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Life as an Archetype: The Warrior
I was born the same year that the Vietnam conflict ended, and in the early 1970s, there was still a lot of animosity towards the returning armed services. They couldn’t get jobs, they got spat on while walking down the street, people would drive by and throw stuff at them… I remember Jody, my oldest sister, carried the POW/MIA stickers everywhere & plastered them everywhere. Many of her friends who had come back from Vietnam buckled under the constant pressure of hatred and became drug addicts, alcoholics and suicides. Back in those days, syndromes like Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and traumatic brain injuries were not well understood and received little, if no, treatment.
Many of my male relatives are veterans. My father was a vet, although due to his propensity for story-telling, I don’t know what branch of the armed forces he was in and he had so many social security cards on him when he died – none of which were his – that the Veteran’s Association could not find any record of his service. I know from his photographs (now lost during multiple moves) that he did serve during the early years of Vietnam. His father & older brothers served in the Prussian army & the early days of Germany, and fled when Hitler rose to power. I’ve got uncles on my mother’s side who are veterans, one of whom has PTSD and suffers from intense flashbacks. He served during the last part of WWII and in Korea in the Navy. Jody was in the Army but received a discharge during boot camp. Rob was in the Air Force, but received a discharge during Tech School. Rob’s dad served in the Army during Korea, and many of his uncles and grandparents fought in civil conflicts in Yugoslavia, Prussia & Hungary. I’ve got a good friend who put his time in the Navy and still serves in the Naval Reserves.
I am a pacifist. I pretty much have been all my life. I do not support wars on foreign soil. I’m not an active pacifist – I don’t feel like getting arrested for protesting, but I do support those who are willing to put their civil rights on the line. I try not to invest in companies who support the war machine, and I let my conscience guide me at the voting booth. I’m not a militant pacifist, though. I believe that countries should have the right to defend their own borders against invaders. I understand that sometimes, wars are necessary – for one, it thins out the human population. Secondly, even in real life, there are ‘bad guys’. I’ve also had a strong opinion brewing since September 11, 2001. Hate the government, not the soldier.
One of my coworkers’ (I’ll call her Alice to minimize confusion) boyfriend was serving active duty in the Air Force in the years following September 11, 2001. So far he had managed to avoid being called into the Middle East – he stayed home and maintained and guarded the air base. It was a constant source of worry and stress for them both, though. She was equally worried about the possibility of another invasion. John Mayer’s song, Waiting on the World to Change came on the radio & it made Alice angry because she felt he was protesting the movement against Iraq & how people like him were no better than the terrorists. It was mostly the lyric, …”When you trust your television, What you get is what you got, Cause when they own the information, they can bend it all they want’… that pissed her off the most. How dare this guy insinuate that the media and the government were lying to us all? Very quietly, although apparently loud enough to make everyone in the room inhale and turn to look at me, I said, “He’s right, though.” Alice called me out on it, “You think the government is lying to you? You think that none of us are in constant danger? That no one’s actually dying in Iraq right now?!” I told her that not one of us really knew for sure how big a threat these terrorists were, if they were indeed going to attack us again, and at that point, many of Bush’s commands had been proven to be, shall we say, ineffective and mislead. Even Bill O’Reilly had apologized to America for supporting Bush’s search for weapons of mass destruction. Alice took it the wrong way – she felt that my saying that meant I did not support our troops, the boys in blue and green who were in Iraq or serving at military bases across the U.S.
I let it slide. Things were tense between us for a couple of years, but eventually as her man was home more and the constant stress lifted, things were forgotten. I don’t know if she thinks about it whenever she hears John Mayer on the radio. What got me to thinking about it was another song entirely – Offspring’s Hammerhead.
… I'm just doing what I'm told
Every single man and woman who chooses to serve in the military, be it our military or another country’s military, is living life as an archetype. They may be a clerk, a medic, a general, a grunt, a runner, a pilot, a ground unit, a mechanic, a special forces elite… they are all embodying an ancient ideal. They are all warriors.
