WHY MEN LOVE WAR

William Broyles was an American soldier in Vietnam. The opening of his essay acknowledges an intimate connection between Vets (warriors) outside of real time. Hiers tells Broyles that he loved the war in Vietnam, but that he cannot tell anyone else. War is horrible and evil, but Broyles suggests that most men would have to admit, somewhere inside, they loved it too. And how do you explain that to your family and friends? This is why Veteran's reunions are invariably filled with a boozy awkwardness.

1. Do you believe that men can love war?

2. Broyles insists that it may be dangerous to suppress the reasons why men love war. Why? What might be the result of doing so?

Broyles calls War the condition of all men for all time. "Their is a reason for every war and a war for every reason." The truth is that the reason does not matter very much. In The History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides gives us a similar insight into a harsher perspective:

For in early times the Hellenes and the barbarians of the coast and islands, as communication by sea became more common, were tempted to turn pirates, under the conduct of their most powerful men; the motives being to serve their own greed and to support the needy. They would fall upon a town unprotected by walls, and consisting of a mere collection of villages, and would plunder it; indeed, this came to be the main source of their livelihood, no disgrace being yet attached to such an achievement, but even some glory.

The story of The Judgment of Paris gives us higher moral reasons for the Trojan War. Paris violates the institution of marriage and abducts Helen, the beautiful wife of King Menelaus. The Greeks unite because of the sacred oaths to Helen's father Tyndareus and thus embark on the ten year siege against Troy, the citadel of King Priam, Paris' father, to get Helen back. Thucydides writes: "What enabled Agamemnon to raise the armament was more, in my opinion, his superiority in strength, than the oaths of Tyndareus, which bound the Suitors to follow him." War is part of the family of man and despite the validity and morality and the righteousness involved, Broyles--like Thucydides--recognizes that the love of war is not romantic hysteria, but born out of a innate lust that dominates everything else including morality.

Only the dead have seen the end of war.

--Plato

Why do thoughtful, loving men, love war while still hating it? Broyles tells us that there are two kinds of reasons, some respectable and some not so respectable.

Broyles begins with the respectable reasons.

1. Experience of great intensity. To witness in the lust of the eye. Enough I couldn't fuckin' believe its to last a lifetime. For an example of seductive terror in Vietnam read Tim O'Brien's How to Tell a True War Story.

2. Order and Clarity and the irresistible urge to rebel against it. War allows men to play boys' games.

3. War replaces the gray areas of domestic life with an eerie, serene clarity. Clear dichotomies exist: enemy/friend.

4. The bonds of family, the duties associated with daily life disappear. This applies to the soldier fighting in a foreign land like the Greeks at Troy and the American Soldier in Vietnam. The question that needs to be answered here is what is lost. What was Achilles like before he went to war? What is the impact on war on the soldier? Yet the ideology of war underscores the reality that an ordinary man remains ordinary and insignificant in times of peace, living out his life in small town America as a copy machine salesman (Hollywood, The Postman). On the battle field, this same man becomes someone significant, a magnificient and forever famous warrior that sometimes (in the aftermath of war) is incapable of returning to his former domestic life as a father and husband. He remains a fish out of water like Hercules and may well go insane at home. Post Vietnam Syndrome.

5. War is the best game. Warriors explore regions of the soul that for most men remain uncharted.

6. The enduring emotion of war, when everything else is faded, is comradeship. You trust your fellow soldiers with your life. The communal transcends race and personality and education--all the things that make a difference in peace. Oliver Stone portrays this cross-racial camaraderie in his Academy Award winning Platoon where African Americans and poor white guys unite in a kind of hip way. The United States Military with Project 100,000 sent the poorest and the least educated men to Vietnam. WHY?

World War II had a profound social impact in America for African Americans. For example, Medgar Evers returned from WW II determined to stand up against racism in the South. He became a prominent Civil Rights leader and was responsible for getting the first black student admitted to the University of Mississippi.

7. Heroic act. The sacrifice on one's life for one's comrades.

Troubling reasons why men love war:

1. War is the no-man's land between life and death.

2. Men love destruction. The war game leads to unbelievable destruction and it is seductive precisely because it is so terrible.

3. War is absurdity. Broyles says that he pretends outrage when his men defile the dead NVC soldier, but he admits to feeling intensely alive, when so many are not. It is a small step to the enjoyment of causing death. Ecstasy. Standing at the edge of humanity and seeing the terrible beauty, great and seductive. Instruments of war are beautiful too. Achilles' Shield is simultaneously divine art and an instrument of war.

4. War is sexual. The intensity of war leads to an intensity of sex. Broyles writes: "In sex I could see the beast crouched drooling on its haunches (Fuseli 1781), could see it mocking me for my frailties, knowing I hated myself for them but that I could not get enough." In the Iliad,Paris escapes death at the hands of Menelaus; Aphrodite sweeps him off the battlefield back to Helen's bed inside the walls of Troy. After his botched duel with Menelaus he desires Helen more than ever before.

The Heroic Code: We admire strength, courage, skill, intensity, drive, and the willingness to take risks. And then in the Iliad the drive goes awry, becomes excessive. The Heroic code calls for high ideals, playing by the rules on and off the field. . . yet the illusion of rules is easily shattered in war. Achilles drags Hector's body behind his chariot and beheads twelve Trojan boys in vengeance. War gives way to savagery. The best of the Acheans becomes the BEAST of the Acheans.

See Achilles