Lessons For Civilization From War

Thoughts on Anton Myrer's novel, "The Big War"

Writer. Navy SEAL. Dispatches on ancient meaning for the modern world through combat, anthropology, dreams, nature, training, figs, and dogs.

Ivan Aivazovsky. The Wrath of the Seas. 1886.

Welcome back to What then? This essay is a first of its kind here, but Anton Myrer is an author whose writing cuts straight to my core, and I felt compelled to converse and riff with him. This is the result.

Also spoiler alert: anyone who intends to read Myrer’s old novel I write about in this piece, I reveal a part of the plot in the last section of this essay. It would be best to avoid the last section.

The paradox

It is curious that while pain and the threat of a meaningless death teach us the value of human life, the opposite is also true: luxury and privilege all too often blind us to it. But this paradox is human... so we should unpack it.

The novelist Anton Myrer attended private schools and then Harvard. When Pearl Harbor was attacked on 1941, he dropped out and enlisted in the Marine Corps. He was wounded in the Battle of Guam, and spent the rest of his life writing extraordinarily nuanced novels on the human condition through the lens of war. He was a writer who knew of what he wrote—he understood the paradox I highlighted above.

What follows is not a literary analysis of his exceptional novel, The Big War, but my thoughts on the scenes I found most striking.

The awakening

“Alan Newcombe withdrew an arm from under the blankets and laid it across his eyes. Just a song at twilight… sinking through layers on layers of time; resting at last on the lonely brute universality of an army encamped. Caesar’s beskirted legionnaires scampering through the rain in hither Gaul, clashing mess gear, skylarking in the chow line;… some strong-grieved Achaian on the plain before windy Ilium strumming on a battered lyre: it would be heaven—to soar beyond heaven—with you...”

Newcombe was not the first to daydream on the universality of war. That would be like saying he was the first human ever to exist. He was musing on the fact that, as a new recruit in the Army during World War II, he had just left behind what makes up merely the last few seconds of the twenty-four hour clock of human history—civilization. He no longer held the belief that running water, grocery stores, electricity, safety, justice, and atrophied muscles are “normal.” He understood they were recent inventions. Anomalies. So with one foot on the war path and the other awkwardly lingering in civilization, he faced what many young men and women face in hard times: that every intellectual conviction he felt was true, every teacher who spoke with absolute certainty, every argument, burst of angst, sense there is “something missing”—he realized each was actually the result of only seeing one hyper-specific and unprecedented sliver of reality.

Questions inevitably arise: What if it is not humanity that is sick, but civilization? And further, what if civilization is our only hope? Thus we see the education of the newly minted warfighter in its earliest stages.

The transition between “worlds”

Newcombe visited his wealthy, distant father, and his loving, intuitive mother, shortly before deploying for the Pacific. He had a thought that echoed the satirical bite of the Stoic philosopher Epictetus:

“Ah, what a farce it all was—what a delightfully ridiculous parody!—society and family and officer candidate school and parental love and the wondrous, tenacious, doddering blindness of humankind!... The house is burning.—Really?—Yes: the house is burning.—Oh: draw the curtain a little, will you? Thanks so much.—Quite all right. Little more tea?—Splendid. No sugar. Now: did you say the house—?”

I describe this transition as moving from the civilized world to the primeval world. For men like Newcombe, it is easy to mock the polite innocence (or often blind arrogance) of those who cannot imagine just how bad things can get. In mocking the civilized, he is in fact mocking himself. He feels like he has woken up and is angry at how long he has been kept asleep.

But is his anger right?

Let us look at the inverse. The transition from the primeval world to the civilized world is an even more radical pivot, as soldiers have learned over and over. What problem is actually a problem if, at the end of the day, you can drink a cup of tea? Or sit with eyes closed after reading a novel? Those who have left civilization, only to return with a primeval perspective, may mock civilization and shake their heads. And yet they are the ones who give their lives to preserve it. Why? Because they understand the anomaly of civilizational calm is actually a gift. Peace, surplus, safety—each is a break from the hellish liquid flowers of a flamethrower.

So it is strange, at present, that the voices crying most loudly for an apocalyptic wake-up call for civilization—all those who are eerily fond of the idea of dictatorships, expanded government, righteous violence for their ideologies, or the promise of war as a return to some idealized fantasy of primitive order—these are those who know nothing of pain, suffering, hardship, and war.

Memento Mori

At one point, Myrer drops us into another soldier’s skull and we live his nightmare:

“There was a blinding flash, then a series of thunderclaps, each louder than the one before it, and he saw the little black-and-white cylinder lying by his head. Jap grenade, his mind said, How long had it been there he couldn’t tell, but it was death for them all now and finally, it lay there neat and small and scored with its shiny serration. I am death, it said without saying; I am death, and I am as you can see marvelously near.”

