How To Apply Marine Corps Philosophy To Hardship
Or mastering our judgments under duress
“Who then is the unconquerable man?” —Epictetus
This essay explores one possible answer to Epictetus’s thought experiment.
When extreme situations arose in WWII, the U.S. troops said “FUBAR”. In Vietnam, they said “There it is.”1
Let us take a walk with the Marines in Vietnam, circa 1968: The Colonel leads from an air conditioned tent while his men ruck to death up a godforsaken hill in the sweltering jungle for no other reason than to advance his own career: There it is. The point man with eleven months of combat takes a bullet fired at random into the bamboo forest three days before going home: There it is. The nineteen year old Marine, for the first time in his life, feels the surreal stiffness of rigor mortis as it sets in on his friends body that was, not a few hours prior, breathing, joking, and rucking beside him: There it is.2
What then is the nature of It? It is a thing or event that arises out there in the world. We can choose to deny It, this path is doomed to fail, as some other It will get us. When the bent blades of elephant grass near the edge of the foot path come into view, either we agree with the judgment of “bent blades of grass + be wary” and take a knee to halt the unit, or we deny it and keep walking, triggering the hidden trip mine and a metal cloud of shrapnel. War is a throwback to the ancient world where everything was a simple “if then” equation: if the Netsilik refused to acknowledge the cold of the arctic or the Bedouin the heat of the desert, then their bloodlines would have been extinguished by the snow and sand.
It seems then that we either acknowledge It or we meet our end.
What follows? We are not merely bones, blood, and tissue. We are that which breathes life into these corpses we walk around in — a breath of reason — which means that nothing outside of our minds can dictate our response unless we allow it to. Let us dig in and explore how this Devil Dog wisdom, whose roots stretch back two thousand years to ancient Stoicism, can help us today when our own hill, whatever that may be, needs to be assaulted.
Once we say “There it is” and a judgment appears within in our minds, what comes after? How do we choose to respond? The inner discourse is composed of many voices: which voice do we choose to listen to when the judgment has been formed and it is time to march uphill?
Do we submit to the miserable voice? The miserable voice wants to live in a bubble blinded by reality. Let us burst this bubble. What is a broken toe compared to trench foot? A scratch on a car door compared to mortar rounds? A power outage compared to camouflage clothing rotted from heat and humidity, and saturated with urine, feces, spit, sweat, and blood? The minor grievance only appears major for lack of major grievances to compare it to. A minor grievance is nothing but an opportunity to say, “I will lean into this test to see how well I can treat hard times like easy times and easy times like hard times.”
Do we submit to the complaining voice? Not even the complainer wakes up in the morning and says, “I hope to be as wretched and cancerous as humanly possible today,” or “I cannot wait to vent my outrage and for everyone to bear witness to my emotional tantrums.” Complaining, at least for my part, is usually a spontaneous and instantly obeyed reaction. The complaining voice chooses to forgot a simple truth: if we can complain, then we are still alive, and if we are still alive, then we should not complain. It follows then that we can hold the complaining voice up to our eyes and ask of it: Would you rather sit in standstill traffic or be dead? Would you rather bear the fanatical fringes dominating public discourse or be dead? When we compare our problems to death, our problems die and are reborn as opportunities.
Do we submit to the discontent voice? The discontent voice expects reality to warp and twist itself into a more desirable form. When we are coated in mud while squatting in the jungle because our insides are clawing their way out of our colon, the discontent voice wants to be home; but when it is home, it wants to be rich; but when it is rich, it wants to be loved; but when it is loved, it wants to be immortal. The discontent voice will never be calm. It will never be willing to breathe a last breath for a cause because no one and nothing is ever good enough for it. The discontent voice is a free rider. A Boat Ducker.
We have a dilemma on our hands. Whether I am miserable, complaining, or discontent, It will still be there. When the canons start pounding the ship – or when the mortars start whistling, or the traffic starts slowing, or the media starts squawking – and all of the voices of the inner discourse start vying for attention, which flag do we raise? If, like good sailors, we were to tattoo our choice across our chest, would we want the script to read, “I act like a wretch” or “I complain about everything” or “I will waste my life away until it is too late”?
The muddy, mine-studded hill standing before us, however, is an opportunity to test ourselves against. Just as Marines might be miserable, complaining, and discontent, only to transition from peace-mode to war-mode in a fraction of a second, so too can we.
Why not then choose the script that reads, “I flow with it”? Why not choose the flowing voice? This does not mean rainbows and unicorns, or a glaze-eyed passivity. It means swan diving into the cosmic web of cause and effect by accepting reality exactly as it is, and learning to unearth the wisdom in everything that happens from a helicopter crash, to a jammed M16, to “the smell of napalm in the morning.”
What does the unconquerable man or woman look like? He might look like a nineteen year old Marine Private marching towards gunfire with a rifle and a dozen hand grenades. She might look like a twenty two year old Navy Lieutenant tending the wounded with a warm smile whether she feels like smiling or not. Both choose to play the role they have been given with the same austere calm and self-command our ancestors were selected for throughout the grindstone of evolutionary time.
Now what might the unconquerable man or woman say?3 “When my flight is delayed twelve hours, then I will calmly state ‘There it is’ and flow with it. When monsoon and injustice and war lie before me, I will flow with it. And when death comes, I will fight against it with all the wrath and rebellion I have been given by nature in all her wisdom, and when my body finally breaks and my time comes to an end, I will calmly state ‘There it is’ and flow with it.”
This blue orb floating in the blackness of space is a miracle no matter how much death, disaster, and hardship echoes across its surface. What comes to pass is not our business. What we think and do about it is the only business we can rightly call our own. This is, I think, the thread of serenity that runs to the root of this bit of war wisdom.
Thank you for reading What then?
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I came across this expression while reading Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War by Karl Marlantes. I cannot recommend this book enough. It is exceptionally written, objective, and touches on some of the universal truths every combatant experiences at some point in war.
The expression “There it is” refers to this thing or event in addition to our initial, subconscious value judgment of it. “There it is” is one and the same with what the ancient Stoics would call φαντασία, which is the root of our word for fantasy, and which in a philosophical context refers to an impression. So a thing or event plus our value judgment of it leads to our impression of the whole. Our war fighters, without knowing it, used “There it is” to call out their impressions with the same logic our ancient thinkers would.
“τίς οὖν ὁ ἀήττητος;” Epictetus 1.18.21. “Who then is the unconquerable man?” One of his best thought experiments.
Great insights and exceptionally well written. You deserve a wide audience!
I call it accepting reality. Sometimes it is “time and space”, i.e. when sitting in traffic I say “i sit here or I sit there”.