The Men Who Lived War

I was standing in a large white room at Camp Pendleton in California talking to a group of Marines who were preparing to leave the military. I was there because of a project I had been building. We had taken forty-foot shipping containers and packed them with everything necessary to establish a small piece of civilization almost anywhere in the world: hydroponic agriculture capable of producing roughly three acres worth of food, solar power, water filtration capable of cleaning badly contaminated water, and satellite communications.

Open the container. Take everything out. Build. The work we were offering veterans was almost comically different from the work many of them had been trained to do. Grow basil. Build greenhouses. Teach kids. Clean water. Help communities.

And that was when I noticed something I have never forgotten.

The Marines in the room divided roughly into two groups. Some had been to war. Some had not. The ones who had not seen combat were often interested in work that allowed them to continue proving their toughness. Police. Corrections. Private security. Jobs where being a warrior remained part of the identity.

The men who had actually been to war were different.

Some had done multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. They had lost friends. They had killed people. They understood what words like combat and lethality actually meant because they had lived inside them. Those were the guys who wanted to grow basil.

They wanted to build things. Teach people. Create food. Put clean water somewhere there hadn’t been clean water before.

I remember being struck by the inversion. The men with the least to prove wanted to create life. The men who still felt they had something to prove were attracted to the symbols of force.

I thought about that room again yesterday. I was watching the President of the United States address the United Nations. He was talking about Iran and the war the United States and Israel have been fighting there since February.

Then he described the choice.

Either Iran makes a deal, he said, or he would “annihilate the Islamic Republic.”

That word took me straight back to Camp Pendleton.

I remembered those Marines. The ones who had actually seen war had no romance left about it. They knew what words like annihilate eventually mean on the ground. They had lost friends. Some had killed people themselves. They understood that behind every clean phrase about military power is a profoundly unclean human reality.

And those were the men who wanted to grow basil.

I have thought about them many times since. War looks different when the person discussing it has smelled it. When the dead person has a name. When the person you killed had a face. When your bunkmate gets killed in front of you. The abstraction called “military action” becomes somebody’s son bleeding into the dirt.

There is an enormous distance between being capable of violence and being eager to demonstrate it.

That distinction may be one of the most important qualifications for anyone entrusted with military power. I don’t know what experiences should qualify someone to become president. Maybe combat experience should be a requirement.

But I do think something is profoundly dangerous when the person entrusted with the most powerful military in human history can speak casually about annihilating another country without having personally experienced what war asks human beings to do.

That isn’t a partisan observation for me. It’s something I learned from Marines. I saw men who had already proven everything there was to prove about their courage. They had been close enough to destruction that they no longer needed to perform toughness for anybody.

They wanted to build greenhouses, clean water, teach kids and grow basil.

There is a difference between knowing how to fight and needing to prove that you can.

We should be very careful about giving enormous power to anyone who cannot tell the difference.