The Warriors by J. Glenn Gray

Author:J. Glenn Gray [Glenn Gray, J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8032-8095-3
Publisher: UNP - Bison Books
Published: 1959-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

If the majority of American soldiers find it impossible to attain any other relation to death than that of rejection or negation, we should not hastily conclude that a positive and acceptive relation is evidence of an unnatural or deviant mentality. There are soldiers in the Anglo-Saxon world and perhaps many more in Teutonic and Slavic lands, to say nothing of the Orient, for whom death is a fulfillment. Unless we try to understand the motivation of this kind of soldier, we can make no claim to grasping the full nature of Homo furens.

Here again, however, it is impossible to treat the genus and disregard the numerous species. Not all soldiers who find fulfillment in death seek the same kind of fulfillment, and their motivations are frequently very diverse. For some, death is only a means to fulfillment. Thus it is, for example, with the soldier who sacrifices his life willingly out of love for his country or for a glorified leader or for an ideal like fascism or communism. Such a soldier can enter into death in self-forgetfulness and treat it merely as an incident in comparison with the reality that fills his being. He uses death as a means by which to prove his love and devotion to something beyond himself. Death is welcomed not for itself, but as a sign of his utter faithfulness. Some leaders can call forth in their men this unbounded eagerness to die for them. The simple soldier who obeys such an impulse to self-sacrifice feels in an irrational way that his leader will be mightily satisfied with him for so doing. Any wrath his leader may nurse at a perverse turn of events will be appeased by this act of selflessness. A soldier like this steps into death, as it were, with his eyes fixed elsewhere. He has not thought much or at all about what it is like to be dead or what dying signifies, because he is overcome by enthusiasm for some living ideal or person sufficient to render his own independent existence of lesser value.

For the deeply religious soldier, on the other hand, death can be a fulfillment in a very different sense from self-sacrifice. If he chances to be a follower of those religions that teach eternal life, then physical death is a portal for him to a greater and immeasurably happier life beyond. Though the numbers of such soldiers have decreased markedly in our century, we should not forget that thousands of them still take part in every major war. I was, in fact, astonished to find how many of the farewell letters written by those condemned for the unsuccessful attempt on Hitler’s life in 1944 were pervaded by faith in a life to come. Sometimes this is a minimal faith, a forlorn hope, but there can be little doubt that many soldiers cherish it still. The genuinely otherworldly consciousness, so much scorned as an escape in recent times, is increasingly misunderstood by people who take little time for reflection.

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