lis
-ten
you know what I mean when
the first guy drops you know
everybody feels sick or
when they throw in a few gas
and the oh baby shrapnel
or my feet getting dim freezing or
up to your you know what in water or
with the bugs crawling right all up
all everywhere over you all me everyone
that’s been there knows what
i mean a god damned lot of
people don’t and never
never
will know,
they don’t want
to
no
e e cummings
In this paper, I will explain the differences between a just and unjust war, introduce the term "necessary war", and show how it differs from a just war. Also, I have taken the liberty of discussing war strictly in a non-nuclear sense. My main goal, of course, is to relate my feelings on war. To do this I will need to refer to my personal experiences and relate my ideology to that. I hope to show what I feel is the sum and substance of war.
What exactly is war? I define war as armed conflict between two or more groups. Mankind has known war for countless millennia and the constant threat of war is still all too real today. Most would agree that war is abhorrent but, at times, unavoidable. It has been said that "war is the ultimate in human social failure…something utterly useless and unnecessary".1 To evaluate war fully, we need to understand which wars may be just or unjust and why, which of these are necessary and why and how war affects the nation as an entity and the individual as an entity.
War may be just or unjust. But how does one decide? What are the criteria? According to St. Augustine, there are three conditions which must be met for a war to be called just: "(1) The authority of the sovereign by whose command the war is to be waged; (2) A just cause is required and (3) It is necessary that the belligerents have a rightful intention, so that they should intend the advancement of the good…"2 Thomas Aquinas added a fourth condition, "the right use of means."3
Let’s examine these four conditions. War is defined here strictly in the nationalistic sense. The first condition of Augustine needs little explanation. The person or body designated by the nation has the only legitimate authority to declare war. Thus, guerrilla war, but not guerilla tactics is considered unjust in this light.
Just cause is Augustine’s second condition. By just cause is meant invasion, seizing of land or natural resources and/or harm to part of the population. According to Fagothey, there are several important subordinate conditions attached to this: (1) minor evils should be tolerated, i.e., war should not be a resort for petty, albeit just, wrongs; (2) war must be the last resort and (3) there must also be fair hope of success.
Augustine’s third point, right intention, is also fairly self-descriptive. This means that a nation’s cause must not only be just and right, but known by all to be just and right.
The last of the four points is the right use of means. This is explicit; no immoral acts may be committed or the war is no longer just. Immoral acts include proper treatment of prisoners and non-combatants, respecting the rights of neutral nations, etc. Please note that even if only one of these conditions is not met, then the war will be considered unjust for that particular nation.
In the nationalistic sense, I can agree with the above. However, having personally viewed these conditions, I cannot agree. How just or unjust is war to the individual, especially those individuals who are committed totally, i.e., the actual combatants?
An analysis is required. Fagothey maintains that "war is not between person and person but between state and state, not a matter of individual but national defense."4 But in any group, no matter what its size or purpose, the key word is individual. What is a nation but a large group of individuals, possessing their own beliefs, ideals and morals which may or may not coincide with what the elected leaders of our society assume. "To assume that there is a public doctrine respecting the justification for employing force is one thing. To assume further that this doctrine reflects the ’moral consensus’ of the nation as a whole is quite another matter."5
I must return to the four conditions of a just war and analyze them in this new light, the individual sense.
The first condition of Augustine is lawful authority. This lawful authority imparts to the person or body that has the authority to declare war the legal right of doing so. This should not be considered a moral right for, as stated above, the moral consensus of the people may or may not be in agreement with that right. Implicit in the assumption of lawful authority is that the individual must follow the ruler without criticism. Bellarmine maintains that "…subjects ought to obey their superior, not should they criticize his commands, but they should rather suppose that their ruler has a good reason, unless they clearly know the contrary…"6 In other words, one must follow one’s leaders blindly, for "to know to the contrary", one must suppose one is in possession of all the facts and who is fool enough to believe that?
Augustine maintains in his second condition that a just war must have good intention; the just must attack the unjust on account of some fault. However, I believe "that the justifications nations urge when employing force are mere facades intended primarily to deceive others, that their principal function is to mask the true motives of action and the real interests sought through force, and that they have little if any influence on the actions of those who invoke them."7 The real interests can vary tremendously, from power, glory and riches to the suppression of communism. I can’t say that this is true in every case, but I have seen it. Our country did not become involved in Vietnam to help a beleaguered people. Rather, we were there to fight communism, communism as an entity threatening the principle of democracy.
