“War may be the only way in which most men touch the mythic domains in our soul. It is, for men, at some terrible level, the closest thing to what childbirth is for women: the initiation into the power of life and death. It is like lifting off the corner of the universe and looking at what’s underneath.”
-William D. Broyles, Jr. (1988). Why Men Love War. Esquire.
Droves of our young men (and women) are curious about war. They watch Russians and Ukrainians kill each other on YouTube™, or Kurds and Turks on Gerilla TV, or worse on anonymous dump sites and messaging apps. For many of these voyeurs, maybe the largest portion, these videos are a stand-in for their real desire: to see combat for real. But our youth have all been taught that war is destructive, evil, a relic of our savage past. Their desire to go to war is the compulsion of a twisted mind, so they’re told.
I was one of those boys. I wanted to know that hidden part of the world. That part of myself. The boys and girls I fought alongside all wished for tremendous combat–to witness it, to put our bodies in it.
When the jets screeched, or a bullet-crack rang my ear, it was more than exhilarating; it was what I had been waiting for. We ran to it, set alarms, became more diligent than we were in our old lives, just to partake in as much as possible. We all had our surface reasons: political ideology, heroism, revenge. But behind all that, what we wanted was an answer to a question:
What is war?
War is the sole manifestation of truth. It is reality–unadulterated, purified, and intravenously injected. It’s where all the could’ve-would’ve-should’ve turns into did or did-not. It’s THE canon. The ultimate non-fiction. It is the die roll of fate, coming to a distinct and undeniable stop.
What you believe war is, is some second, separate thing. You can read, watch, and talk all about it–but you will only have that second thing.
There is wisdom gained only through war. You will see the real world there, and see men as they really are, and meet your real self. And I can tell you what I’ve seen, but that’s not the same as seeing it. Someone could tell me what heroin feels like–but that’s not feeling it.
Many think war is a test–a Darwinian measure of aptitude–while another half think that war is fruitless, meaningless. I’ll address the latter first.
The self-righteous believe war is all bad. They believe they know war by their looking at footage, or reading, or hearing the stories, or their tour in the sandbox driving roads with bombs on them. “War. Huh! What is it good for?” But central to this view is the belief that our species is not naturally warlike but is naturally civilized. This is incorrect.
Without straying too far from my own purview, the simple truth is that we humans have been brutally killing each other for much longer than we have not. Our prehistoric human ancestors practiced war. Our primate ancestors before them practiced war. Our current primate relatives practice terrible, savage war.
For every human that existed before civilization, life was war. Our species was born into war because nature is war.
Before industrialization, the child mortality rate was fifty percent. Half of all children born would die, either at birth, or in early childhood. Those that did survive contended with predators, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, volcanoes, famine, fire and frost. When we built walls against those, the problems didn’t stop but worsened: plague, populism, human sacrifice, witch trials, assassination, conquest, insurrection, sectarianism, holocausts.
We humans built civilization very recently in our total history, and it has not spared us from war but refined it, industrialized and digitized it.
Hatred of war is an equal–if not worse–naivety than optimism. It is an ignorance toward nature and a refusal to look at one’s own animalness. It is a quiet surrender to those that still torture, chop off heads, or blow themselves up for their goat-herder religions. The question “what should we do about being alive?” will be argued for in blood by those who are most concerned about it. Refusing to answer in blood reassures the head-chopper that you cannot handle the decision making process. To them, speaking and killing are a single form of communicating differing only in severity. To a degree, they are correct. (How does a lion argue? A dog? How would primates argue before we had words? Physical communication is communication.)
The optimist, on the other hand, thinks of war as a test; a measure of their skill and competence–their specialness. That is only half true, and of the part that is half true, the optimist doesn’t understand.
See, war doesn’t measure how fast you run, or how well you shoot, or how good-hearted you are. It tests how long you can sit in the dirt like an insect, watching for hours with nothing to occupy your mind but the slim chance that an enemy may suddenly emerge and–for a split second–be killable. It tests how well you can ignore your evolved sense of danger; to fight equally whether behind the next corner is only one enemy or fifty.
It tests your manners: how well you can live in a group so intimate as to shit shoulder-to-shoulder. There are no hot-shot, Tom Cruise characters in war–just assholes whose comrades want to smoke them more than the enemy does. No matter how physically capable you are, you can’t be rude and a good soldier.
The other half of war is watching good people, people better than yourself, get obliterated for no good reason.
I saw war was a fickle bitch, killing without regard to virtue, justice, or beauty. It is the cruel darkness of nature. Back home you can look away–look away from the slightly-rotting human animals lining our streets. In war there’s nothing else to look at, and you wouldn’t want to.
“Part of the love of war stems from its being an experience of great intensity; its lure is the fundamental human passion to witness, to see things–what the Bible calls the lust of the eye and the Marines in Vietnam called eye fucking.”
-William D. Broyles, Jr.
I saw that combat was a sport–a game that usually rewarded the better team.
In combat you see the animalness of men–their brains damaged, pieces missing. In those animals you will see yourself. You will see nothing and everything; the black streak of missiles you didn’t think you could spot with your eye; supersonic detonation–an instantaneous expansion of matter that your animal brain wasn’t evolved to comprehend–the demon that took Nobel’s brother but made him as rich as a king.
What you thought war was will smash against what war is. You will see your ignorance laid out–possibly at the expense of your life or the lives of those next to you.
The hopeful soldier is looking for proof of their worthiness, the same way he looks for validation from young women. It’s naive, but still a noble desire. You might just find what you are looking for. People may need you. You could join an exceptional group and find belonging that the modern world cannot give you.
But when the war is over, or you decide to leave before you die, what can you take back with you to civilization?
Nothing. No belonging. No group. No standing. All the signs in the world will once again read: you’re dog-shit. “Thank you for your service,” is a sick joke and even more so if the person means it. I didn’t go to war to save others, I went to war to save myself from others. Being out of war is like losing a great love.
Life in war is meaning, purpose and belonging. You see it every single day in the love and admiration of those around you–whom you also love and admire. I have met great soldiers and wonderful people who come back home, after years of surviving just fine in combat, to immediately kill themselves.
What the war-seeker truly desires is meaning. They are starving for it. But war is transient relief–sugar to your hunger. So unless you want to die early, you must find meaning in life and not war.
But meaning is not the standard course of modern life. It is absent from our social model. Civilization has expunged war and survival from our lives, and threw out with them meaning and belonging. This is why you feel the hunger. Why do you think our most popular books and movies are all about catastrophe, or apocalypse–the current hegemony conveniently burning to the ground?
There are good people all over the world unfairly afflicted by war. There are still good causes to join. But if you do go to war and survive, when the rifles are put down and you’ve carried your friends to the grave, you will return to a more terrible battleground: our meaningless civilization.
And who will be left to fight that battle? Politicians? Cops? Your parents? The work-from-home, vote-by-mail, DoorDash™ revolutionaries?
Who’s going to fight the war of our wasted civilization? And who could be more motivated for the job than you?
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