Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, July 1, 1993 TAG: 9307010607
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A14 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: NICK PAPPAS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
His thesis seems to be that elite forces need to be manned by men with "the Right Stuff": aggressiveness and anti-social behavior. These are the traits that make for good warriors, but probably not good citizens. And, because warrior spirits are necessary for national defense, they must be tolerated, along with their sometimes bestial behavior. Since White uses historical examples, it might be worthwhile to reflect on some insights from antiquity.
The Spartans, for one, might agree with "the Right Stuff" thesis, since they praised the virtue of "savage valor," the ability to stand the sight of slaughter and strife and still rush on to destroy the enemy. Even here, though, one should pause to remember that, as militaristic as it was, Spartan society was held together by even fiercer social constraints based on reverence for ancestors and the gods.
In Plato's "The Republic," the problem of the "guardians" is expressed in the famous image that pictures these soldier-rulers as being like "noble puppies" - fierce to the enemy while friendly and loyal to their own citizens. The provisional answer given by Socrates to the problem of how to create such men is that these soldiers need a very special education. The guardians must engage in "gymnastics" to harden their bodies but also in "music" to train their souls. The result of this education is a citizen-soldier whose courageous soul is completed by the influx of the higher virtues of wisdom, justice and temperance.
Aristotle adds to the analysis with his observation that the Spartans were invincible, not due to the harsh regimen of their training, but simply because for the longest time they fought against others who did not train at all. When it comes to warfare among equals, he continues, it is "the element of nobility, not what is beastlike" that has the leading role. "For it is not the wolf or any of the other beasts that would join the contest in any noble danger, but rather a good man."
Do we really want our armed forces to be a society within a society whose virtue is that of beastly men? The very fact that their jobs are so dangerous suggests that this is not "the Right Stuff." Carl Von Clausewitz, the German philosopher of war, tells us that the element of danger is what makes war so different from other areas of life. In such a supercharged atmosphere, "one might say that the physical [forces] seem little more than the wooden hilt, while the moral factors are the precious metal, the real weapon, the finely honed blade." War, to put the matter differently, drastically and dramatically speeds up the process of finding out who we are and where in the universe we are located. The dread inspired by danger causes us to have a look into the unimaginable depths of the soul and the reality of a world of truth beyond existence - all in a very compressed time span.
If we think that our sailors and soldiers are best trained by a savage diminution of the truths of the soul, perhaps this is a hint that the "savage valor" of the solely self-interested, selfish man might really be all that is left of citizen virtue in our republic - or are we now closer in temperament to an empire?
White's thesis identifies virtue with passivity and conformity, and rightly concludes that these are poor qualities in a soldier. But does he seriously ask us to identify the junior-high-school antics at Tailhook with a "manly" nonconformity? Maybe we shouldn't be surprised that with such a wimpy definition of virtue, aggressiveness and anti-social behavior are becoming the norms of "manly" behavior in civilian society as well, therapy and sensitivity training notwithstanding. An education in aggressiveness and vulgarity may conform with the modern notion of specialization in the professions, and it may be an appropriate education for mercenaries or the bunge-jumping lawyers that White is training at Michigan, but let's not mistake it for one appropriate to real men and real soldiers.
War - the province of friction, danger, and the horrible - is the place where the terrible truths of courage and cowardice, virtue and vice, suddenly become realities rather than mere textbook opinions. Men who think of themselves as merely young warriors or beastly men will respond to these realities exactly like the dumb brutes they imagine themselves to be.
\ AUTHOR Nick Pappas teaches international relations at Radford University and was a Marine rifle platoon leader in Vietnam.
by CNB