Walking Among the Dead

An ancient saga tells us how
In the beginning the First Cow
(For nothing living yet had birth
But elemental cow on earth)
Began to lick cold stones and mud:
Under her warm tongue flesh and blood
Blossomed, a miracle to believe;
And so was Adam born, and Eve.
Here now is chaos once again,
Primeval mud, cold stones and rain.
Here flesh decays and blood drips red,
And the Cow's dead, the old Cow's dead.
—Robert Graves

In the end, we all die. It is the one truth which we can neither blink nor blot out. We are born. We live, well or badly, as it is given to us to live. And then, painfully or quietly, bravely or shamefully, routinely or with much pomp and glory, we are no more.

Alone among the animals, we know that we will die. Much that we do-our medicine, our religion, our institutions, even our insurance industry-is an attempt to cope with the fact of death. Medicine postpones it. Religion gives us hope that despite it life has meaning. Our institutions outlive us, providing a kind of imperfect immortality. Our life insurance-the irony is unconscious and unremarked-promises security for those who survive us.

None of this is sufficient. Medicine does not always save us. Religion's promise of hope may be false. Institutions may prove corrupt or faithless. Insurance is, at bottom, a wager which we can win only by dying before the company can profit-hardly an attractive prospect. We walk every day among those who will be dead. We seldom talk about it, and we do not often think about it, but it conditions our lives.

Nowhere is this more true than in the military. War is, to be sure, about many things. It is about causes, good and bad. It is about enforcing one's will upon an adversary. It is about courage and cowardice. It is about strategy. But most of all, it is about killing and dying.

That death is central to war seems to need no argument. Soldiers in combat measure their life expectancy in weeks, days, hours, sometimes even in minutes. They love each other with the intensity of the doomed. Those who survive are never the same again. They cannot be, for they have seen death, reconciled themselves to it, and somehow gone on. It is not surprising that they have difficulty talking about the experience; it would be astonishing if they did not. Death in combat is not an abstraction. It is one's friend gasping for breath as his lungs fill with blood. It is always there, among friends, among enemies, pervading the battlefield with its stench and its pain.

Soldiers cope with the threat of death in myriad ways. Those who have not seen it before often find it hard to believe that they themselves will die. Psychiatrists call this the "illusion of immortality," and it is common among military-age people. Many take refuge in fatalism-if my death is ordained, I cannot prevent it. Most, after a time, become numb to the danger around them.

Numbness provides short-term protection from fear. In the long run, however, we must find ways to talk about death. This is not easy. Civilians seldom speak of it directly. Even soldiers usually talk about it in euphemisms. They are more blunt and direct than civilians would be-one does not "pass away"; one "buys the farm"-but still they speak only indirectly of the central fact in their lives.

After the battle is over, the fact of death becomes transmogrified as the survivors try to give it meaning. One did not die, but "gave his life." Like nearly all ceremonial military talk, it is a cliche. One repeats the accepted words so that death in combat, so brutal and meaningless at the time, may possibly acquire meaning.

Whether death in combat actually has meaning is beside the point. The formula is a way of going on. Families and buddies of those who have died participate in the ritual, for few institutions are as traditional as the military. To a civilian, it sounds trite and unworthy of the awful reality. To those in the military family, it provides some comfort, as a more original phrase might not.

There is even a sense in which the formula is not a lie. Soldiers, even draftees, often willingly take risks which they would not take in civilian life. From the first moments of basic training, they are taught self-sacrifice. They learn that they are part of a larger whole, that their lives are worthwhile only as they serve the goals of the unit. They do, in fact, give their lives-to their buddies, if not to their country.

Gen. Sir John Hackett, who himself narrowly missed death at Arnhem in World War II, argues that the central act of the soldier is not killing but dying. We ask soldiers to kill, to be sure. But we also ask them to die. Willingness to die is an essential part of being a soldier. It is part of the bargain.

The cliches at military funerals are, in a sense, a way of affirming the bargain. Everyone knows what they really mean, and no one is really fooled about the fact of death. But by speaking the necessary words, we try to put death in a context with meaning. Without the bargain, death is simply death-painful, ugly, and meaningless.

It is precisely because they have not agreed to the bargain, in fact, that we find the deaths of civilians in combat so shocking. Some of them, to be sure, were actually partisan fighters, and in a sense they had accepted the bargain. But most did not. They simply got in the way, or lived in a strategic place, or happened to live in the country we were fighting.

One can argue, as I do, that we ought not ask anyone to be slain on our behalf. There is no difference, at bottom, between the death of a soldier and the death of a civilian. But the fact remains: the soldier was asked, and the civilian was not.

