What A Green Beret Can Teach Us About Helplessness
Or how to learn self-command
This post is part of my series on taking slices of excellence from a combat mode of mind and applying them to everyday life.
The focus for today: self-command.
There exists a saying in the SEAL Teams that has stuck with me: “If it is worth doing, it is worth over-doing.” By this same logic, if life is worth living, it is worth over-living. If command is worth having, it is worth over-having. Heart, mind, soul, eyes, ears—all committed and cranked up to maximum.
I see traces of this hammer-esque philosophy in a striking war story. Sergeant First Class Jerry Shriver was one of the most accomplished Green Berets in the Vietnam war. Radio Hanoi, the enemy propaganda arm, put a bounty on his head and dubbed him Mad Dog. We will soon learn why.
When a recon team had to covertly infiltrate Cambodia to observe the effects of a B-52 strike, Mad Dog led it, taking one other Green Beret and four of his indigenous Montagnard teammates with him. They were soon out-numbered and surrounded by over a company of North Vietnamese Army soldiers.1 Screams of the enemy, the crack of bullets, the whine of rockets, and the thump of grenades inched closer and closer as grass and bark and air were broken by a babel of steel.
Let us pause here. Life-and-death situations are unique. Every possible action is reduced to an either-or when the line between existence and non-existence is a breath away. Combatants are taught self-command to make this either-or clear. They use the same methods, I imagine, our ancestors used to train their young for the limitless dangers of the natural world. A typical combatants inner discourse goes something like this: If I do not own this tight spot, then my Montagnard brothers and I will die in this ditch. If I do own it, then we might live. Why not then take responsibility for it?
I laughed when I read this story because Mad Dog owned this terrible situation—and then over-did it.
Looking down at the assault from an airplane overhead, an air controller told Mad Dog he was completely surrounded and needed to be extracted.
Shriver, earning a seat in the proud halls of Valhalla till the end of time, said, “No, no. I’ve got’em right where I want’em—surrounded from the inside.”2
What then? Mad Dog was not helpless in one of the most helpless combat scenarios imaginable, and yet we find a plague of helplessness at present. What is the decisive difference between then and now?
Like some Stoic sage, he knew the external situation—NVA soldiers surrounding him and his team—was outside of his control, and the internal situation—how he responded to the external—was inside of his control. Such a super-power is not learned via voodoo. So how did he over-do it? My guess is that long before this epic moment, he reflected on his training. He reflected on the truth that life was unfair and, at times, unjust. He reflected that there was no escape from pain and death. He reflected that to confront matters of life-and-death he had to strip every last triviality from his life and live in the Zone3. He reflected that he—and no one else on earth—had the irrevocable authority to respond to each precise second in time exactly as he pleased, no matter what hell it may bring.
What, then, is a 7.62mm bullet to a man like this? Or a hundred enemy soldiers taunting him with “You die, GI” as they tighten the noose around his neck? Or a lie? Or death? Is there one object, idea, argument, man, or woman that can turn him into a slave when his mind is in this mode of command?
War, like the ancestral world, demands self-command across many domains—fang, claw, spear, ambush, famine, tyrant, mudslide, breaking through ice into sub-freezing water. But what happens now? We live in an environment where we only need to be in command of one, maybe two domains. Maybe none.
The crucial point is that we can now learn helplessness.
According to psychologist Martin Seligman, “learned-helplessness” is when we are conditioned to expect suffering to such an extent that we stop trying to escape it even if we can. It is significant that learned-helplessness is learned. It is, therefore, not innate. We must become helpless. We must be taught.
A reader might ask, “Who cares? Why does any of this matter?” Let us look at it this way. In peace, learned-helplessness does not seem ominous. It just seems annoying. We are merely annoyed when we hear, “I do not have the power to stop the mugger on the subway, or call out censorship, or risk my career, or say No.”
But what happens when we pivot from an N-of-1 in a subway to an N-of-1,000,000’s in a country? We do not need to turn to George Orwell’s fictional 1984 to see what learned-helplessness looks like at scale. We can look at the results of one of the most diabolical mass movements in history—the Soviet Union.
When Soviet citizens were taught to expect suffering, they stopped saying No and the government exerted more control. When it exerted more control, it collectivized agriculture; when it collectivized agriculture, famine spread; and when famine spread, what then? The government created posters like the ones it hung throughout Ukraine as it starved the population and parents became cannibals: “Eating your children is an act of barbarism.”4
The government taught its people learned-helplessness and their deaths were tragic. The government claimed that it, too, was helpless, and the result was an irony of biblical proportions—it did not accept responsibility for murdering millions.
And so we are left with a crucial question: if self-command works in war, why do we not use it everywhere else? Why have we not created “self-command” classes in our schools where children learn how tough the sinews are in their limbs and how iron the minds in their skulls? And with the Soviet Union utopia in mind, what does this glorification of helplessness mean about our society and those who pull the strings?
I picture two competing bell curves:
It seems then that the State cares less for self-command of the individual than it does for the submissiveness of the herd, the mob, the hoi polloi, the riffraff, the collective. It is an incremental and never-ending assault on the only thing that is truly ours according to the Laws of Nature—how we respond to each second of our existence.
States place a premium on specialists, or those whose command is limited to one hyper-specialized domain at the expense of all others. War and nature require us to be generalists, or those who are more likely to learn self-command in many domains.
My sense is that most people fall somewhere in the middle of one of these bell curves—a little command here, a little helplessness there, neither commanding to the nth nor helpless to the nth.
But why? Why would we not place our palm on the “State” bell curve and shove it to the left towards command, shifting the locus of control inwards?
What, then, does a Mad Dog inner discourse look like when our own boots are on the ground? Let us over-do it: I have so many troubles. They are not happening to me, for I am happening to them—I have them surrounded from the inside. I am plagued with thoughts of self-doubt. Madness—I have them surrounded from the inside. I do not feel in command of my self, my life, my existence, my society, my government, the earth, the galaxy, the silence of the universe, any of it. Nonsense. I know that I am capable of absolute self-command in every second of my life, because I know what is mine and what is not mine, and that I have all of it surrounded from the inside.
What then? is a passion project.
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See you for the next essay on Tuesday.
Guzzetta, Jerry. I Walked With Heroes. Authors Book Publishing, 2023.
Plaster, John L. SOG: The Secret Wars of America's Commandos in Vietnam. New York, Simon & Schuster, 1997.
Courtois, Stephane, and Mark Kramer. The Black Book of Communism : Crimes, Terror, Repression. Harvard University Press, 1999.
Outside of a military context, how would you teach self-command to a civilian or help them increase the skill?
Occasionally I find myself stepping in to solve some minor problem. Not a big deal, but others around me have been surprised that I simply solved the problem myself rather than consult an 'authority'. As they say, if you want it done right, do it yourself.