Dropping Bombs on Oneself with the SOG in Vietnam
Riffing with Epictetus and finding figs on thorns
Ambushing enemy combatants was one of the best experiences of my life. I loved stalking and sitting in silence for hours on end after hours of heavy rucking in the black hours of the night. I loved the hunt. It was not until the enemy ambushed me that the real learning began.
I woke up in a sense. I had always known what was under my control and what was not under my control, to use the Stoic terminology, but that was merely theory. Within a tenth of a second of lying face down in an irrigation ditch inhaling dirt and dried bits of goat shit with bullets pounding the earth around me I was left with a question: what is truly ours when all else has been stripped away from us?
I found my answer as though it were a grape on a thorn or a fig on a thistle.1 I found the answer through failure and pain like the knuckle-dragger I was at the time.
When I discovered Epictetus years later, I was struck he had answered this same question almost two-thousand years ago, I imagine as the knuckle-dragger he himself surely was during his slave years: “If a man should take to heart these two words and observe them in controlling and keeping watch over himself, he will live a highly peaceful life.”2
The two words are this: endure and renounce.
What, then, do they mean? Why do they matter at present?
Life is a matter of perspective. In the peace we have been blessed with, everything is relative: when wretched people, traffic, politics, and a host of other nuisances intrude on a peaceful life, they can feel like apocalyptic abominations. But when we are in war, in hardship — in hell on earth — everything is absolute. When a bit of traffic or a political spectacle is compared to death-by-bullet, each becomes a minor curiosity. No more than a cause for reflection.
Each becomes a fig on a thistle.
My point is Stoic concepts such as “endure” and “renounce” are most clearly understood in times of peace not when they are defined theoretically in ease, but when fleshed out with concretes in hardship. Not in peace, but in war.
A SOG recon team in the Vietnam War provides us one example.
In 1966, a CH-46 helicopter inserted three American SOG warriors and their indigenous Nung partners into the jungle. As the rotors beat the bush around them and the bird lifted away, the recon team came under 360 degree fire: they had inserted into the middle of an entrenched NVA unit. The recon leader screamed into the radio, “Come and get us! You’ve got to come and get us!” Aircraft strafed the forest and dropped bombs around the unit, but the NVA were too close. The helicopter could not pick them up. Suddenly the radio broke squelch again, but this time the voice was calm: “That’s it, guys. It’s all over. Don’t come in. You haven’t got a chance. When I quit talking, put the shit right on us.” American bombers dropped thousands of pounds of explosive on the recon team’s position. For every one SOG, there were almost one hundred NVA. The radio never broke squelch again. The team vanished.3
Our SOG warrior reveals the unspoken meaning of Epictetus’ words: our lovingly ruthless old Stoic did not counsel us to train for peace and plenty. His “peaceful life” was neither sedan chairs, Roman villas, nor Iberian vineyards — it was a peaceful inner life no matter our external hell.
Endurance is to feel the black jungle soil on our cheek as we fire our rifles into the yellow muzzle flashes ten feet away. It is to hear the high-pitched ringing in our ears and feel the bits of bark from shattered trees in our hair. It is to observe the situation from the detached observation center within our minds and realize with an eerie equanimity that “It’s all over.” It is to know our death is near; that we are in fact choosing this death for a noble reason; and to pause before pressing the transmit button, calm the voice, and make the command decision to wipe our own position of the face of the earth. It is the fact that one hundred NVA could not break one SOG warrior and yet one SOG warrior could break one hundred NVA.
Renunciation is to look up at the helicopters safely hovering above the inferno in the jungle beneath them. It is to feel the urge to scream at them to swoop in and save our lives, only to then to renounce this craving. Why? What went through our SOG warriors mind in this moment? In one hand he held the lives of the pilots, the souls of the crew, and his own wishing, craving, screaming, blaming, self-pity, and terror; in his other hand he held the creed of renunciation. His decision was made: he sentenced himself to death so that others might live. I can only imagine how he felt when he said, “Don’t come in.” Did he feel only suppressed craving? Or did he place both palms on the granite bedrock of Epictetian freedom and feel a bit of serenity?
Let us sum up with this: Those who endure are broken by nothing but themselves. Those who renounce are those who have nothing left to lose because everything that can be taken away has already been willingly given away.
Endurance is to choose death over kneeling; renunciation is to choose death over begging.
It seems, then, Epictetus left us with some options. If we can renounce but not endure, then we may find inner peace when the world is at peace, but an inner hell when the world is in hell. We make victims of ourselves. If we can endure but not renounce, then it would probably be wise to keep us in a military barracks, or perhaps a prison, safely locked away until the next war. Yet even then amid whistling bits of metal we are but a grenade without a pin: spastic, unreliable, governed neither by others nor by self. And if we can neither endure nor renounce, then… who would want this? I do not even want to write about it. But if we can do both, and merge with the SOG, and seal our blood-bond with Epictetus, and assume command of our role in this cosmic play, then we may truly be unbounded, unperturbed, unbreakable.
So if our SOG legend can attain inner peace in outer hell and keep others safe by commanding his own death-by-bomb, then what is a bit of traffic? A little tumble in the stock market? An election? A wretched human being? And if these minor trials are now nothing because our perspective has forever changed from relative to absolute, then what is a home in flames? A hurricane, a tsunami, a war, an apocalypse?
Figs on thistles.
At last, we come back to our question: why do endurance and renunciation matter at present?
Because they cut through the bullshit.
It is to look up at the heavens when it does not seem as though life can get any worse, spread our arms, grin the grin of the gods, and say: “Put the shit right on me — I can take it.”
To help What then? reach more readers, please consider adding a like, restacking, and sharing this essay to help spread the good word.
“Are grapes gathered from thorns or figs from thistles?” —Matthew 7.16
Plaster, John L. SOG: The Secret Wars of America’s Commandos in Vietnam. Penguin Publishing Group, 2010.
I find it really interesting you found Epictetus following your experiences with war just as Epictetus found Musonius after significant experience with slavery. Almost as if the mentor provided powerful language and perspective within the experience already lived.
As I continue to read Discourses again (because of you) it’s wild how similar your writing feels to his in the raw and honest but empowering style for those willing to be uncomfortable with the words and subsequent application.
Just incredible shit brother.
Sam this was so timely! Been a bad couple of days, just nonsense stuff, but enough to aggravate an old 0302. Then Sam shows up this morning and reminds…endure…renounce, it’s nuisance stuff that has your ass in a twist. I picked the fig, endured the thistle, tastes very good, the fingers will heal. Hot, cold, thirst, hunger, tired. They all just another feeling. Endure, renounce and carry on? Well now you have something.
Thanks for post and the lift sailor! Semper Fi!
PS Those early SOG guys were truly something, not to take anything away from today’s warriors but when you look at the changes in gear and education and training you really respect what they did, invented and taught.