We have all seen the “Army
of One” or the “Few, the Proud, the Marines” commercials. Their images appear
in TV ads and before movies. As jets streak across blue skies and ships across
the sea, strong looking men and women mix metaphors to the narration of a
bombastic announcer. They seem to fight their way through rock and fire,
sprinting through obstacles and fighting.
We flash through their
training, see them fighting our wars in the fields and in command rooms,
glimmering with the sparkle of computer screens and technical read out. The commercial concludes when much
sacrifice, hardship, the drama of combat, and military discipline turn coal
into diamond. The commercial’s protagonists stand adorned in the full glory of
military uniform. They appear to us heroes on a crest over viewing a vast
computer generated landscape.
These commercials only
compliment images of soldiers fighting that the average 18 year old male citizen
is bombarded with, in movies, in news, and, let’s not forget, in first person
shooter video games. Together all these images tell a story: that serving your
country in war, that serving your country in combat transforms the spineless, impotent,
degenerate-piece-of-coal-civilian into a diamond, into a man (or woman) of
integrity and courage, into the virile heroic protector of democracy.
This is perhaps the true
story of some if not many of our honorable soldiers. I am not qualified to
comment on whether it really works this way. I am not a soldier. I have never
been in combat. I have never had to make a life or death choice. I have never
had to hold a gun. I am a happily degenerate civilian. Even to me the story of
our gallant protectors is intoxicating. But far away form the diffused
insurgent fronts in the Middle East, even I can observe that this story is only
one of many stories coming back to us.
Clearly, war changes
different men in different ways. Since we hear so much about our diamonds in
the rough, it might be worth reviewing some of the other stories. How about the
soldiers that come back to us with missing arms and legs? How about the soldiers
that come back with brain damage from having their heads slammed around in
their helmets? How about the soldiers that come back with health problems and
can’t accesses their benefits? How about the soldiers that come back in a pine
box?
And those are only the ones
that come back with their honor intact, if not their minds and bodies. Let us
not forget that the inverse can also be true: some come back to us with intact minds
and bodies, but have been stripped of their honor, a disgrace to their own
human dignity. We need name only a few. How about the abusers at Abu Grab and
Guantanamo? How about the soldier that (reportedly) opens fire and kills 16 sleeping
Afghani villagers? Some don’t come back heroes but torturers and murders
instead.
All of these stories, the
good and the bad, reflect on the charter of our society and they have
implications that are both local and global. We should not be proud of all of
them. It is clear that war and the military transform. It is not clear how they do so. It is
not clear what the end result of the transformation will be. For many the end
result is positive, or at least they are able to go back to family, friends and
some sort of civilian life. Despite even the best intentions some times the
results are horrific.
Do you think that soldiers
enlist with the intent of torturing prisoners or murdering civilians? Perhaps
some twisted individuals do. However, I am inclined to believe that more often
than not, even our disgraced soldiers enlisted with the intent to protect and
serve our country. People enlist with the intent of becoming a better person.
They enlist with the intent of learning to become a hero. They enlist with the
intent of seeing and making their way in a world that is growing ever more
complicated. How do good people with the best of intentions come to do bad
things? This is an important story and many have attempted to tell it.
The world has never been
anything close to simple, and it continues to grow ever more complicated. We may
not always reliably know how environments – like combat, like the military – transform
individuals or what the end result of the transformation will be. However, the
social sciences, and in particular social psychology, have proven that our
environment profoundly influences the way we behave and the way that we think.
We know that the influence of our environment often trumps both our personal
beliefs and our conception of our selves as “good people.”
Many renowned experiments
demonstrate these principles. However perhaps the most well know are the Stanly
Milgram Experiments. In the Stanly
Milgram experiments individuals responding to a newspaper ad came to a Yale
laboratory where they were told that they would be participating in a study on
learning. When subjects arrived they meet a confederate posing as a fellow
subject. A rigged lottery assigned the subject to the position of teacher, and
the confederate to the position of learner.
Subjects and the
experimenter were then lead to a separate room where they saw a table, chairs,
and a shock generator with a dial ranging form 125 volts, all the way up to “XXX.”
Subjects were told that they would be reading word pairs to the learner. The
learner would recite them back; but if he made a mistake, the teacher would
administer shocks in increasing voltage.
As the shocks increased, the learner, who was a professional actor,
would become more and more frantic – begging the teacher to stop the experiment,
faking spasms, and finally passing out. If the teacher hesitated to administer
the next shock, an experimenter in the room would tell the teacher that the
experiment required them to continue.
Before conducting his
experiments Milgram asked leading psychiatrists what percentage of his subjects
would administer the highest shock level. Their estimates ranged from 2% to 3%,
which is the prevalence of psychopathy in the general population. Milgram was
astonished when roughly ten times that amount (about 30%) administered the
final shock.
The Milgram experiments are
one of the best demonstrations of how a bad, authoritarian environment can lead
well intentioned people into doing bad things. The Milgram studies make me
nervous, because I know that I would be one of the “good people” sitting in the
chair pressing the button, shocking someone till they pass out. Milgram told a
good story because bad, authoritarian environments exist outside of the lab. Milgram's story is one that we must remember when we send people to war.
My 18 year old cousin from
Colorado just graduated from Boot Camp.
Though we have never been close, I am proud of him, and nervous for him,
upset, and afraid. I am upset because he has wanted to be in the marines since
he was 5 years old. I think that people wanting
to commit acts of violence (no matter what it is for), is a tragedy. I am
nervous because according to a close friend who was in the navy, the marines
are “bullet sponges.” I am proud because despite the fact that I (and people
like me) am nervous and upset and frankly afraid of and for the people that
fight in my name, these people do so any ways. I am afraid because
experiencing, witnessing, and inflicting violence, pain and suffering will
transform any human being, and it is not always for the better.
Behind my feelings my
choices, my cousin’s feelings and his choices, our countries feelings and our
choices, there are many stories. Each one contains elements of both fact and
fiction and it is incredibly difficult to understand them, to figure out which stories
are best to base our choices on. The process of understanding is dynamic,
iterative, and unending. To come to understand we must ask many questions of
our stories, answer those questions with an integrity that respects empirical
facts, and then evaluate the implications of the answers with honesty – which
in turn forces us to tell new stories and ask new questions.
From understanding comes
an obligation to both investigate when it becomes clear that we do not
understand well enough and to make choices that respect people by respecting
what we do know. Understanding how toxic, fear and ridged command structures
and a mandate for violence can be to the human condition (i.e. the Milgram
studies) obliges us to ask many questions and confront their honest and
complicated answers with integrity.
Here are a few questions
that come to mind: Is the cause that our solders fight for worth asking them to
attempt to endure the toxic environment that is war? Are their other viable
alternatives to armed conflict? Will armed conflict actually protect our cause?
I am not qualified to answer these questions on my own. But I think that as a
citizen it is my duty, our duty, to at least ask them, to learn the art of
asking many questions, and to learn how to ask them well.
The presidential election
approaches, and my cousin, and our sons and daughters, lovers and haters,
friends and family are still marching off to destinies unknown. As a citizen, I
have a lot of questions. It is my hope that as citizens we pay our solders the
utmost respect by doing our duty as citizens: asking the big and uncomfortable questions
and making the big decisions with as much integrity as possible.
