How War Teaches Us To Live—And Eat—With Gratitude
Eating watermelon in a war zone with Ernst Jünger
I sat in a Bobcat forklift with a rifle and a radio beneath the arc of the Milky Way. I saw the feint trace of an airplane broach the black mountain to the north of our camp in the mountains of Afghanistan. As it flew overhead, a dozen large boxes slid off its rear ramp, their parachutes opening with fluttering cracks and gracefully landing in front of me.
I thanked the pilot, scooped up a box on the Bobcat forks, and drove it to our tents over the broken desert floor. We had been eating nothing but MREs, or “meals ready to eat,” plastic tasting mush with a shelf life of well over five years. I jumped out of the Bobcat, tore the cover off the box, and gazed within: lettuce, apples… and watermelon.
I wrapped my palms around the melon and carried it off to a small pile of sandbags. I placed my rifle on the ground, squatted on my heels, unsheathed my knife, and carved into that red flesh with the moon for company. Two thousand calories of melony goodness later and I would swear I was not squatting in goat shit but sitting on a throne in a castle in heaven.
Ernst Jünger described a similar moment in WWI that reminded me of my melon. During an attack on an enemy trench, he came upon a hastily abandoned British dugout. He struck gold: pipes, tobacco, wool socks, eggs (“eggs were little more than a word to us at this stage”), canned meat, jam, and coffee.1 He took a few samplings from this cornucopia of luxury and then stepped out onto the shrapnel laden mud of the trenches.
A few days later, he was crouched in a bomb crater as the sun was rising. German and British aircraft fought overhead and, beneath them, a pale roan horse looked “ghostly as it flew over the wide, lonely plains under the shifting and variable cloud of explosive.” And then came bullets. And then shells. And then screams. What, then, did our warrior-philosopher do? “You have to be a fatalist in such situations. I confirmed my adherence to that creed by sampling the delicious contents of a can of gooseberry jam I’d picked up from the British stores.”
Yes. This fatalism is one of the things I miss most about midnight missions and the whine of helicopter rotors a dozen feet over enemy rooftops. It is this fatalism that makes the in-between moments in life more precious than the main moments.
So why does the enlightened suffering of a philosophical soldier matter?
It matters because a man a breath away from death and surrounded by rotting corpses can savor his gooseberry jam while shrimp from Mexico, cacao from Ghana, wine from France, and bananas from Ecuador can be eaten without the same sense of gratitude and mindfulness amid peace and plenty. Jünger is hinting at a deep and ancient wisdom. I want to pick up where he left off.
What then is fatalism? It is a doctrine that states we are powerless to change events.2 Jünger could neither turn his bombed out crater into a French chateau with a wish, nor could he shoot down the enemy aircraft with lasers from his eyes. What then?
The creed of fatalism makes it clear that we cannot change events—we can only change our thoughts about them.
But there is something unique about fatalistic thoughts in war. What, then, if Jünger rolled his eyes in disgust at his gooseberry jam and his miserable bomb crater? His would be an ungrateful fatalism. What if he dumped the jam in the mud and cursed the sun? Suicidal fatalism. What if he ate it but demanded more from the gods? Gluttony fatalism. What if he took the can of jam and wondered about those who grew the berries, and whether or not they had died in the war, and how nothing is worth war, and how everything and everyone is just wretched for causing so much bloody waste? Melancholy fatalism. No. War fatalism is often a positive fatalism, a get after it fatalism, the same strain spoken of in war since, I imagine, we sprouted vocal chords and written of since we invented the alphabet.
In war, we know we cannot change events, so we change our minds. In peace, we do not change our minds because we think we can change events. How so?
The nearness of death makes what we can control and what we cannot control quite clear. When death is not near, whether by trench, or bullet, or bacteria, or falling piano, our world is not minimized to this moment in time. We hinge everything on the next moment. This is, in a sense, a delusion of immortality, for we think the next moment is certain to arrive. This delusion may be at the root of many modern ills. That spoon of gooseberry jam can be half-looked at, half-tasted, worth nothing in the face of a thousand other luxuries and things to do. But the next moment is and always will be an if.
I remember every savory bite of that watermelon eaten from the edge of my knife because I was not watching television while eating it, or reading an email, or thumbing through social media, or wishing I were on a beach in Mykonos, or thinking about the next food I could shove in my mouth. That watermelon was my world on that night. I was alive when I might not be, eating a watermelon when I might be eating a bullet. Near death, the question is to live or not to live, and, if to live, to savor or not to savor. Now, we hinge everything on the present moment.
It seems a brush with death can make all those things we thought were important evaporate with a thousand-yard-stare and a shake of the head. If we are given another chance to live, we swear we will never forget the lesson that how we treat each moment of our lives dictates whether we ever actually live at all. Without this, how many people actually stop and sit and stare in awe at a glistening red wedge of watermelon? What is a wretched melon worth when we think we will live forever and eat a million watermelons?
What, then, is it to live—and eat—with positive fatalism?
When it comes to remembering the lesson of death, I have found much value in combining the heaviness of I am going to die tomorrow with the lightness of I am going to live forever. I can only describe it as the feeling that we are in a car spinning out of control. It slides to a stop and teeters on the edge of a cliff. At last, it comes to rest with two wheels hanging off the edge, and we know we will live, and to which we can do nothing but erupt in uncontrollable laughter.
When it comes to eating, war taught me the holiness of food. Squatting near sandbags, stalking through silty rivers, and crouching on craggy peaks taught me how to eat with awe. I now challenge myself to eat with the same granular attention. I try to see the color of the taste of cacao: in my mind it is black, like the lush black soil of a rainforest. I try to hear the sound of the taste of a strawberry: it is the sound of a bubbling Pennsylvania creek in spring. I try to smell the scent of the taste of a moondrop grape: it is the smell of midnight in autumn.
I believe it is possible to reverse engineer a combat mode of mind, which is in fact a Stoic mode of mind, and which is, in the end, an ancestral mode of mind.
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Jünger, Ernst. Storm of Steel. Penguin Classics, 2004. For this and all references to Jünger and his experiences.
I left out the “predetermined” aspect of some definitions of fatalism as that is not a subject I want to broach in a short-form essay.
Great piece. I think this sort of appreciation goes hand-in-hand with humor in our darkest moments. As life slides out of control we can savor the little pleasures and absurdity of the whole thing.
Sam: This one flowed today; you shared a moment of appreciation, of savoring the watermelon, valuing both the simplicity and the grandeur of that experience.