Lessons Written In Blood, Wisdom Written In Ink
What we can learn from Epictetus and a Vietnamese helicopter pilot
“Instead of the gong for dinner, let us hear a whistle from a Spartan fife.” —Emerson
War is an incubator. Every possible permutation of emotion, thought, and action we can experience is laid bare. War is, therefore, an existential mirror of the human condition.
I want to use a striking war story I came across to flesh out one of my favorite quotes from the Stoic Epictetus. And why not? The lessons of the Stoa are the lessons of war, but where the former were written in the classrooms and painted porches of Rome and Greece, the latter were written in the far more ancient fields, paddies, mountains, seas, and deserts across the earth.
Nguyen Van Hoang—dubbed “Mustachio” by Americans who willingly placed their lives in his hands—was a Vietnamese H–34 Kingbee helicopter pilot. He was selected to fly Studies and Observations Group (SOG) warriors into and out of some of the most intense combat zones of the war in Vietnam. On a black night in 1966, a SOG recon team was ambushed and had multiple wounded. The NVA were hunting them. Neither American Huey nor Vietnamese Kingbee pilots would fly at night.
None but Mustachio.
He told his copilot and door gunner to stand down. He chose to go alone because he knew the mission might be his last. Rising into the wet and heavy Vietnamese air, he flew in the darkness by himself. He landed amid a cloud of yellow muzzle flashes, white blasts, and crisscrossing tracers of green and red, and calmly picked up the shot, bleeding, and surrounded Green Berets.
His helicopter was shot eighty-eight times. His thumb was shot off. But he brought his brothers home.1
Why, then, did Mustachio say Yes when all others said No? What wisdom can we learn from Epictetus? What does it mean for you and I?
Let us turn to our ancient teacher: “What hardship is involved when that which has come into being is destroyed? The instrument of destruction is a sword, or the rack, or the sea, or a tile, or a tyrant. What concern is it to you by what road you descend to the House of Hades? They are all equal. But if you care to hear the truth, the road by which the tyrant sends you is the shorter. No tyrant ever took six months to cut a man’s throat, but a fever often takes more than a year.”2
I feel ten pounds lighter when I read his words, even though they are heavy with death. I do not know why, but the weighty matters in my mind that seem to have nothing to do with dying—a thought I have not yet gotten to the bottom of in a Dostoevsky novel I am reading or playing with the ideas in this essay—suddenly do not feel weighty, but things I am grateful to be able to do. It becomes less “I have to do this,” and more “I get to do this.” It becomes less about me, and more about something else. But what?
It is significant that Mustachio ordered his gunner and copilot to stay behind. Not only did he seek to save the SOG, but he sought to save his crew. He knew they, too, might die, and did not want to fly them into hell. He reflected on them. Now, why would he do something as risky as leave his crew behind?
A stone knows neither love nor hate; a lily pad knows neither life nor death. But we do. Those who know life stand at a fork: build or burn. For my part, this choice rose out of sand and blood and led to self-reflection; this self-reflection turned outward to others who were also conscious of what it is to be alive; and then this outward reflection forced a question: in the face of mortality, do we fight for the life-affirming, or do we cave to its negation—apathy, destruction, or nihilism?
My sense is Mustachio chose the life-affirming path. Like many who have stood at deaths door, he probably found compassion for life deepened not despite death, but because of it. We might save a life. We might see the end of a life. We might take a life. Is compassion only possible by first knowing what the end of life really looks like? When we witness the precise moment in time two eyes transition from fire to glass, life to death? This differential forces the mind to freeze. The mind must reframe things.
Is this why Epictetus, a slave, devoted his life to teaching serenity to young men who might have been his masters if history had gone differently? Is this why Mustachio, a warrior, risked everything for Americans who might have been his enemy had he been born a bit further north? Is this why he died a few weeks later risking everything, once again, for his American brothers—brothers not by blood, but by belief?
Epictetus reminds us we are not victims. A choice in how we die means we can choose a good death. We can descend to the House of Hades on our own terms. On one level, he is saying that from the other side of death, dead is dead—we will not be around to care how it happened. On another level, we can try to avoid it, raging and moaning, but it will find us anyway in the form of a bacteria or the rack, some slow and wretched death. And on yet another level, we can accept it, and in so doing earn a different kind of death: death-by-train saving a stroller from the tracks, or death-by-gravity falling several thousand feet in a cockpit while trying to rescue some soldiers in a firefight.
In the end, I believe Epictetus is saying that in choosing a good death we are choosing a good life. For my part, a touch of death leads to a life in eight-thousand pixels.
A touch of death makes a walk a thing of awe for azure water, yellow autumn leaves, golden desert sand, purple skies, white stars, black soil, and red-embered fires. A touch of death can close our eyes in gratitude for the velvety flesh of a fig off the branch. A touch of death and the compassion that follows might make us say Yes to the breathless voice on the radio asking for help in the dead of night.
The dying see what the living ignore.
This may be why Mustachio said Yes. He may have already heard that voice. He may have already flown that mission. Epictetus used vivid language—tile, sword, a throat slit slowly—for a reason. If visualized, contemplated, and prepared for, then the reality of these threats has been defanged. Flying bits of broken rotors, twenty seconds of free fall into the jungle, the invisible and bizarrely impersonal bullet—Mustachio may have had made peace with them all.
What follows?
The beauty is we do not need war for any of this, for war is simply a mode of mind. One of the greatest gifts of the Stoa is to put ancient lessons written in blood into wisdom written in ink that can be contemplated in solitude.
That we die is a universal law; how we live is a matter of choice.
What, then, is left but to live with the command of a warrior and the calm of a philosopher?
What then? is a passion project.
To support my mission, please share this essay with a friend, share your thoughts below, or simply add a like.
See you for the next essay on Tuesday.
Plaster, John L. SOG: The Secret Wars of America's Commandos in Vietnam. Simon & Schuster, 1997.
2.6.17-19
Mustachio was not an anomaly. Many years ago, SOG veteran John Plaster told me that of his 22 SOG operations, his teams had to shoot their way out 19 times, More than any other soldiers in the Vietnam War, death was their constant companion. When Jerry Shriver, called a "Mad Dog" by Radio Hanoi radioed, during his final mission in Cambodia, that his team was surrounded. According to Plaster, he said, "I've got 'em right where I want 'em -- surrounded from the inside." After Shriver advanced towards the treeline, his team lost radio contact with him, and he was never seen again. Vietnamese, American, Montagnard--the men of SOG were remarkable and unusually selfless warriors. 10 SOG teams went MIA and another 14 were overrun.
https://sogsite.com/sogs-casualties/
Just. Incredible.
Sam. I don’t know if publishers are knocking yet, and I don’t know how that world works.
But with ideas this sharp, wisdom so profound, and a writing style this unique and crisp, it’s only a matter of time before huge things really take shape for you.