More Than Just War

Narratives of the Just War and Military Life

Charles Jones

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136677151
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book raises questions about the just war tradition through a critical examination of its revival and by juxtaposing it with a literary phenomenology of war. Recent public debate about war has leaned heavily on a just-war tradition dating back many centuries. This book examines the recent revival of that tradition in the United States and Britain, arguing that it is less coherent and comprehensive as an approach to the ethical issues arising from war than is generally supposed, and that it is inconsistent in important ways with the theology on which it was originally based. A second line of criticism is mounted through close readings of modern texts in English - from Britain, Australia and the USA – that together constitute a more subjective, bottom-up understanding of the moral dilemmas of military life. In this second tradition the task of representing war is seen as more problematic, and its rationality more questionable, than in just war discourse. Works by William Shakespeare, Sir Walter Scott, James Fennimore Cooper, Stephen Crane, John Buchan, Robert Louis Stevenson, Joseph Conrad, Tim O'Brien and Kurt Vonnegut are featured.

The book will be of great interest to students and scholars of security studies, military studies, theologyand international relations.

Part I

Not Just War

1

Introduction

This book investigates two traditions of Western writing about war. One is the treatment of war in modern Anglophone imaginative literature. The other is the Christian just-war tradition. The antiquity of the second conceals the fact that its current popularity and typical contemporary expression are quite recent. Neglect of the literary tradition reflects the implicit manner in which its arguments are expressed. They do not employ the quasi-deductive style of the just war, but they are arguments none the less. The rift between the two arises partly from this stylistic or formal difference, but has been aggravated by a growing incongruity, at least in the USA and Great Britain, between increasingly skilled and professional volunteer forces and the nations they serve. Imaginative literature offers, in ways that the just-war tradition cannot, possibilities of thinking about the variability and unexpectedness of war and the predicaments it brings, the cultivation of military virtues, and the ethical parameters of military service. It is not by chance that military education includes the study of military history. More subtly, the task of adequate literary representation of combat and the military life becomes, in the twentieth century, an analogue for attempts to maintain social order and comprehensive rationality in late modernity. In this respect, the literary tradition offers a subversive counter-narrative to the reassuring confidence of just war and legal discourses, which maintain that war can be framed and disciplined by rational criteria and rules.

This first chapter provides a preliminary reconnaissance of the terrain. It begins by distinguishing military ethics – associated with the literary tradition – from the ethics of war, which has become almost synonymous with the just-war tradition. Next it juxtaposes this distinction with a second, between soldier and civilian. Even as members of their armed forces in the USA and Britain have been drawn more firmly under the law and social norms prevailing in civil society they have experienced growing cultural isolation. A rift has opened up between the armed forces a society produces and the society those forces are committed to serve, and this is reflected in a divergence of the teaching of ethics between the universities and the military academies. This introductory chapter therefore explores some tensions in contemporary literature and pedagogy about the just war and military virtues in its third section before moving on to argue for the importance of narrative within moral philosophy and in the practical formation of personal and social identities. It concludes by sketching some of the concerns that emerge fully only in the third and final part of the book, through a general discussion of the different ways of war and kinds of combatant represented in modern texts in English, and the anxieties that haunt them.

Military Ethics and the Ethics of War

Military forces from the USA and Great Britain have been engaged in a wide spectrum of missions without interruption since the end of the Cold War. These have ranged from peace-keeping, through counter-insurgency operations and the denial of air-space, to high-intensity conflict. The collapse of the Soviet Union brought an end to the threat of massive conventional war between the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Warsaw Pact and its escalation into devastating thermo-nuclear exchange. Ironically, the end of the Cold War also opened the door to more frequent great-power military engagement. On the one hand, the major powers no longer had to weigh quite so heavily the implications of their own military interventions for the wider strategic balance; on the other, removal of Cold War constraints encouraged political and military adventurism by lesser powers in many parts of the world, sometimes drawing in the heavyweights. This enhanced level of activity and the casualties it inevitably brought promptly rekindled public and professional interest in warfare, and this concern found expression in a very marked increase in public and academic debate about the ethics of war, largely conducted in the terms of the Christian just-war tradition. The central contention of this book is that both this concentration on the ethics of war and the peculiar form it has taken have been at the expense of serious public engagement with the equally important subject of military ethics, and that this parallel ethical tradition is best studied through narratives, the war stories of Part III.

