On War and the Soldier

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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.