The Things He Carried

Is one soldier’s experience in battle universal or particular? It depends—and it’s what it depends on that’s fascinating.

I first went to war when I was 23 years old. I was leading my platoon of light infantry on a run through the woods of Fort Drum, New York, when the first plane hit the World Trade Center. In the months that followed, my infantry company deployed first to Kuwait and then to Afghanistan, where we participated in Operation Anaconda, the last big battle in the conventional phase of the struggle for control of that country. I returned from that battle and joined the U.S. Army’s Ranger Regiment, which fought in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Since leaving the Army in 2004, I have had some time to reflect upon my own experiences while studying other conflicts and serving as an occasional adviser to a succession of commanders in Afghanistan.

A person’s experience in combat is sui generis. We all march into battle from different backgrounds, social classes, and regions. We come from different families, received different levels of education, and developed different expectations. It is difficult to draw broad conclusions about personal experience with—and in the aftermath of—conflict because each and every one of us sees war through our own lens.

Trying to generalize about the experience of combat amounts to, as the author of Ecclesiastes might have put it, striving after the wind. In this sense then, Karl Marlantes’s What It Is Like to Go to War is a failure. It never lives up to its title.

But Marlantes fails brilliantly. For the vignettes and observations in this book will ring true for all of us who have gone to war. And for its wisdom and wit, I recommend it to any young warriors about to deploy to Afghanistan—or journalists or aid workers trying to wrap their heads around their experiences in Libya, Somalia, Syria, and other garden spots on the planet. In order to understand, though, why this book fails and why it is also worth reading, we must start with an understanding of why each combat experience is unique—and the key variables that determine this inimitability.

The first and most obvious variable in the experience of combat is the individualized nature of the combat itself. This variable is entirely and uniquely shaped by local conditions and varies from day to day, from unit to unit, and from place to place. Everyone always remembers the horror of Omaha Beach, but on the same day a few miles to the west, U.S. soldiers landed without much incident at Utah Beach. A soldier from the 1st Infantry Division, then, has a different memory of D-Day than a soldier from the 4th Infantry Division.

Likewise, a light infantryman in the Arghandab River Valley in Kandahar province in the summer of 2010 had a different and more violent experience than a light infantryman in the same valley this past summer. But even these experiences differed from those of soldiers in other units serving in the same area at the same time. Both of these riflemen’s experiences were likely—but not necessarily—more intense than those experienced by a staff officer a few miles to the southeast at the airfield outside the city of Kandahar.

Karl Marlantes experienced war as a U.S. Marine in Vietnam. In 1968, the Yale graduate and future Rhodes Scholar found himself in charge of 40 young Americans in the kind of maddeningly difficult counterinsurgency fight described as “the graduate level of warfare.” Upon returning home, Marlantes spent 30 years working on a novel based on his experiences, Matterhorn, which last year was a New York Times bestseller and has already entered the pantheon of great literature about the conflict in southeast Asia.

Given the remarkable memoirs and novels already written about Vietnam, one might question what another novel had to contribute to the genre. Marlantes found a way, through Matterhorn, to open a new window on both the horror and drudgery of counterinsurgency warfare fought by light infantrymen in double- and triple-canopy jungles. His protagonist, Lieutenant Mellas, clearly the mimesis of Marlantes himself, goes to war full of ambition, but ends ups simply trying to hold both himself and his platoon together. Caught between a stubborn enemy and an infuriating higher headquarters, Mellas and his men fight for themselves.

After four decades, though, Marlantes has more to say about war than one piece of fiction allows. What It Is Like to Go to War is his nonfiction meditation on war as an experience and man’s innate warrior nature. Organized into themed chapters—“The Enemy Within,” “Guilt,” etc.—What It Is Like to Go to War draws from warrior fiction, military history, religious texts, and the author’s experiences to elucidate war and the warrior spirit for the uninitiated.

War, Marlantes argues, offers young men “raw life: vibrant, terrifying, and full blast. We are lifted into something larger than ourselves. If it were all bad, there would be much less of it, but war simply isn’t all bad.” Here Marlantes echoes Robert E. Lee, who, looking down on the carnage of Fredericksburg, remarked that “it is well that war is so terrible—otherwise we should grow too fond of it.” War is an intoxicating, exciting experience punctuated by moments of sheer terror and episodes of soul-wounding loss. How we should harness the warrior spirit alive in man while preparing him for the highs and lows of the experience itself is the central question in this book. Marlantes suggests demystifying the warrior spirit that dwells within us in the same way we now speak frankly with our children about sexuality. “Natural aggression,” he writes, “like sexuality, can either be repressed, to eventually emerge ugly and out of control, or it can be guided into healthy and productive uses.”

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