culture of ordinary peacetime life.
It's a culture dominated by fear and blood and sadism, by irrational actions and preposterous
and usually ironic results.
It has more relation to science fiction or to ironic theater than to actual life, and
that makes it hard to describe it.
If you like, you can regard what I've said about this bizarre and ignorant concern with
after action reports.
If you like, you can regard it as just another bureaucratic intrusion into a place where such
intrusion is entirely inappropriate, and even worse, stupid.
It's especially unfortunate because it simply underlines the unpleasant facts of the military
class system.
On the one hand, remote and privileged staffs and administrators.
On the other, the troops, mostly sad conscripts, we must remember, the troops who must do the
The distance between serious survivors of World War II fighting and optimistic onlookers can
be measured by a current controversy in Britain.
This controversy is between veterans of the Second World War and the government.
The veterans want D-Day commemorated with solemnity and sorrow.
After all, it marked the beginning of a battle in which 37,000 people, most of them pathetically
young, were killed.
The government, avid for tourist dollars, takes a different approach.
It proposes not a commemoration, but a celebration involving street parties, dances, cute reenactments,
The Quarrel is between those who know the culture of war and those who think they know it, or who are prepared to profit from a misrepresentation of it.
In between these two groups, a reconciliation is hardly possible.
A spokesman for the veterans in this quarrel has said the event is being trivialized.
Those who actually took part feel it was just a battle, albeit a successful one.
Many of their comrades lost their lives in the process, and many ladies were widowed.
That the Allies won the Second World War doesn't oblige us to be cheerful about it.
Wars are won by distinction in the techniques of mass murder, and that's hardly something
for people pretending to civilization to be proud of. Tolstoy's words are worth recalling.
War, he said, is not a polite recreation, but the vilest thing in life, and we ought
to understand that and not play at war. It will be years, perhaps decades, before it
It becomes clear whether the Cold War was really necessary, or was a gratifying and
profitable playing at war, whose beneficiaries were not the people of the earth, but the
makers of armaments designed to become rapidly obsolete and quickly replaceable.
If focusing the economy on armaments bankrupted the Soviet Union, think what it did to the
Thus, if the culture of war solidifies those who fight and alienates them from those who
do not, it has other regrettable aspects.
One of them is censorship.
War kills people, obviously, and the culture of war does not, but the culture of war kills
Freedom is something precious and indispensable in a civilized society, that is freedom of
utterance, freedom of curiosity, freedom of knowledge.
Recently, I think you're going to like this, recently an official of the Pentagon explained
why the military had censored some TV footage depicting Iraqi soldiers cut in half by automatic
Fire for U.S. Helicopters. He explained, if we let people see that kind of thing, there
would never again be any war. I got that quotation from a comical gift book titled, The Seven
176 stupidest things ever said.
But that remark, of course, is far from stupid, it is very true, and its implications spread
very far.
It's obvious that tight censorship is a necessity in any modern war.
It's usually rationalized by the need to keep the enemy in the dark about our plans, but
it's also valuable to conceal military blunders and fatalities and war crimes from a public
that in the absence of censorship might learn to be critical.
And my point is this, if you are trained to be uncritical of the military, you can easily
go just a little bit further and learn to be uncritical of government and of authority
and of all established and received institutions.
The result is, of course, the death of the mind, the transformation of the higher learning
and independent scholarship into a cheering section for whatever popular notions and superstitions
prevail at the moment.
During wartime and during the cold wartime, we've all had to pretend that the military
is a force for some kind of social good. I wonder if it is. Is the habit of unthinking
obedience a good one to instill in young Americans? For one thing clear about the culture of war
is that it's necessarily an obedience culture. And as one critic has noticed of armies in
general, in organizations where there must be unquestioning obedience, there must be
and a passive injustice.
And not just that, the obedience culture is certain over the long run to shrivel originality
and constrict thought, to encourage witless adaptation and social dishonesty.
The culture of war is the only culture where the concept of morale is crucial.
And that's a significant point.
Money is crucial in the culture of war because at all times the troops are engaging in activities
sure to undermine cheerfulness and hope. They are either being bored picking up cigarette
butts or they are being dehumanized by killing their fellow creatures, who like them are
for the most part helpless conscripts who have done nothing for which they deserve to
be blown to bits.
In wartime culture, censorship has the assistance of general euphemism and programmatically
inaccurate language. Before long we are calling war making peace keeping and believing it.
What used to be designated aerial bombing has been euphemized into airstrikes and even
Surgical Airstrikes, dishonestly implying a degree of accuracy which will make combat
veterans laugh out loud.
