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Becoming a True Warrior

by David Chrisinger

As far as most traditional societies are concerned, being a warrior was a noble and honorable thing. For men especially, being a warrior was the highest of statuses—and rightfully so.

This word—“warrior”—has gotten a lot of play in the media and in the veteran community since the Global War on Terror began. If you pay attention, you’ll see headline after headline referring to post-9/11 veterans as warriors, regardless of their branch, rank, MOS, etc. And in terms of non-profit organizations that serve veterans, we have the Wounded Warrior Project, the Warrior Brotherhood Veterans Motorcycle Club, Homes for Wounded Warriors, K9s for Warriors, Connected Warriors, No Barriers Warriors, Hope for Warriors, Operation Warrior Wellness, and so on.

I wonder, though, whether this word is going the way of “hero”—a word that has, through overuse, lost most of its original meaning.

Dr. Charles Hoge has worked with thousands of post-9/11 veterans and wrote a valuable book about transitioning veterans titled Once a Warrior—Always a Warrior. He says that any service member, veteran, government worker, or contractor who has ever deployed to a war zone is a warrior—that they have “warrior tendencies” that will need to be refined as they transition back into civilian life.

Dr. Edward Tick has also worked with thousands of veterans—mostly Vietnam-era veterans—and wrote a similarly valuable book about war and coming home titled War and the Soul. He says that a veteran of war does not become a “true warrior” merely for having been in combat. Instead, he says that a veteran does not become a warrior until they:

Learn to carry their war skills in mature ways;
Exercise restraint;
Set right their life again;
Discipline the violence within themselves;
Prioritize protecting life over destroying it;
Serve their nation in peace as well as in war making;
Use force only when they have absolutely no other choice;
Use their influence to dissuade their people from suffering the scourges of war unless absolutely necessary; and
Use the fearlessness they have developed to help keep sanity, generosity, and order.

“The ideal warrior is,” Tick writes, “assertive, active, and energized. He or she is clear-minded, strategic, and alert. A warrior uses both body and mind in harmony and cooperation. A warrior is disciplined. A warrior assesses both his own resources and skills and those arrayed against him. A warrior is a servant of civilization and its future, guiding, protecting, and passing on information and wisdom. A warrior is devoted to causes he judges to be more important and greater than himself or any personal relationships or gain. Having confronted death, a warrior knows how precious and fragile life is and does not abuse or profane it.”

So what should we call those who haven’t yet made this long and difficult journey?

According to Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette, authors of King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine, veterans who have not ascended to warrior status are considered “shadow warriors,” characterized by:

A lack of control of aggression,
Insensitivity to relatedness,
Desire for vengeance,
Enjoyment of carnage and cruelty,
Scorn toward the vulnerable,
Hostility toward the feminine and everything “soft,” and
Compulsive and workaholic tendencies.

Which do you think we need more of today? Warriors? Or shadow warriors? Do we need one so that the other can exist?

There’s no doubt that we are living in some tumultuous times. We will, I fear, always need “rough men” ready to “do violence” to protect those sleeping peacefully in their beds, but what we also need—perhaps more than ever—are true warriors who know the cost of war and who are willing to bear witness to it, who wish to protect and nurture, and who can serve fearlessly to help alleviate human suffering here at home.

Easier said than done, I know, but no one to my knowledge has ever said coming home from war would be easy.

To start the process of becoming a “true warrior,” according to Tick, veterans must accept what has happened to them and “find the depth of character to negotiate” their resulting resentment—to grieve their “lost ideals and innocence, to say yes to new difficulties, to live for [themselves] and all their dead comrades, to make meaning out of the entire matrix.”

Until and unless veterans undertake such a journey, they will remain stuck in a shadow world of loneliness and bitterness.

What do you say? Are you ready to become a true warrior? I sure hope so. We need you.

(Featured Image: Steve Beales / Band of Brothers / The Journal of Military Experience, Vol. 2)

On Our Next Stop In Modern War

By Jerad W. Alexander

“I said, ‘SHOOT HIM!’”

A machinegun rattles. A man dies.

