This is the third of a three-part article.
By Michael Pipkin
Chris Hedges, after seeing war in all of its forms, no longer wonders why we wage war – it makes sense to him, and to me: War is seductive. We are led to war by very large ideas like “National Defense” or “Protection” or to bring “Democracy” to people far away. In an age of technology, we are led to war with the belief in something that is neat, tidy, and clean. A war where we don’t see or count the dead, but speak only in terms of victory and exit strategy. I was led to war by these ideas, except I had my own desire to live fully into God’s will for my life to further complicate the question of what is meaningful and right.
Hedges writes that the myth of war is a potent thing, indeed, “allowing us to make sense of mayhem and violent death. It gives us a justification to what is often nothing more than gross human cruelty and stupidity. It allows us to believe we have achieved our place in human society because of a long chain of heroic endeavors, rather than accept the sad reality that we stumble along a dimly lit corridor of disasters. It disguises our powerlessness. It hides from view our own impotence and the ordinariness of our own leaders. By turning history into myth we transform random events into a chain of events directed by a will greater than our own, one that is determined and preordained. We are elevated above the multitude. We march toward nobility.”
Now, you and I may disagree about the applicability or universality of what Hedges is saying, but I can tell you that this was very much my experience. The myth of being a good chaplain and a good Marine is every bit a part of how we were to follow in a long chain of heroes, and that if we were faithful we would achieve our place in history – and yet it required something of me that I was not prepared to admit until, as my chaplain assistant watched over me, on that February Morning, while I was digging into the road and pouring concrete into the gaping hole left by a previous violence, he was shot in the wrist and fell to the ground.
If the myth of war disguises powerlessness and hides our impotence, the reality of war shatters all of that.
All men are equalized by combat. All men are ordinary on the battlefield. Bullets and shrapnel and chemicals do not distinguish between rank, combatant status, sex, religion, or faithfulness. To my enemies, who themselves had been fed an equally seductive myth about war, I was a prime target, a target of opportunity – if you kill the chaplain, you wound everyone – but to their bullets, I was no different than the guy standing next to me, my bodyguard.
We don’t know exactly whom the sniper was targeting. I was the only guy not wearing a weapon, and it was pretty easy to guess that I was some kind of non-combatant, or at least ranking officer, because all of the Marines were deferring to me, helping me, and everywhere I went, my chaplain’s assistant was standing watch over me, protecting me. I don’t know if I was the target of a bad sniper, but I took it personally anyway. Mike was my man.
In that moment the myth vanished.
I heard the shot ricochet off of the vehicle behind us and I saw Mike hit the ground out of the corner of my eye. Normally, when we take fire, the chaplain’s assistant, who acts as my bodyguard because chaplains are not allowed even to carry a defensive weapon, is supposed to tackle me to the ground – a limitation that Chaplain Capodanno never had to contemplate. But this was odd; I didn’t know what to do. For even the briefest of seconds I contemplated: Do I dive right or left. I still had not realized that it was Mike who had been wounded, and so I dove right as he fell left. The Marines took up positions and began to seek out a target, all the while we were trying to determine from which direction the shot came, and how best to provide a perimeter of defense so that the corpsman and the ambulance could be brought forward to tend to Mike’s wounds.
I wondered then if the people who had shoved the myth of Chaplain Capodanno down our throats had ever been shot at, if they had ever been in any combat situation. Because the reality of what I was experiencing was, altogether, eviscerating. I had never felt so incredibly impotent in my life, and for all of our strength that day – we were surrounded by armored vehicles, tanks, perimeters of roving infantry, and helicopter gunships all meant to protect us – for all of our showing of force, we were unable to stop the violence. The sniper, knowing that we all wear bullet proof vests that cover our torsos and Kevlar helmets to protect our heads, was aiming at the level of our pelvis, just below the belly button – a tactic used often, because there is a nexus of blood vessels and nerves that gather in your pelvis, and the likelihood of hitting something fatal or crippling is very likely – an extremely violent choice of targets.
It has been said that War is the Pornography of Violence. And in waging war itself, Hedges suggests that the seductiveness of violence, the fascination with the grotesque, with what the Bible calls “the lust of the eye,” gives us the illusion of god-like empowerment over other human lives. I now know why.
I can only imagine that, looking through his scope, the sniper looked at a great number of us working there that day, and that there was great power in choosing which one of us he would shoot and where he would shoot us. And I imagine that there was a great feeling of victory in seeing one of us go down; even if he didn’t stick around long enough to see our fear, I know that he assumed it.
And that is where the myth of all of this ends for me, and where the reality of war sets in.
We are told that wars are necessary to protect our way of life, and yet, war itself undermines our way of life and proves only that we have the capacity for destruction. We believe that our technology makes us more powerful, that we can project our power in such a way as to limit the number of casualties on our side, but thinking like this only separates us from the reality that war, even from a distance, is damaging to our bodies, corrupting of our minds, and emptying of our souls.
It mars the very creation that God has breathed life into, life made in God’s own image. That’s the internal damage. Externally, it rends the world that we have been invited by God to exercise stewardship over, destroying the landscape for generations to come, creating false boundaries called “Nations” that ultimately need defending, and dividing person from person, making us believe that we are somehow right and just in our way of life and way of thinking, and right and just in our defense of that thinking.
But war proves nothing except for our lack of faith.
War is, at the very foundation of its exercise, the disconnection of our fundamental theological beliefs – disconnecting what we believe about God from the very choices that we make as God’s followers.
We choose to destroy because we think that we must. But the truth is that we do it because we have forgotten that meaning doesn’t come from anything that you and I do or create or participate in. Meaning itself is imbued upon us by God.
The disconnection is that we have taken on the responsibility of giving ourselves meaning, which is the meaning of the story of our expulsion from the Garden of Eden, as Adam and Eve attempted to become the masters of Good and Evil. We continue in that heritage, believing that we are the masters of meaning, that we can bestow honor, that we can choose where to draw boundaries, that we can choose where and how to met out justice. We fight wars because we defend what isn’t ours to defend, and we choose to believe in war because it gives value and meaning to those “values” that define our existence.
The great irony in making war is that we believe that it ennobles us. My many medals, my combat badges, my rank… I’m still very proud of what I did. But the greatest myth is that somehow I’m a better man because of any of those things. But we all need to understand how deeply disconnected that kind of thinking is from what we believe as Christians.
I am a better man because God became one of us – it is in the incarnation that humanity is ennobled, and it is in our creation that we are given meaning, not in how we stigmatize our enemies, or create false divisions, or destroy the creatures of God.
I have meaning because I am marked as Christ’s own forever.
The Rev. Michael Pipkin is priest-in-charge of The Falls Church (Episcopal) in Falls Church, Va. He served in the Navy for nine years, including one tour of duty in Iraq. He also served as a Navy chaplain at Bethesda Naval Medical Center after returning from overseas. This reflection was delivered on Nov. 8, 2009, at Christ Episcopal Church in Alexandria, Va.