Augustine’s third condition is that there must be a rightful intention, in order that good is advanced and evil avoided. But who decides which is the good and which the evil? One must be aware that one judges others in one’s own terms. This applies to nations as well as individuals. One may mistakenly assume there exists only one right, one’s own. "…an obsession with justifying the employment of force can lead only to fanaticism and to punitive "wars for righteousness", and that this is particularly so when the nation pretends to act in terms of universal interests or in accordance with a moral law which it insists is equally valid for all nations."8 I do not doubt that Hitler felt this universal validity in his persecution of the Jews and on his ideas of Aryan supremacy. Being universally valid, how could such noble rights possibly be wrong?
Vietnam is another excellent example. Our leaders seemed to view it as a battle between democracy and communism. We let our Western moral ideals guide us to aid those who have totally different concepts. I’m not referring to the Vietnamese leaders, but to the people themselves. Our Kit Carson scout was a fair translator; he would accompany us when we went on Med-Caps. A few of us would invariably spend some time speaking with the local village chief through our interpreter. The chiefs’ consensus was the same; they simply wanted to be left alone. The ARVN and GIs would scare them, destroy crops and, if suspected as VC, would kidnap and kill. The NVA and VC would scare them, steal their crops and, if suspected as loyal to the South Vietnamese government, would kidnap and kill. These people did not want war, GIs, the Saigon regime, the VC or the NVA. They simply wanted to live in peace.
Politics and democracy are seen as great moral goods to Western man and were imposed on the Vietnamese accordingly. In contrast, Communism is seen as inherently evil. On one Med-Cap, I asked the chief what he thought of democracy and the president of the South Vietnamese government? His reply was "What is a president?" This chief did not want to live in fear and terror, in democracy or communism. He merely sought to exist as his people had for centuries.
Augustine goes on the justify war through religion. He maintains that "true religion looks upon as peaceful those wars that are waged not for motives of aggrandizement or cruelty, but with the object of securing peace, of punishing evil doers and of uplifting the good."9 To me, this makes a mockery of all that Christianity stands for. If memory serves me correctly, Christ taught that one is to love one’s fellow men, that one should be concerned only with love. I fail to see how love and war can both be served keeping this in mind.
We now come to the fourth condition, given us by Aquinas. It states war must employ the right means. In other words, one may kill and maim the guilty (combatants), but not the innocent (non-combatants). I take grave offense as a former combatant, of being judged guilty strictly on the grounds of being a combatant. I judged my opposing combatants guilty of nothing more than being in the same place as myself at the same time. However, as we usually met in a free fire zone, we shared our guilt by firing small pieces of lead at one another. If the former guilty party were lucky, his piece of lead would strike the latter guilty party, hopefully causing the latter to cease firing his pieces of lead at the former. This sometimes led to one less guilty party in the world and one constantly found oneself sharing his guilt with a new party.
No war can truly be just to the individual; ergo, all wars must be unjust. However, some wars may be necessary. A war that is necessary is a war that a nation enters solely on the basis of self defense. Any entity must be able to defend itself or it will cease to exist as an entity. In the individual sense, the "justness" of the war of self defense must be determined by that individual. If he feels the cause important enough to die for, then, for him, it is just. But if he decides that the war is unjust for him, then it is just that, unjust.
I maintain that war is unjust to the individual because it is immoral. The individual I speak of is the combatant. This is not to say that war is not felt by others, but that the combat soldier is totally involved. Let’s examine the issues.
To build up its armed forces, a nation must rely on a combination of recruiting volunteers and forced conscription. In forced conscription, an individual only has three choices: (1) he may refuse the conscription and face a prison sentence; (2) he may desert the country and (3) he may submit to the conscription. In all of the above choices, personal liberty is lost. This is immoral. If the individual makes the third choice, he may is subjected to other injustices.
The nation demands that the soldier be ready to make certain supreme sacrifices that he may or may not want to do. One of these sacrifices is the potential for the soldier to be killed or maimed. It should be noted that the average age of the combat soldier is twenty-one years. Death and severe injury are usually the last things on a young man’s mind. A combat soldier may also lose very dear friends. It is most saddening to see a relationship that has grown so far so fast be destroyed totally in a few seconds. There are other people, relatives, friends, lovers, who also feel the terrible loss. They too are tremendously saddened.
One must also consider the dehumanization of the individual, without which he cannot kill effectively. May combat soldiers find this a difficult concept at first, but usually come to accept it rather quickly. This concept may, however, prove hard to lose when the combat soldier returns home. Lastly, there is the other suffering, the physical, mental and spiritual pain. It’s now hard for me to imagine the physical pain all of us went through. Humping a one hundred pound rucksack through one hundred plus degree heat through a knee deep rice paddy is no easy feat. Enduring the insects, snakes and vegetation was unbelievably frustrating. The physical pain of combat, bullet wounds, punji sticks, tiger pits, booby traps, was excruciating. Yet the combat soldier does it, day after day.