Since this distinction between military ethics and the ethics of war is neither obvious nor current, some preliminary explanation is needed. The ethics of war deals with moral, as distinct from legal or expedient justifications for resort to public force, and of the means employed once hostilities are under way. By and large, this is a view from the rear, the concern of statesmen and commanders. Military ethics, by contrast, centres on those who do the fighting, but is not limited to their behaviour when fighting. It deals with what it is to live the life of a soldier and with the moral predicaments and qualities peculiar to this profession.¹ The first is largely about putting others’ lives at risk; the second, about how to comport oneself when living a life more than ordinarily at risk: how ‘to act wisely in spite of fear’.² The two fields overlap at many points: most obviously in that division of conventional ethics of war commonly referred to by its Latin name, the jus in bello, which urges combatants to employ force in a discriminating and proportionate manner. They also intersect at those points in the chain of command where a strictly legal order offends the conscience of a subordinate or where passion, style or sheer force of personality confounds hierarchy. However, the intersection is not of like with like, because each field is premised on a different idea of the nature and setting of war.

In the just-war tradition hostilities are seen as acts of state intended to achieve justice following the commission of wrongs that cannot otherwise be dealt with because they are committed by sovereigns acknowledging no superior temporal authority. The central question for the head of state is under what circumstances it might be right to order the use of lethal force against an enemy. For many Christians, war is nested within larger stories than those of merely setting earthly things to rights. Theologians traditionally have discussed war under the heading of charity, by which is understood non-erotic love. For Christians this is the greatest of three so-called theological virtues. Embedded in a narrative of the loving use of force, war may be viewed as an instrument in the working out of Divine Providence, the expression in historical time of the ultimate redemptive purpose of God. In this very important sense, the just-war tradition, generally encountered today as a set of criteria or prudential rules, is itself firmly embedded in a theological narrative.

In recent secular variants of the just-war tradition the story has been more modest, though not always more modestly expressed. National survival or liberation has replaced redemption at its core, with the implication that some universal value attaches peculiarly to the principles embodied in the institutions and public life of the nation concerned. This quasi-Hegelianism has perhaps never been stated more overtly than by Francis Lieber, author of US General Order 100 (the 1863 ‘Lieber Code’), who claimed, in 1838, that ‘the state stands incalculably above the individual, is worthy of every sacrifice, of life, and goods, of wife and children, for it is the society of societies, the sacred union by which the creator leads man to civilization, the bond, the pacifier, the humanizer, of men, the protector of all undertakings …’³

Soldiers have fought for many reasons, but they have not always been bound by faith, ideology or loyalty to the polity or lord they serve. They have not always understood, let alone adopted, the narratives of their commanders. Armies have typically comprised a miscellany of more or less willing men brought together by one or more of chance, duty, custom, self-esteem, coercion and the prospect of gain or glory. Their moral concerns and predicaments have generally been far from identical with those of the power for which they fight. Robert Graves, in his memoir of trench warfare on the Western Front during the First World War, recalled that he and his fellow officers ‘all agreed that regimental pride remained the strongest moral force that kept a battalion going as an effective fighting unit, contrasting it particularly with patriotism and religion’.⁴

Besides, life for the soldier has seldom been one of continuous fighting. Even when it has extended over a long period, war generally has been punctuated by lulls between campaigns, formal truces and other periods of respite. Typically, campaigns and even wars have been episodes in a military life. Not uncommonly, such a life has been lived without much in the way of combat, though always in readiness. Military ethics therefore embraces questions shared with the ethics of war, such as the treatment of prisoners, but extends also to the cultivation of military virtues such as courage and honour over a lifetime, to the forms and purposes of military training and drill, and to what may loosely be termed military bearing, the last of which may seem to lie outside the moral realm and have little direct connection with war, yet is surely a not insignificant element in the professional ethic of the soldier. Think only of how many military suicides wear uniform.

So while the most pressing issue for military ethics may be how to live a good life, even in the heat of battle, this is conjoined with a less urgent but no less important concern about what it is to be a good soldier over an entire lifetime. Tim O’Brien’s Lieutenant Corson, after leading his contingent half way across Asia in pursuit of a deserter, perhaps by this time a deserter himself, fell in love with Jolly Chand in Delhi. As his health and confidence returned, he ‘began taking care of himself again, dressing well and combing his hair into a neat old-fashioned part. He demanded that the men start showing the same good habits. “Garrison troops,” he said loudly, for Jolly’s ear, “are what makes a wartime army”‘.⁵ Drill, echoes Graves, provides the basis of later effective action under pressure.⁶

Although military ethics are to be distinguished from the ethics of war, it is also true that a proper understanding even of the ethics of war requires an investigation that extends beyond the core concerns of the just-war tradition. Equally, military ethics requires attention to the role of professional soldiers between wars as well as during them. Hence the titles of this book and of its first part. It is not just about war, and it is certainly about more than just the Christian just-war tradition.

