Mark Pyruz, who has commented several times on The Secret Life of Walter Mitty and shown great skepticism about the concept of the Code of the Warrior, recently offered this challenge:
I’ll provide you with a historical situation, and you identify the code.
Trucks arrive at your village. Armed men get out and corral all males capable of bearing arms or even walking. There is no registration process, men are simply picked up by physical size, so 15 and even 14 year olds are selected. You are then taken captive and hauled away in trucks and later into trains, your destination the front. The ‘lucky’ ones get uniforms (or parts of uniforms) and a firearm of some kind. You are marched at bayonet point to the actual front line, dodging the effects of artillery and air attack the entire way. At the jump off point, a whistle blows and you are rushed forward in a human wave attack against an enemy position. Any stragglers are shot down by police forces at your rear. The odds are highly unlikely that you will survive. But if you do, you will face the same situation again and again.
Where is the code? And please don’t consider this situation as some kind of exception to your code, as this situation was in no way exceptional during the Russian Revolutionary War, the Great Patriotic War and the Iran-Iraq War.
These are violations of the Warrior Code. As I mentioned in one of my comments, an important purpose of the Code is to protect the soldier psychologically. Jonathan Shay, a psychiatrist who treats military veterans with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), repeatedly found that veterans with PTSD had experienced what he calls “betrayal of what’s right.” “Betrayal of what’s right” is the core theme of his well known book, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (1994) [see also this review]. Being forcibly dragooned into a fight that is not your own — that does not represent your values — and then being used abusively in a human wave attack: if this isn’t a betrayal of what’s right, I don’t know what is.
Mark is at pains, I think, to craft a scenario in which there are soldiers but not warriors. This is fair enough, and historically it happens regularly. (Another example would be the increasingly common phenomenon of making soldiers of children.) But driving this system at some point, there are warriors, and it is they who have violated the Code. It is they who have betrayed what’s right, and given way entirely to what in Jungian terms would be called the Shadow Warrior. If this seems vague to you, think of Darth Vader, a mythic warrior who famously embraced the “dark side of the force.”
In real life, this can happen to actual veterans, and it can create lasting psychological damage in men who have committed atrocities or dishonored a dead enemy. Such veterans seem disproportionately to fall victim to PTSD. The same often occurs in veterans who were treated unfairly by their leaders (for example, being repeatedly singled out to “walk point,” so that the burden of this dangerous task is not shared equally within the unit).
(For more on this subject, see my online essay, Union Soldiers and the Persistence of Restraint in War.)
5 Comments
Count me with Mark Pyruz as a skeptic on the warrior code. Take Achilles, since you bring up Shay’s book. Certainly a warrior, but what does he do to Hector’s corpse? Ties it to his chariot and drags it around the walls of Troy: dishonoring a dead enemy.
There seems an element of the “true Scotsman” circular reasoning in the warrior code. To quote wikipedia, the true scotsman argument goes like this:
Argument: “No Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge.”
Reply: “But my uncle Angus likes sugar with his porridge.”
Rebuttal: “Ah yes, but no _true_ Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge.”
Translating this to warrior code, it would run like this:
A: “There is a warrior code.”
B: “But there are warrior cultures that violate what seem to be key elements of the warrior code, and in militaries that you say exemplify the warrior code, individuals routinely violate the warrior code.”
A: “Ah, but no TRUE warriors violate the warrior code, and warrior cultures that violate the warrior code aren’t TRUE warrior cultures.”
I guess my overarching question would be this: are there elements to a warrior code that transcend enormous distances of time, space, and culture? I suspect not.
Mark Grimsley:
I wish it did take great pains to craft such a scenario. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Any study of the Russian Revolutionary War, the Great Patriotic War and the Iran-Iraq War will bear this out. These were the largest wars of the century, and the actions I’ve outlined were state imposed- not violations, as you suggest. I must also point out that had these severe actions not taken place, the USSR and Iraq would probably have been defeated in these wars.
Mr. Grimsley, my favorite cousin died of PDST from injuries sustained as a Marine Corps rifleman in Viet Nam. He was a defender at Da Nang airbase during the Tet offensive. He did not commit atrocities or dishonor a dead enemy. Still, he fell victim to PDST and the condition contributed greatly to his death.
David: Achilles’ behavior is precisely Shay’s point. That’s why he uses Achilles as a central figure in a book about “Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character.”
And as to transcendent Warrior Codes, I think an argument to that effect can be made and sustained. As I’m trying to show in a course I’m teaching, the roots of the Code lie importantly in the Myth of the Hero — myth in the sense of paradigm, not falsehood. Joseph Campbell found commonalities in the Myth of the Hero all over the world. That’s why he could write his classic book, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, and why myths about the hero — and by extension the warrior code — resonate worldwide. The Japanese understand the Iliad and we understand the Samurai.
Tens of thousands of people in this country, and probably millions worldwide, have studied the martial arts, which are first and foremost about grasping and internalizing the Warrior Code. And the highest expression of the Code, I would argue, are those who undertake nonviolent resistance. Theirs is aggressive, decisive action undertaken in the service of a larger cause, and they are willing to die in that cause. But action that is the purest in moral terms and therefore the best protected from the coarsening effects of action undertaken through violence.
Mark: I said that your examples illustrate violations of the Warrior Code, not state policy. State policy can and does routinely pervert the Warrior Code. And Shay does not argue — and does not believe — that committing atrocities or dishonoring a dead enemy are the sole causes of PTSD. That is obviously untenable, if only because survivors of civilian disasters can suffer from PTSD. He does argue that betrayals of themis (“what’s right” are a frequently overlooked contributing factor. Such betrayals can take various forms. For Vietnam veterans, one common betrayal was to have fought hard and valiantly for their country only to have their combat service discounted, even dishonored, upon return to this country.
The Warrior’s Honor by Micheal Ignatieff. (http://www.librarything.com/work/619370&book=4186514)
The idea of the warrior code is not necessarily an ideal or abstract concept. The book above has an essay on the use of the idea of the “warrior code” by the Red Cross to promote restraint in combatants for whom the Geneva Convention has no relevance.
“Blood and Belonging” by the same author deals with some of the same themes.
As to whether the warriors code is relevant to the contemporary American experience of war is another question.
Mark G:
State policy was openly received by the Soviet military establishment during the Great Patriotic War. Exponents of a military strategy not employing a so-called Warrior Code were Georgi Zhuckov, Vasili Chuikov and more. The architect of this strategy was Leon Trotsky (during the Russian Revolutionary War) but traces of its use can be found in the French Revolutionary War and the American Civil War. Warrior codes be damned! Modern military strategists have never heard of such, and if they have they are definitely handicapped in action.
I agree that this purported warrior code is employed as a philosophical application in many eastern martial arts. I can also see it being intellectually traced to human mythology. But like the study of philosophy itself, science has forever changed all of this. The Industrial Revolution and its effects on the modern battlefield, as well as the advent of WMD’s, both support my contention that a Warrior Code is non-substantive in the age we live in.