The mental anguish comes from knowing you’re so far from everyone and everything you once cared abut and knowing that they can’t help you in your time of need, or you in theirs. They’re more than half a world away; they exist in another time and dimension. You think of sex, food and comfort, soft-skinned girls, a thick juicy steak and a dry clean bed.
The spiritual pain comes when you realize that to succeed as an infantry soldier you must forget all the values you once held so dear. You learn to accept and sometimes enjoy killing and defacing the enemy and literally destroying the land and people you are there to protect. You see villages, crops and people destroyed without batting an eye. Your only thought is that there are a few less to fight against you, to plant booby traps along the trail. It makes little difference whether you commit the acts personally; you know what is happening and don’t speak out and so accept the guilt.
The real spiritual pain comes later, after you’re home and begin to be acclimated to civilization again. It is almost impossible for me to believe what I have seen and done. It seems light years ago; it exists as a fairy tale or nightmare. I blink my eyes and awaken, praying that it’s gone, but it isn’t. it won’t leave until it’s dealt with properly and that hurts terribly.
We GIs looked at the South Vietnamese as an inferior race; we lovingly referred to them as dinks, gooks, slopes and zipperheads. We felt they deserved the pain and suffering of the jungle as they seemed good for little else. We looked on the men as pimps and the women as whores. We suspected them all of subversion. We felt little, if any, compassion for their pain and suffering. It mattered not at all when they died.
Most villagers were seen as VC and treated accordingly. Hootches were ripped apart and set afire; crops were destroyed. Once, after a particularly heavy firefight in which we lost some really good men, our commanding officer ordered a "Sherman’s march to the sea", his words. Every hootch we came upon was destroyed; if we found a cache of arms or food, we’d call an airstrike on the nearest village and we took prisoners no longer. In a war measured in body count, we reigned supreme. Guilty and innocent alike were removed from the scene. The enemy dead were disfigured and left to rot on the trails. We left our unit’s initials carved on the foreheads of the enemy dead so they knew who to fear, or who to seek. A few GIs would remove ears and noses from the enemy dead and string them from their belts. Two GIs even went so far as to remove the gold teeth of the dead Vietnamese with a knife, one of the most nauseating sounds I’ve ever heard. These two GIs were looked down upon, not because they disfigured a body, but because it was for personal gain. They would send the gold home.
It has taken me many years to truly sort out and evaluate my feelings on war. I thought about my actins then, but in a different light, I was still doing them. It’s difficult to speak of morality when living in immorality. There is a tremendous amount of evil in war, but in the midst of all this evil, good existed. Not in the war itself, but what it could awaken in you. I knew a sense of camaraderie that I have never known since. It was a true expression of love among men. This love was never spoken of, but always felt.
Being a medic, my job was different. My primary concern was the health and welfare of my men, not in the actual waging of war, although it did come to that several times. If you’re a good medic, you’re respected; if you’re an excellent medic, you’re treated akin to a hero. People come up to you and thank you for being there, saying that your mere presence is a comfort. I miss that sense of total dependence, of realizing that my presence may make the difference between life and death. Even more than that I miss the feeling of elation I knew when I fought the enemy. I felt totally alive, every nerve and fiber of my being was alert and taut. I knew what it really meant to save lives. In the jungle, there’s only one medic per platoon and sometimes per company. No one is there to observe you or instruct you. when several need you at once, you have to work fast and work well.
There’s a sense too that you’re on the right track for once in your life, that you have truly found a meaning in life. I find it best expressed in the following excerpt. "There is honestly something very positive about being over here. I can see it in myself and my men. Not in the war itself, God knows that’s hopeless enough, but what happens to you because of it. I’ll never be the same again. I can feel myself growing…a lot of guys get out of here OK, and despite what they say, they’re better for it. I can see it in myself. I’m getting older over here in a way that I could never do at home or maybe anywhere. For the first time in my life, everything seems to count. All the fuzziness is gone, all the foolishness…"10
In conclusion, I hope I have presented war as I believe it to be, an immoral act declared by national leaders and fought by states in the broad sense and individuals in the personal sense. When an individual suffers, a piece of the nation suffers. When an individual dies, a small part of the nation dies with him. This is the point.
1Fagothey, Right And Reason, p. 405
2Ibid., p. 407
3Ibid.
4Ibid., p. 411
5Tucker, Robert, The Just War, p.5
6Fagothey, Right and Reason, p. 410
7Tucker, Robert, The Just War, p. 2
8Ibid,, p. 2
9Fagothey, Right and Reason, p. 407
10Glasser, Ronald, 365 Days, p. 265
Right and Reason by Fagothey
Thinking About Ethics by Richard L. Purtill
The Just War by Robert Tucker
War edited by Leon Bramson and George Goethals
365 Days by Ronald J. Glasser
Last Updated January 7, 2007
All original material © Mike Dubrick 1980-2007. All rights reserved.