These matters cannot properly be addressed until a prior question has been dealt with. If the decisions of states and the conduct of soldiers only make moral sense when framed within extended narratives, surely the same is true of war itself. What kind of thing is it? Is it an institution of international society, or is it the mere breakdown of those institutions believed to prevent or obviate the need for it, notably diplomacy or commerce?⁷ If war is waged by a people chosen by God against His enemies, as in the Old Testament, it becomes a religious duty. If it is a means of righting wrongs, as the just-war tradition insists that it may be, the primary loyalty of the soldier may be to his sovereign, trusting in his motives and the justice of his cause. If, by contrast, war becomes simply a tool of policy, without moral justification, then the soldier will remain bound to his duty by military discipline, but his primary loyalty may shift to his immediate comrades, his band of brothers. If, finally, war loses all rational purpose, the moral obligation of the combatant may be to retain some residual humanity. The story in which the soldier plays a part may be one of obedience to God, service to nation, solidarity with comrades, or personal integrity in a moral wilderness. It may be all of these and more at various moments in the same conflict. The moral obligations of the combatant vary accordingly.

Once again, the point is nicely made by O’Brien in Going After Cacciato,in which he juxtaposes two narratives, the first relating the routine of an infantry company in Vietnam and the second tracing the 8,600-mile pursuit by a handful of soldiers of Cacciato, a dullard who ups one day and sets off on foot for Paris. The novel is very largely an exercise in the phenomenology of war: of how war is immediately perceived by those caught up in it. The tone is set by an epigram from Siegfried Sassoon: ‘Soldiers are dreamers.’ In the midst of the dream narrative, when the pursuers are detained in Tehran, still carrying arms but without passports, their interrogator, an Iranian captain, suggests that he and the Americans compare their experiences of war. Accepting the experience of every participant in a battle to be unique, the Iranian nevertheless looks for unity in this diversity and asks how foot soldiers can be expected to fight effectively and achieve victory if they lack a clear and common moral purpose. One of the Americans rounds on him; the Iranian has changed the subject. ‘We’re talking about how it feels. How it feels on the ground. And I’m saying the common grunt doesn’t give a damn about purposes and justice. He doesn’t even think about that shit. Not when he’s out humping, getting his tail shot off.’⁸ The point is rammed home repeatedly. As battle approaches, a young West Point platoon commander knows where he is and where he’s going and works through his sergeants as a leader should, infusing the chain of command with his growing personal authority and watching with pride as the last of his thirty-eight men makes it up the hill. For his part, ‘Private First Class Paul Berlin did not think … [T]he climb was everything’.⁹

Berlin’s whole being is taken up by the perennial preoccupation of the infantryman with the sheer effort required of him, perfectly captured in the title story of O’Brien’s collection, The Things They Carried, which exhaustively lists the items and their weights, the material and the metaphorical. It is a recurrent theme in infantry memoirs. Rifleman Harris, who served in the Peninsular War at the start of the nineteenth century, recalled that ‘the weight I … toiled under was tremendous, and I often wonder at the strength I possessed at this period, which enabled me to endure it; for, indeed, I am convinced that many of our infantry sank and died under the weight of their knapsacks alone’.¹⁰ Almost a hundred years later, a decade after he was de-mobilized, Robert Graves quoted a letter he had written home from Flanders after marching his men out of the trenches, in which he had enclosed ‘a list of their minimum load, which weighs about sixty pounds [with] a lot of extras on top of this – rations, pick or shovel, periscope, and their own souvenirs to take home on leave’.¹¹ Under this weight, the moral universe of the soldier may easily contract to moment and point.

Wars and their component episodes of combat at best make sense within larger stories of Divine Providence, political judgement, group solidarity and personal development; at worst as tales of lust, ineptitude, disintegration and bare life. Moving to a still higher level of abstraction, the question of primacy among these stories depends heavily on the plausibility of a further narrative, which haunts contemporary discussion of military ethics. For the contention offered here is that academic and policy debate, at least in the USA and Britain, have lately witnessed the marginalization of military ethics and the phenomenology of combat in a society bewitched by criteria and rules. The official just-war story – of a coherent, comprehensive, continuous and universalizable Western tradition – has scooped the pool. It seems to be all there is to know. Howev...