The Will

In the monologue which really made his Hollywood career, Marlon Brando spoke of conflict, and of the importance of will. How victory went not always to the army with the largest battalions, but to the combatant who would go to the greatest length to either prevail, or to avoid defeat. When a man will cut off the arms of his own children because those arms have been invasively handled by the enemy, how can you hope to match that level of determination? This is the problem with terrorists. They hold their convictions so deeply, that - delusional or not - they value the killing of the enemy above their own lives. With such an enemy, there is no real alternative to ongoing struggle, until such time as you yourself are willing to concede defeat, or else where you are willing to slay the enemy to the last man. Wars are won in the will.

But beyond the issue of the philosophical value placed on victory - deciding the moral and practical price that your society will pay to prevail - there is also the will of the indivdual combatants. In order to cut off the limbs of infants in pursuit of total victory, you must have among you a soldier who will wield the machette, not against an enemy, but against the children of his own people. Besides the philosophical desire for victory at any costs - something politicians are not shy about extolling - there must be soldiers who even if not eager, will do what is necessary. Who will pay the price demanded by the situation.

Throughout history, such soldiers are among the rarest and greatest commodities a nation can possess. In ancient Greece, a man named Hereclitus was charged with raising and training armies. Speaking to his overlords, he asserted that for every 100 men that were sent to him, 10 should not be there at all. 80 were nothing but targets. Only nine were real fighters, and they were lucky to have them, for those men make the battle. Then there is the one that remains of the hundred. "Ah, the one. One of them is a warrior, and he will bring the others home." There are among us on this planet people who have the gift for being soldiers comparible to child prodigies with the piano. People who, in the midst of armed combat, seem to transcend the situation around them. Watch 'Troy.' Read 'Armor.' Or just google 'Sgt. Alvin C. York.'

Those individuals can actually have an astronomical effect on the outcomes of battles. Amazingly enough, one of the greatest problems armies have had through history is getting their soldiers to actually kill the enemy. In digging up civil war battlefields, researchers have found many muskets that have as many as nine or ten loads in the barrel. Where the soldier would load, not fire, and then load again, many times in a row. Perhaps this could be accidental if there were one or two loads in the barrel; some error, or a mechanical problem with the weapon which cause a failure to fire. But eight or nine? The only rational explanation is that the soldier - standing in rank and file with his fellows - did everything his fellows did, loading and pointing his rifle appropriately so as to not stand out from his fellows. He did everything he was told to do as a soldier, except pull the trigger when the order came to fire. Based on the archaeological evidence, this was not a rare or isolated occurrence in civil war battles. Even as high as the body count in the Civil War was, it really is remarkable - with armies standing within a few hundred yards of each other, shooting for literally days on end - that casualties added up as slowly as they did. The explantion was that many of the soldiers were simply unable to bring themselves to fire at the tacit enemy. No matter what you see on the news about violence and brutality, men are genetically programmed to NOT kill each other, which is a hard program to evercome.

It can be done, as evidenced by - for example - operant training methods which make the United States Marine Corp both so feared and so respected. Among enemies of the United States, it is a common story that Marines must kill a member of their own family before being awarded the Globe and Anchor. This reputation exists because in the Marines, nearly every man is a fighter. Perhaps every Marine is not every one the One described by Hereclitus, but he is at least one of the Nine that make the battle. It doesn't work that way in most armies around the globe. With most armies, they do their fighting with maybe two or three men our of every ten affirmatively, consciously trying to kill the enemy. So while foreign armies continue to face the age-old problem of more than half their men cowering instead of fighting, the United States military fields forces where nearly every man is a combatant, instead of just being a man in combat. When you consider the capabilities of forces like the Navy SEALs, or Army's Delta, where every single man in the unit IS the One, enemies rightly quake. A substantial fighting force where every man actually fights, while something that civilians take for granted, is largely unprecedented in history, and this is reflected in the speed and relative surety of victory wherever the United States is capable of readily finding enemies to send hard me to go kill.

The point of this is that - regardless of philosphical bent or source of motivation, and regardless of imperatives created by politicians far from the fighting - when a state or a nation has a goal that must be met or achieved, hard men must go and obtain the goal. Soft men, even with the best of intentions and highest of moral goals, will not be able to do what is necessary to win the day. Even if they stand in formation, even if they keep loading their rifles, and even if they truely do see the necessity of the battle (even to the point of believing that the enemy must in fact be killed), history, psychology, and genetic imperative all indicate that soft men will not be able to make the hard choice, and actually pull the trigger. When lives and nations are on the line, it is the hard that tend to survive, because the soft lack the will to do what is necessary.

This has been on my mind lately, after a conversation with my brother, GL. Strange as we are, we talk about things like zombie uprisings and the collapse of society, and how one might fight through it. When asked how the hell he expected to last, living in the overpopulated, extremely liberal city of San Jose, California, GL had a simple response. No, he would never starve, regardless of the breakdown of social order. He was not above cannibalism, he said. "When I look around, all I see is steaks." Of course, he was joking. Mostly. But neither of us doubted that if GL did happen to die in some apocalyptic breakdown of law and order, he would not be dying of starvation. Just as in armed conflict: when pushed to the extreme, the strong survive because they will embrace means for survival that others would not resort to.

Hardness and softness is applicable to less than armed conflict. The ruthless and agressive, those who strive through difficulties instead of yielding to them; those are the successful and productive. While their mindsets (hopefully) do not extend to dismembering children as the Viet Cong did, they are the warriors of our modern society. All of us, to one degree or another, can often times tell with just a few minutes contact whether a person has that sort of drive, focus, and/or capability. Although it does sometimes take something to draw it out (Alvin York was a pacifist farmer who initially refused to fight in WWI), the lengths to which people are capable of pushing themselves, or the lenghts to which they will go to obtain the end they desire, is often a function of who people are. Hardness and softness exist largely independent of morality, philosophy, or education.

Hereclitus' Nine (and even his One) are not all that difference from the rest of us. But they ARE different, and something inside us will often spot that difference. Think about it. If you were tossed into a situation where your survival was in doubt, and where you and your groups' lives depended on the choices you made (or the depths to which you would sink to survive), do a few people you know not immediately come to mind as those with the best chance to get through? Among your friends, is there not some One who you would trust to bring the others home? I'll bet there is. And I'll bet the people you're thinking of tend to be capable and dynamic; able to make hard decisions, and to pay the price those decisions require. Not all of those who would be the One end up as soldiers.

These days, I just wish some of them would find their way into politics. As a country, we have some hard decisions coming, and I would really like to see them made by men hard enough to make the right choice, instead of just seizing the easy choice.