He does not pass away like the elderly or terminally invalid—lying in a hospital bed in the soft receiving haze of curtained sunlight, each breath labored and forced until they’re not anymore. No spectacled doctor in a trim white lab coat waits with two fingers on a flat artery. No one announces the time.

The dead man is the fucked-up earthy brand of dead. He is OD’d dead, murder-victim dead, and taste-the-shotgun-barrel-on-your-tongue dead. He swam the machinegun waters and is now lemming dead. He is dead in every kind of way except peacefully dead. He chose the path of most resistance. He is firefight dead.

Now his body is a barrier we have to cross, the final shattered remains of an insurgent strongpoint boiling with smoke. We move slowly and with purpose. I am number three in the column. We are still alive but could be dead inside too, and the tiny hairs on the back of my neck stand like cactus needles.

What’s It Like to Kill Someone?

by Travis Switalski, Sr.

I have been asked that question more times than I care to count. I have been asked it by complete strangers, friends, and by those closest to me. I have been witness to the anger that erupts when someone is asked it and I have on occasion been the outlet of that anger. Most real honest-to-God combat veterans will tell you that asking that question is inappropriate, to say the least. However, the farther away I get from my time in the military, the less the question bothers me. In fact, I often find myself asking “what was it like to kill someone?” When I think of being asked it occurs to me that I was offended by it not because it was inappropriate, but because I didn’t really have an answer to the question. It was much easier to explode into a tirade or ignore the question than to face it.

I have killed. Killing to me wasn’t so much an act as it was a journey. It began as we marched in formations at Fort Benning, when we responded to the Drill Sergeants counting our steps by saying “Train to kill, kill we will!” I went to the rifle range with my comrades and shot at pop-up, man-shaped silhouette targets. The Army’s mental conditioning designed to offset the “Thou Shalt Not Kill” training provided by society. Action, reaction; target up, shoot, target down; see the enemy, kill the enemy. Train to kill and kill we will. More of the same mental conditioning was provided to us at our units. In Staff Sergeant Moore’s Squad we were taught to “Strike Fast, Kick Ass!” See the enemy, kill him first. Strike fast, kick ass. Our job as Infantrymen, to close with and destroy the enemy by means of maneuver and superior firepower, was drilled into our heads and into our souls. Trained to kill, kill we will. The journey took a few years. All of the training and mental conditioning culminated at one moment, a squeeze of a mechanical trigger, just a fraction of friction. I remember feeling relieved that I had done it, had proved to myself and those around me that I was capable of doing what I was trained to do.

The act of killing I think is immensely private. My buddies saw me do it, but the feelings I had about it were mine alone. Those feelings are not always the same for everybody. I felt a sense of relief and a feeling of accomplishment. I had done it without hesitation and without fanfare. Others took it much harder outwardly. It was not uncommon for guys to lose their nerve after taking a life, or for them to become overwhelmed with the feeling that they had done something wrong. Then, some of the boys took great pleasure in killing, or at least they seemed to. As a defense against labeling the act of killing as killing we use gentle euphemisms to describe it like wasted, smoked or zapped. We also dehumanized our enemy to make wasting him easier on the conscience by calling him Haji, The Dirty Haj, and Raghead to name a few. And after the first time I killed another human being came as a relief to me, all of the ones I killed after him didn’t matter. Killing became a perfunctory and mechanical aspect of my employment.

What is it like to kill someone? As I look back on it now, years after what I hope is the last time I will ever have to kill another person my answer is this: The act of killing is a terrible and sad thing. For many it is a mentally and spiritually damaging act from which they’ll never recover. For others it doesn’t mean anything. For me, all I know is that it is better to be alive than to be dead, to walk the Earth, not to walk in someone else’s memories. I also know that to explain what killing is “like” to a person who has never had to kill, is an exercise in futility. They possess an annoying curiosity on the subject of killing, and maybe they have a right to know exactly what we did on their dime and in their name. Perhaps instead of coming unglued or shutting down, we as veterans should tell them exactly what they want to know even if they could never possibly understand it. Maybe we should find a way to articulate it to them in one word. If I had to sum killing up in one word, I’d say, “Easy.”