Soldiers and ex-soldiers, where did you find your faith?

Great Debates
1

First off on this Memorial Day, let me thank you for your service, your courage and all your efforts. I know there are exceptions, but I do believe most of you have honestly set out to defend our country, and that you’ve served with honor and should be respected, revered and rewarded.

But I have a question. I really want to know. I’m not trying to insult anybody, I swear. How do you find the faith to follow orders when the situation isn’t clear? I love my country and all it stands for. If ‘they’ ever show up here in mass, trying to take over, I swear I’ll be out there fighting them somehow, but we haven’t had much in the way of straight-forward wars lately. We’ve not been fighting in our own country, against invading armies. We haven’t been fighting armies in uniform, with clear battlefields very much.

A cursory study of history and a casual observation of the present tells me that the best and the brightest are not always the ones winding up as the leaders and decision makers. Leaders are as human as anybody else. They have all kinds of faults and issues. They make terrible mistakes. They have dreadful misunderstandings. They sometimes allow ego and ambition to influence their choices.

Maybe it’s just my deep-seated distrust of authority, but I have never felt I could obey orders to invade a foreign country, drop bombs on designated targets I knew nothing about or shell targets in the distance, just on the say so of someone higher up in the chain of command. Yet I’m sure that sometimes this does have to be done. I’m sure that it sometimes does matter as to whether or not we are safer. And sometimes it was a mistake. Without access to more information than a deity could have, I think that often there’s no way to know which is which, a lot of the time.

How do you deal with this?

2

[QUOTE=XaMcQ]

But I have a question. I really want to know. I’m not trying to insult anybody, I swear. How do you find the faith to follow orders when the situation isn’t clear? I love my country and all it stands for. If ‘they’ ever show up here in mass, trying to take over, I swear I’ll be out there fighting them somehow, but we haven’t had much in the way of straight-forward wars lately. We’ve not been fighting in our own country, against invading armies. We haven’t been fighting armies in uniform, with clear battlefields very much.

[/QUOTE]

For me it comes down to the feeling that this is the only way the system can work. It’s hardly an ideal situation but as I see it the alternatives as either, at best non-functional, and at worst a recipe for total chaos.

We’ve got guns, bombs, tanks, planes, lasers [whoohoo!] and so on. All in all that’s some pretty serious shit. The moment we start selectively following orders based on a “this is good policy” “this is bad policy” criteria [vs an “illegal order vs lawful order one”] then the whole system breaks down.

At one end of the spectrum we have a bunch of well-armed, well trained individuals who may or may not show up to work when the orders come down. At best, this end of the spectrum would lead to a general inability to get anything done. At worst, you have a bunch of little groups choosing their own targets and missions based on what they feel needs to be done.. for example, “Screw it, it’s time somebody just Nuked [insert country].”

At the other end of the spectrum who have a military that is, on the whole, cohesive but picks and chooses which policies it wishes to carry out… which is pretty much a recipe for a coup.

To me, the only workable solution is to have faith in the system because there is no better one; hope that the policies you carry out are wise and if not, that the citizens of your country reverse them, and finally, you hope if it ever comes to pass that the orders you are given are unlawful t, that you have the wisdom to recognize it and the courage to disobey those orders.

3

Thank you, Dubious, for your reply. I’m a little disappointed not to have heard from anyone else. Did I pose the question badly, do you think?

4

[QUOTE=XaMcQ]
Thank you, Dubious, for your reply. I’m a little disappointed not to have heard from anyone else. Did I pose the question badly, do you think?
[/QUOTE]

No, I think the question is well posed. I think the problem is that for many of us the concepts that the military must be controlled by a civilian authority [whether or not we voted for them] and that lawful orders must be obeyed whether or not we personally agree with them is simply so well ingrained that we don’t often stop to examine the reasoning behind these concepts.

We* know*, that this is the way it must be just as we know that it’s for the for the greater good but we don’t often stop to think how we know these things.

Personally I think this is a mistake as we should always examine our assumptions critically but at the same time I think it’s a very understandable mistake to make.

5

I think the title of the tread is misleading. When I read it I assumed it meant religious faith (i.e. “where is God in the trenches?”). Some people may have passed over it for that reason.

6

I too thought the thread would be about religious faith, so I was prepared to come in and tell you that I am a former Marine who was/is agnostic, bordering on atheist.

As to your actual question, I served in relative peacetime and never faced any deep soul-searching.

Sir Rhosis

7

For me, it was Faith in the Constitutional Process that Congress would call the Pres. on the carpet if he was out-and-out wrong, evil, or misguided, and take appropriate action.

Of course, my last foray into armed conflict was the first Gulf War.

8

I, too, served in peacetime, but it was during a time of heightened tension along the Iron Curtain. We were drilled constantly on our response to an invasion of West Germany by Soviet forces. We were fatalistic about it – we knew we would be defeated in the early going, and that our true mission was to resist until a counter-attack could be launched from Britain and the U.S. We knew most of us wouldn’t survive, that tactical nuclear weapons probably would be used against us (we assumed our side would use them, too, but never really knew) and that escalation to full-fledged strategic nuclear exchanges probably wouldn’t happen. My own “response scenario” included getting my wife and baby son evacuated to Switzerland. I knew that, if the Soviets invaded, there was little chance I would ever see my family again, but I guess I knew deep inside that, if called, I’d report and do my duty. I’d sworn to do that, and I was raised to honor my word, and I really didn’t think about it much beyond that.

I did serve with a lot of Vietnam vets, and to be quite frank, none of them really rationalized much about it. The fighter/bomber pilots I knew said they ran the missions they were told to run; the grunts went where they were told, did what they were told, tried to survive. I think that’s what every combat soldier does. Once you’re in uniform and have committed yourself to the service, there isn’t a lot of choosing to do. There are consequences for not following orders, and those consequences are made very clear. I don’t think there’s much debate about the need for that kind of discipline – it’s saved countless lives during the history of military conflict.

Military training actually works somewhat to desensitize one to the fact that the job involves killing fellow humans. They’re targets, bogies, aggressors, insurgents, rebels, terrorists or something else to the shot at and hit. Shooting and hitting are practiced so much that they become second nature. And, for the most part, when we’re shooting, we’re being shot at, so the survival aspect figures largely into the equation.