Stoic Warriors: The Ancient Philosophy Behind The Military Mind by Nancy Sherman

Author:Nancy Sherman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Inc.
Published: 2005-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

But not all modern armies afford their troops the solace of reliable body identification. Argentinean troops interviewed after the Falklands conflict of 1982 told of their terror of wearing makeshift dog tags, essentially slips of paper taped onto a small aluminum disk. After a few days of heat and sweat, the writing would run, and the identification would be wiped away. Others, who counted themselves “less lucky,” were left to write their names and addresses on their arm in ballpoint ink. Still others wrapped letters from home in plastic and shoved them deep in their pockets, hoping that even if they didn’t survive, at least the return addresses on the envelopes might. Fear is still audible in this interview with a veteran: “Senora, do you know the terror that it means to a person to think that they will die and no one will know where you are buried? Your mother will never know. Your body will never go back home and no one will ever visit your grave.”51

This Argentinean’s terror of vanishing without record must mark a recurrent theme in the history of warfare. For dog tags are a relatively new phenomenon, with more long-lasting types emerging only during the two world wars and used today by only those countries that can afford the luxury. It is worth recalling that American Civil War soldiers, much like the Argentineans more than a hundred years later, went into battle with their names and addresses written only on paper pinned onto the back of their coat. The slightest amount of mud, blood, or rain could wash away an identity.52

Here I vividly recall one of my earliest introductions to the Naval Academy—a “hail and farewell” party for arriving and departing members. As my host, Betsy Holmes, a Navy captain and clinical psychologist, was to explain to me many years later, such events are a ritualized way of “honoring absence and presence” within the military. They are a reminder that despite the frequency of those cycles in a military person’s life, absence and presence are never to be taken for granted. In a powerful way, this Argentinean soldier reminds us that permanent absence must be honored as well, and he also reminds us of the powerful fear that can attach to leaving this world without markers.

In a significant way, Seneca shows some sympathy with the point. While he will hold that full moral perfection requires facing the inevitability of death with equanimity, he nonetheless maintains that this may be too much to ask of the moral learner, even in advanced stages of moral progress. In this regard, Seneca self-consciously opts for a strain of Stoicism “milder,” as he puts it, than orthodox doctrine: “For it is our Stoic fashion,” he writes to Lucilius, “to speak of all those things, which provoke cries and groans, as unimportant and beneath notice; but you and I must drop such great-sounding words” and speak “in a milder style.”53 Here, the issue of how to apply Stoic ideals to less than perfect moral beings is clear.

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