Pain Is Weakness Leaving the Body by Lyle Jeremy Rubin

Author:Lyle Jeremy Rubin [J, Lyle Rubin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2022-11-02T00:00:00+00:00

I was determined to become not only a marine officer but also a good one, irrespective of the politics surrounding my commission. I had no control over the stratagems of the Defense Department or the machinations of the CIA, but I would take command, in the not so far off future, of my own little platoon. I intended to conduct myself with the utmost proficiency, and so I set about perusing the relevant literature.

When flipping through the Corps’ Warfighting manual, commonly referred to as MCDP 1 (Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication 1), I was struck by its philosophical influences. It was a stealth crash course in modernity that began with a Pragmatist tutorial on democratic deliberation:

War is thus a process of continuous mutual adaptation, of give and take, move and countermove. It is critical to keep in mind that the enemy is not an inanimate object to be acted upon but an independent and animate force with its objectives and plans.

It proceeded through the mirage of dualism, the hard-nosed counsel of the Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt, the poststructuralist iconoclasm of Michel Foucault, the strategic chaos of the situationist Guy Debord, the right-libertarianism of Friedrich Hayek, on the one hand, and the left-libertarianism of Noam Chomsky, on the other. Next, the spurning of the McNamara Fallacy, the Ivy-educated faith of business executives and government officials—from Robert McNamara to Donald Rumsfeld—that success can be secured through the aggregation of quantifiable data. And, finally, somersaulting backward to hints of Leo Tolstoy’s pacificism and Friedrich Nietzsche’s will to power. If the goal was to survey competing twentieth-century visions of the modern predicament from the white male canon, the Corps could scarcely have done better.

My highlighted sections in the Leading Marines pamphlet were just as telling: “There is yet another element of being different that defines Marines, and that is selflessness.… Any man in combat who lacks comrades who will die for him, or for whom he is willing to die, is not a man at all. He is truly damned.… Marines, far flung, performing dangerous—sometimes apparently meaningless and often overlooked—missions find strength and sense of purpose simply knowing that they are Marines in that mystical grouping they know as the Corps.”

I still wanted to live up to the legend then. More to the point, I didn’t want to let my fellow marines down, specifically those who would be relying on my leadership. But I was also in the process of understanding many themes that would later preoccupy me: the paradox of achieving self-worth and self-aggrandizement through self-sacrifice; the highest form of mutuality, of existence even, necessitating carnage. One’s willingness to take life—one’s own or another’s—counts as life’s most precious benediction. In the absence of this ethos one becomes condemned, and that Longfellow got it backward. It doesn’t matter the cause of the slaying, or even its ultimate end. What matters is the slaying itself. To kill a brother, or to be killed by a brother, is not to violate the covenant of brotherhood but to affirm it.

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