Reply #8: War brutalizes SOME people [View All]

[Gordon25]

As DEMVET points out in the post above, there are those capable of following a warrior's life path who yet retain a capacity for true compassion and kindness.

As a Marine Corps Vietnam vet myself with five years plus service, it is my experience that it is the lies told as part of the rationale for war which lead to the brutalization.

War has a way of forcing you to make choices which in any other situation you would never make. Example: It is night at an ambush site. You have a wounded teenage enemy fighter laying near you who is screaming in pain. The noise is going to give away your position and probably lead to you and all those with you being killed. You try to silence him with a hand over his mouth and the thrashing response provides a different but equally dangerous noise. You choose to cut his throat to save your own life and the lives of those comrades around you.

Those kinds of choices, in the aftermath, can be extremely difficult to deal with, but if you can believe in your heart that your reason for being in that situation in the first place is just, it makes the weight of the responsibility easier to bear.

If however, as was the case in Vietnam and now in Iraq, you find the reasons you were given for going to war were based on lies, that external justification which arises from a just cause, disappears. When you are left in that situation by your leaders, without a valid external justification for your actions, the process of brutalization begins because you now must begin the process of hardening yourself against the guilt and emotional pain arising from your actions.

You begin to wall off parts of yourself. You depersonalize the enemy because "things" do not give birth to guilt. You lie to yourself at first, and then to others. You refuse to see anything which calls into question the "reality" you have created as a justification. You hear, see, acknowledge only those things which reinforce your position. And when you have perfectly protected yourself and have built full personal justification for your actions, you have become capable of anything because these internal justifications are inevitably also built on lies.

The point being, it is lies in the justification for war which brutalize, not necessarily war itself.

This is a difficult idea, concept, experience to get into words. I apologize if I have not been clear. But personal experience leads me to believe it is an important point to ponder.

Gordon25