“That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.” — character in P.C. Hodgell’s novel Seeker’s Mask
If I told you the godawful truth, would you believe me? Would you even want to hear it? Lately I have been grappling with the question, “why have I been able to share some war stories over the years and not others?” I am quick to share the ones that consistently arouse a few laughs from the crowd. I tell the ones that play in to our romanticized illusion of war. I give the audience what they want to hear, not what they need to hear. I tell the ones that feel like appropriate cocktail conversation. I tell the ones with happy endings. I don’t tell the ones that suck all the oxygen out of the room and bring everyone down. True war stories don’t have happy endings.
I like to tell the funny ones as they help me mask my own pain. Like the time my Marines stole Saddam’s toilet seat from his palace in Baghdad and used it to make a field expedient commode. Or the time we traded some piping hot Starbuck’s coffee while we were already in Iraq for SAPI plates (bullet proof vest inserts) for my team and I (do not ask why the US government did not have enough of these for us to get them before we went to war). Or the one about the chicken that was travelling with us to be the actual canary in the coal mine, since chickens are allegedly more sensitive to chemical warfare agents and would get sick more quickly than us, giving us a warning and time to stick ourselves with our atropine injectors. While these things did happen and are funny in retrospect, they are not the hard truth.
There is a saying in the comedic world, “tragedy plus time equals comedy.” While I greatly appreciate dark humor and its ability to help us confront difficult subjects, some of the things I experienced and did in war will never be funny to me. We delude ourselves in to believing things were not as bad as they really were. We remember the good parts and we black out the bad ones. Delusion is how, as humans, we cope, but it is not how we change. Facing and accepting a shared reality and working toward a better here and now is the only way we collectively change.
The famous English poet, Lord Byron, wrote in Don Juan, Canto 14, Stanza 101, this provocative verse that I absolutely love (bold added for emphasis):
‘T is strange, — but true; for truth is always strange;
Stranger than fiction; if it could be told,
How much would novels gain by the exchange!
How differently the world would men behold!
How oft would vice and virtue places change!
If truth could be told, how often would vice and virtue change places? How differently would we behold the world? Truth is stranger than fiction.
The truth does not allow us to sugarcoat war. We cannot just put war in a tidy little shadow box of memorabilia and celebrate it with the sunshine patriotism of football game flyovers, backyard barbecues, fourth of July fireworks, and pledges of allegiance at flag-waving parades. The truth about war for me is personal. It is like what US President and experienced combat veteran Dwight D. Eisenhower said, “I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.”
Time has not made the tragedy of war amusing to me. Time has helped me accept war for what it is. It is the fantasy of war that bothers me the most and has held me back from sharing my true feelings and experiences. The farther away in time and distance you get from war, sadly, the more fetishized it gets.
Business is not a battlefield, but people with zero combat experience like to play summer soldier. War analogies do not belong in non-military teams, spoken by people who cannot grasp the graveness of what they are saying. The most egregious of these came from a client of mine, not long after I had returned home and traded my desert camouflaged utilities for a Navy-blue Brooks Brothers’ sport coat. This business executive came out of a staff meeting (where no one was injured — not even with a papercut) and proclaimed, “It was a Gettysburg bloodbath in there!” What a profoundly stupid and insensitive thing to say. No one in that conference room came within a million miles of giving “the last full measure of devotion.” There were not tens of thousands of casualties of fathers, brothers, and sons who would never return home or who would come home physically, mentally, and spiritually wounded. We did not heed President Lincoln’s words and the world all too soon forgot “what they did here.”
Another use of war analogies that really fuels my anger is when business executives compare their team, group, or individuals, who did not serve, to actual military units, especially special forces. “We are the Force Recon of Dunder Mifflin.” Cringe! I did not imagine you could get more oxymoronic than this. Hold my beer and watch…
A senior executive I once worked with, who did not serve one minute in the military, swore to me that someone on their team who they loved was like a US Navy SEAL. In that moment, I felt like I was Lloyd Bentsen in the Vice Presidential Debates with Dan Quayle, when Quayle compared himself to President John F. Kennedy. [Author’s note: Bentsen was a decorated combat veteran and so was President Kennedy. Quayle joined the Indiana National Guard to avoid the draft for the Vietnam War and attend law school instead.]
What I wanted to say to this executive was this:
“Mister, I went to Annapolis with Navy Seals, I served in combat with Navy Seals, I know Navy Seals who died for this country. Mister, this selfish asshole you think is like a Navy Seal would not make it as a frickin’ admin clerk in the Space Force. In fact, he would probably get shot in the back by his own squad members in bootcamp during the first day on the rifle range.” [Author’s note: does the Space Force even go to the rifle range?]
Paradoxically, if the non-military world is to glean anything useful from the military and combat operations, then it should be about character under fire, teamwork, and in particular the level of mutual trust required to place your life in the hands of other people. Simon Sinek in “Who is the Asshole?” discusses how business leaders often overly tilt toward rewarding people who get results at any cost AND not toward those who care deeply about how the results are achieved. He highlights an important lesson the business world can learn from the actual Navy SEALs’ ultra-elite SEAL Team 6 or DEVGRU:
As I continue to make progress on my book, I will strive to be guided by what late scientist Carl Sagan, in The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, calls the hard truth. Sagan writes, “…better the hard truth, I say, than the comforting fantasy. And in the final tolling it often turns out that the facts are more comforting than the fantasy.” For me, accepting the facts about war and sharing my hard truths is what is helping me to heal and grow. I hope it helps you too.