Originally artillery or mortar shells fired by mistake at our own troops were called terrible
mistakes or tragic errors.
Then a euphemism was devised, incontinent ordinance, and finally some Pentagon genius
hit upon the warmer and cozier term, friendly fire.
During the Gulf War, friendly fire caused over one-third of the American casualties.
Twenty-three percent of the American dead died from friendly fire.
Fifteen percent of the American wounded were wounded by friendly fire.
Now, of course, blunders are the very essence of war.
This is why the culture of war is so far removed from the culture of predictability and rationality.
Soldiers know that blunders are the very essence of war,
Because they know what's likely to happen when you arm a lot of frightened boys with deadly weapons,
but the public must not be told, lest their simple faith in military authority and rationality be shaken.
Transforming the ugly and shocking into the noble and bright is the business of the most popular illustrated history of the Second World War.
In those volumes, clear and noble cause and purpose are assigned systematically to events
which are really accidental or which are embarrassingly demeaning.
Readers of those books are insulted by being presumed to be incapable of confronting the
In truth, everything must be transformed into fairy tales of heroism, success and nobility.
That series of books has thus conveyed to the credulous a satisfying, orderly, wholesome
and optimistic view of catastrophic occurrences, like for example the shooting down of hundreds
of American paratroopers during the invasion of Sicily by frightened and undisciplined
American sailors convinced that the large airplanes flying overhead held enemy troops.
The presentation of war by such dishonest means is a fine way, actually, to encourage
a moralistic, nationalistic and bellicose international politics.
Now, it's customary to maintain that American wars are all fought on behalf of freedom.
There is few notice that for the sake of freedom, millions of young men are enslaved for years, shying hide by conscription into a life whose every dimension is at odds with the idea of freedom.
Flags, uniforms, bugle calls, band music, all the trappings of military glory hardly
suffice to persuade the hapless conscript that he is involved in the defense of freedom,
especially when his weekend pass has just been canceled at the last minute in payment
for a heartfelt satiric remark which his sergeant has just overheard.
Indeed, the culture of war is hardly separable from the culture of chickenshit, to invoke
a rude term which I hope will offend no one here, all of whom I take to be expert in the
facts of life, in addition to the facts of economics.
During the Second World War, an Australian poet, John Manifold, wrote a poem titled
Ration Party. It dramatizes the irony of slaves in uniform defending freedom, and it adds
the irony by being a sonnet of poetic kind normally associated with delicate or beautiful
sentiments.
Here is his poem, Ration Party.
Across the mud the line drags on and on.
Tread slithers, footholds fails, all ardors vanish.
Rain falls, the barking NCOs admonish the universe more than the lagging men.
Something like an infinity of men plods up the slope.
The file will never finish, for all their toil serves only to replenish stores for tomorrow's
labors to begin.
Absurd to think that liberty, the splendid nude of our dreams, the intercessory saint
for us to judgment, needs to be defended by sick, fatigued men brimming with complaint
and Misery, who bear till all is ended every imaginable pattern of restraint.
Now the final thing I want to point out about the culture of war is that it is necessarily
and resolutely only adversarial, only dualistic.
We are here, the enemy is over there, and a no-man's land, either literal or figurative,
as in ideology, divides us.
The divisiveness at home, occasioned by the Vietnam War, is an example, and that divisiveness,
as you're aware, almost ruined this country.
You remember how it went.
If you opposed the war, you were dishonoring the flag, and were practically a traitor.
If you favored the war, you were a true American. You had thus to be either a dove or a hawk.
Take your choice. No room for compromise, conciliation, or even very subtle discussion.
If you were not for the war, you must be for communism. It was that attitude that finally
brought down the Nixon White House.
If earlier invasion or physical pressure against American territory would lead to war, now
the U.S. became kissing her eyes.
Now threats to American, quote, national interest were a sufficient reason for sending the troops
into bloody action.
National interest is constitutionally an interesting term because it is legally meaningless and
constitutionally undefinable, hence popular.
The evanescent phrase the national interest is the best gift ever awarded to those Americans
who are neurotically bellicose, but who like Henry Kissinger always seem to avoid being
on the front line, preferring to serve their country by getting others to drop bombs on
people, and the people they drop bombs on, and this is notable, are always more primitive
and unfortunate than themselves. They're always smaller in stature, they always have, or usually
have darker skins. That is what the current culture of war seems to amount to, and I think
I think we should abhor it. Thank you.