By speaking as we do about death in combat, we try to affirm the meaning of that death. There is, however, another way of talking about death: the detached, formulaic jargon of strategists, weapons-makers, military planners, and defense intellectuals. It speaks of another world altogether. Here there are no regiments with traditions, no flag-draped coffins, no soldiers offering themselves to be slain for a greater good. Here one daily walks among the dead.

Consider the planning of an attack. The officer in charge must assess the strength of the adversary and project the likely resistance. He or she must calculate how many soldiers, and with what weapons, will be needed to overcome this resistance. Many of the attacking soldiers will die, and this, too, becomes part of the calculation.

These soldiers, to be sure, are not yet dead. But any experienced commander knows that they will be killed in this kind of attack against this kind of adversary. The commander does not know which soldiers will be killed, but he or she expects "losses." In effect, for purposes of planning, these soldiers must be counted as dead.

Most military commanders, to do them credit, do not calculate with this kind of cold-blooded cynicism. They agonize, as Eisenhower did before D-Day, over the impending deaths of so many good young men and women. But, with or without pain, they make the calculation. If they care about their troops, as Eisenhower did, they visit them and talk with them, knowing that in the plan some of them are already counted as dead.

Even where no offensive is in prospect, even in peacetime, strategists must plan for many dead. If there is an attack by the Warsaw Pact, NATO troops will need so many hundred thousand replacements. If the U.S. invades Nicaragua, the 82nd Airborne (or whatever other unit) will have so many dead and wounded. Soldiers who are part of the Rapid Deployment Force (now called the U.S. Central Command) know precisely what their job is and how the planners view them. Until the name of the force was changed, they called themselves the Rapid Dying Force. They understood, despite euphemisms and obfuscations, that they were among the dead, or would be if the plans were carried out.

Pentagon planners, especially the civilians, do not speak openly about death. Indeed, they hardly speak of it at all. The jargon phrases used for it-"termination with extreme prejudice" is the most famous-are laughable, and civilians and soldiers alike laugh at them. But by talking about death in this inhuman, sanitized way, planners in effect make their own planning possible. They do it without apparent agony because the dead are simply not part of the equation in any real way. It is far easier to talk of "casualty rates" than of "numbers of people whose guts will be shot out and who will bleed to death in great pain."

It is, in fact, too easy. For in modern warfare, the dead include not only soldiers but civilians. In nuclear strategy, whole cities are counted among the dead, and there is a whole world of jargon for talking about massive, painful death, charred flesh, radiation poisoning, firestorms, and all the other horrors of nuclear war. Indeed, in the world of nuclear strategy, none of these horrors even has an acknowledged existence. The talk is all of targets, counterforce as against countervalue warfare, "circular error probable" (the likelihood that a missile will miss its target, and by how much), and a whole panoply of rational-sounding and well-scrubbed terms for a reality which, if we talked plainly about it, would be obviously unacceptable.

For the fact is that, every time you or I walk down a city street, we are walking among the dead. Those around us have not made any bargain with their lives, but they are, or would be, among the dead in any large-scale nuclear war. We do not talk about it, for one could not dwell on it constantly. But it is nonetheless a reality. And we ourselves are part of that reality.

All of us, of course, will die. But there is a difference between death that could not be prevented and death that could. If a physician prescribes bloodletting instead of a needed antibiotic, and the patient dies, we do not excuse the physician because in the long run the patient would have died anyway. Just so, if our planners prescribe mass death, we cannot justify their actions because we are all mortal.

Of course we will all die anyway. But our species will go on. Life will go on. In the natural course of things, we have a kind of immortality through others. The fact that others will survive us gives meaning to what we do in a way that nothing else could. The fact that life will go on gives a hope which would not be there if life were extinguished.

Nuclear strategists argue that they do not plan for death, but for the prevention of war. This is nonsense. If a one-megaton missile is targeted on your city, you will be among the dead if it explodes-if not immediately, then over long and painful time. If ten thousand megatons are exploded, or half that number, or even a quarter, then the Old Cow will indeed be dead, and hope will be gone.

Has anyone the right to make such plans? And in what kind of world are those who do considered normal, and those who refuse to be part of war considered marginal, odd, and slightly naive?

It is, rather, the other way around. To live and talk at one remove from reality is a kind of madness. To speak plainly about the reality, say that it is unacceptable, and oppose it with one's whole being is, in the nuclear age, a fundamental requirement of sanity. It is, at bottom, what war resistance is all about.

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