What It Is Like To Go To War by Marlantes Karl

Author:Marlantes, Karl [Marlantes, Karl]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780857893796
Publisher: Atlantic Books
Published: 2011-09-30T22:00:00+00:00

7

LOYALTY

Warriors have always had to deal with loyalty. Concepts of loyalty change, however, and warriors have to cope with that as well. Through much of history loyalty pretty much meant being faithful to the leader of your group. In many parts of the world today loyalty is given to some concept of the nation or the state and leaders are simply viewed as temporary managers of these larger entities. No matter the course of the future the warrior will need to constantly reevaluate to whom or to what he is loyal and why. There will be situations when loyalty to the side of the fight or even some higher value is in direct conflict with loyalty to one’s own moral code. The warrior must live with these tensions and consciously choose among them. Sometimes the conflict will be unbearable. The warrior will fail and will have to learn to live with that.

In 1964 I stood with a bunch of other kids, raised my right hand, and joined the United States Marine Corps. I swore an oath to follow the orders of the commander in chief and defend the Constitution of the United States of America. I don’t remember the precise words. I do remember the solemnity and seriousness with which I swore that oath. I believed in God. I believed in the Constitution. Most important, I believed that a president of the United States would never give me an order that would cause me any moral conflict.

Three years later I was in my room at University College, Oxford, England, struggling with my friend John about just such a moral conflict. We were both trying to decide whether to give up our Rhodes scholarships: in my case, to join my fellow Marines who were already fighting in Vietnam or to desert to Sweden or Algeria; in his case, to turn in his draft card, an act which entailed permanent exile in Canada.

Earlier, in September, my commander in chief, President Lyndon Johnson, had given a speech in El Paso, Texas. I had listened to it in a 1954 Buick driving across South Dakota with a friend from college. We were on our way to New York from Seattle, he to the Columbia University business school and eventually the Peace Corps and I to Oxford and eventually Vietnam. I was by then a Marine second lieutenant with a temporary duty assignment to Oxford so I could take up my scholarship.58 In his speech, Johnson had made a remark about “cocktail critics,” people who bitch about things at cocktail parties but never have to face any of the hard choices. That remark hung with me all across the brown plains and all across the gray early-winter Atlantic on the S.S. United States with my fellow scholars. And it hung with me every day of what should have been the time of my life at Oxford.

By the fall of 1967 I couldn’t defend the war politically. Nor did I. John and I basically agreed it was a mistake.

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