In ancient times, mighty Gods and heroes arose Who were the patrons of the warriors. Ares/Mars, Athena, the Morrigan, Thor, Tyr, Freya, Achilles, Cuchulainn, Anahita, Indra, Mithra, the Badb, Huitzilopochtli, Ogoun, Sekhmet – the list is probably endless, and many of these Gods are still propitiated today by modern Pagans. In ancient cultures as in modern society, people filled various roles and duties in society – there were healers, priests and priestesses, hunters, farmers, rulers, administrators, crafts and trade people, builders, and warriors. There used to be rituals and ceremonies central to each little group – harvest and planting festivals for the farmers, rituals for healers to perform on the sick and on themselves to cleanse themselves of illnesses, sacrifices and thanksgivings for the hunters to keep the game in balance with the predator, blessings of new buildings for the architects. There were also rites of passage – a child becoming an adult, marriage, birth, death… and for the warriors, there were rituals not only of initiation, but rituals to ensure success on the battlefield, propitiating the Gods that ruled war so as not to be chosen to end up among the slain, protective runes and rites, and very important rituals to ease their reintegration back into society once the fighting was done.
It’s easy for a pacifist like myself to sit back and think, “What a fucking idiot. That soldier is putting his life on the line because of some whack-job politician’s misguided attempt at foreign-policy-via-blunt-force-trauma”. Who am I to think I have the right to judge an archetype? That’s really what the soldier is – he or she is one of the most ancient archetypes – the Warrior.
Living the Warrior archetype means being willing to kill someone (in some cases, it also means assassination, torture and slavery). In many societies and cultures, killing another person has always been a major taboo. Although it doesn’t always seem this way, murder is not generally condoned. Condoning murder means lawlessness prevails and communities crumble. The warrior has to be able to bridge the cultural inhibitions that prevent a logical, community-minded person from killing someone else.
I am the one, camouflage and guns
Risk my life to keep my people from harm
Authority vested in me,
I sacrifice with my brothers in arms
…
I'll take a life that others may live
Not everyone has the ability to do this, to make this choice. A warrior on the battlefield, whether it was an ancient plain where people fought face to face with axes and spears or a modern scenario where bombs are dropped on an enemy from miles above, faces that life-or-death decision every time he or she goes out to fight. The soldier may simply be protecting him or herself against another soldier, or he or she may be protecting his or her squadron, or some gods-forsaken outcropping of rock in a strategic position… but underneath it all the soldier is protecting the greater ideals of his or her country, his or her fellow citizens, his or her government and all for which it stands. I’m not making the distinction here of ‘right or wrong’ – to the soldier, the warrior, there is no ‘right or wrong’ because he or she is serving. He or she has made the decision to put the life of his or her countrymen before his own.
Stay the course, reasonable force
I believe I serve a greater good
Society has lost many meaningful rituals. We still have our small rites of passage – weddings, funerals, graduations, baby showers. I think it is still important to draw those bold, heavy borders on the timeline. I think something that may help people like my shell-shocked uncle reintegrate back into a life of peace would be some small ceremony – cleansing away the taboos of murder, removing the stigma of serving an unjust government, opening a heart that has closed itself off to pacifism so it can cope with killing. Even a ‘Welcome Back’ party could serve as this – a time to say thank you, a time to let the Warrior step off the tank and gun turret and be healed by companionship and re-acceptance into society. Hopefully the next few years will see many homecomings and opportunities to reunite with friends and loved ones who have been gone far too long.
I think, as a whole, most people have forgotten that the soldier is an archetype. I believe in free will, and I believe that people can make choices in their lives that will keep them safe from harm. I tend to assume that people follow their logic. Until recently, it had not occurred to me that maybe, even without a mandatory military draft, the soldier may not really have a choice. It could be that the need for that archetypal role to be filled by someone pulls the soldier, the Warrior, into service. Part of why I wanted to write this out was to, in some small way, honor the men and women who are fulfilling that archetype.
Thank you, Warriors, soldiers, servants of the armed forces, for stepping forward in times of need to protect us all.