What is worse than the fear of a grenade near our head? What is worse than a nightmare counting our own death down from three, to two, to one, waiting for hundreds of metal splinters to end our lives forever? Is this, perhaps, worse—never knowing how “marvelously near” death actually is? For how much life is never lived without this reminder? How many choices would have been made differently? How many friends, mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, daughters, sons, and dogs would have been treated with slightly more respect, a bit more love, if each was treated as if each day might have been their last? Which is worse—the grenade taunting death, or the fate of Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich, who only realized he was alive a few short agonizing days before he died?

What is the threat of death if not the ultimate human paradox: the end of life and yet the source of life’s intensity?

Poets by nature, not by profession

“Newcombe pulled a clip out of his belt. Savage teeth, well aligned. His rifle looked strange to him: curiously proximate and bright. Why was that? Never had it possessed so many corners, so many facets of gleaming metal — an amazing, faintly oily, gleaming complexity that nearly dazzled him.”

Now we come to the fascinating relationship between the abstract and the concrete.

When we compare the concrete teachings of war, earthquake, and flood, to the abstract teachings of modern academic philosophers, overly-educated intellectuals, and gurus of astounding variety—we realize the majority of the latter is bullshit. Humans of all classes, races, ideologies, convictions, and nationalities experience a retrograde evolution in hardship. Often for the worse, but not always. As the dangerous allure of abstraction dies away (the sort of abstractions that lead to Gulags, Concentration Camps, and genocide, for example) the cosmic beauty of the concrete fills the observer with meaning.

Did you look at these bullets, brother? Do you see the way the light of the sun glints on the bronze of the shell casing like an ancient necklace on the throat of a daughter of Troy? And did you taste that cold water? Tell me, have you ever really looked at the perfectly parallel veins of a coconut palm leaf? I swear I saw a god hidden in the pattern.

In hard times, existence is no longer defined by what: what you believe, what we ought to do, what we are upset about in the past or hope for in the future. Rather existence is defined by that: that we can see, that we feel awe—that we exist.

Small talk versus Soul talk

Newcombe and the other men he was with had a close call earlier in the morning. Here the focus is no longer on the outer world, but the inner:

“He stopped, put his hand to his forehead: the sweat was standing on it in little bubbles. Why was he running on like this? like a garrulous old man? Listening it struck him that everyone who wasn’t asleep was talking, pouring out a stream of memories, arguments, dreams... It was because of this morning: they had to talk, all of them—It was as necessary as gasping for air when you broke water after a dive. It was—proving you were still alive, in a way...”

Yes. Suddenly, the future is no longer an image in the mind of wealth and fame, or of terror and loneliness, or anything other than a simple and pure desire to live another day… because life is good. Suddenly, the gnawing voices in the darkened corners of the skull are forgotten… because one voice rises above the rest. The rupture brought on by an acute Hard Time is a reminder we exist; and if we exist, we have a choice; and if we have a choice, why would we not put words to all that which makes our existence interesting?

Suddenly, small talk is worthless. Polite conversation is an insult when memories, and dreams, and sparrows, and novels, and ideas, and grapes can be discussed during the time we would not have had if we had died that morning. This is when “Yeah, hey, how are you” and “Great, thanks” actually means “Fuck you.”

When we have time and security, how many of us waste it on trivialities and formalities? But when we suspect our time will be up before the sun drops below the horizon, how many no longer give a damn, and speak from the soul?

A path forward

In the end, Newcombe was killed in action. His mother struggled to understand the loss of her son: the waste, the unknowns, the why. In an epic passage describing her interiority—her deepest and innermost thoughts—she said:

“If in a world drunk with ferocity and loss there yet remained one human spirit that declared, ‘I will impose an order on chaos, I will endow it with eloquence and meaning, offer it in an ordered structure that will delight in its unalterable beauty’—If one man could still say this and others of his kind could still gather to pay homage to it, man could not be destroyed. They cannot kill this, she cried silently…”

It is becoming all too clear that if civilization does not learn to endow life itself with eloquence and meaning but without the chaos, it will continue to rely on disorder, misery, and death—in a word, war—to remind us that a meaningful life is simply a choice.

We can make a prophecy: the greatest test facing our civilization is to impose meaning by choice rather than by force. It is to choose gratitude, calm, awe, and creativity out of a love of life, rather than a fear of death.

Contemplating death, gently, is an ancient practice that on the one hand minimizes the ruminating voices in the skull, and on the other hand maximizes loving attention on the world around us. The eyes turn to the tiny teal mark on the inner margin of the hindwing of a black and yellow swallowtail that says to us “Behold what actually matters.” Or to a pomegranate flower bursting open with explosive hues of red that says to us “The epic fight for life has just begun.”

Or we can watch the glutes of our mutts twitch on a ninety-minute ruck and feel twenty-thousand years old, and suddenly want to study every text ever written with a stone, quill, or a pen, to gather all that “eloquence and meaning” and make of life a poem.

Εἰς μελέτην

For meditation