What Half-Yellow-Face Can Teach Us About Victims
Or the art of visualization
In 1876, Crow scouts fought with Custer’s 7th Cavalry in the Battle of the Little Bighorn in order to win Crow land back from the Lakota. The Crow were led by Half-Yellow-Face.
As the sun rose on the day of the battle, Half-Yellow-Face stood on the Crow’s Nest – the highest point of the hill – and looked west to the valley of the Little Bighorn. He realized the enemy force far outnumbered what Army intelligence said and he warned Custer. Custer ignored him – and decided to attack.
Half-Yellow-Face did not say a single word. Knowing the odds of survival were near zero, he stripped down and started painting his face. Custer asked him, “Why are you doing all this?” Half-Yellow-Face replied, “Because you and I are going home today, and by a trail that is strange to us both.”1
I read his quote several more times, and then my eyes unfocused and I stared at the page. The significance of his mindset struck me like a freight train when I compared it to my own mindset in the twenty-four hours leading up to that passage – I had been playing the victim. My immune system is forever in self-destruct mode, a hangover from one of my tours to the Middle East, and on that day I was dealing with a bit of pain; it felt like someone injected lava into my muscle fibers. In response, I allowed my mood to go dark.
And yet this man did not play the victim when he stared into several thousand Lakota rifle barrels and arrowheads. Instead, he walked towards them.
What then? What universal truth can Half-Yellow-Face teach us about ourselves?
Let us begin to answer this question with an observation: death is the ultimate paradox. Death is nothing less than a threat to all that we love and it is nothing more than a return to the universe from which we came. The mind almost breaks trying to understand it. On the other hand, people often say they are afraid of death when in reality they are afraid of dying. Who is afraid of the day prior to their birth? Why then would we be afraid of the day after their death?
My feeling is that Half-Yellow-Face was calm and masterful for catastrophe because he had already been there. He had inoculated himself not just to death, but to all hardship. This is why he viewed death as “home,” dying as “a trail that is strange,” and the fight of his life as a path to self-realization. The irrelevant fact is that Half-Yellow-Face knew the mortal danger while Custer did not; the significant fact is that he stayed and fought anyway.
That was not the first time he stood on that Crow’s Nest – it was the thousandth time. He had already looked out on countless columns of smoke from enemy camp-fires coursing like black veins cross the red hands of dawn. He had already felt the adrenaline fueled tremor in his muscles. He had already fought the Battle of the Little Bighorn a thousand times within his skull as he danced around fires beneath the stars or sat in silent solitude on buffalo skins in his tipi.
While the hands of Half-Yellow-Face were painting his skin, the mind of Half-Yellow-Face was waging war. When combatants paint their bodies (or don their body armor), familiar smells of sweat, earth, and paint fill their nostrils and launch their minds into un-worded yet emotionally vivid visualizations that are the result of years of conscious preparation. This pre-war routine is very ancient, and it is very real.
I imagine the inner discourse of Half-Yellow-Face went something like this: if I am wounded, how will I choose to respond? Will I spread panic like a virus to my war-painted Crow and my blue-coated soldiers, increasing their odds of dying by drawing their attention away from the fight? Or will I suffer in silence and set an example, treating as a final test of self-command my ability to remain calm while walking that “strange” trail to the beyond? And what of death itself? Death, or abandon my tribe? Death, or let the Lakota threaten my family? Death, or fail in self-command? I know that to wake up tomorrow morning and not have fought would be worse than death – it would be living death.
Before I had ever set foot in a combat zone, I practiced this sort of visualization as a teenager preparing for the SEAL selection process called BUD/S. By the time I set foot on the sands of Coronado, I had already felt the heavy boat on my head compressing my spinal column, the wooden telephone pole we carried around shredding the skin of my forearms, the bloody chafing around my waist stinging with salt water, and my body jack-hammering during midnight “surf torture” in which we linked arms and laid down in cold water beneath the moon. I had, in the process, already learned to smile at the inner voices begging me to surrender before the pain ever even set in. I had laid the path within my mind and all I had to do was walk it in reality.
And yet while reading about a warrior so in command of his mind that he calmly walked into a massacre and made himself useful, I was sitting in my chair feeling sorry for myself. I chose to play the victim when I could have chosen command. It is strange that war fighters, actors, athletes, and others practice the art of visualization for their profession, yet so rarely apply this art to every other facet of their lives outside of that profession. What? Is there no suffering in life? No pain? No lava filled muscles? No failure? No death? How often I have made myself a victim. How often we have all made ourselves victims, when there is not one good reason to play the victim despite a wretched culture at present that claims victimhood is the apex virtue.
Custer – called Son-of-the-Morning-Star by the Crow – was slaughtered, along with every single man under his direct command. By a twist of fate, Half-Yellow-Face survived, fighting like a warrior in another unit and saving another Crow’s life when he was shot. Eventually, the Crow and U.S. Army defeated the Lakota. A Chief of the Crow who was not in the battle, said “We could now sleep without expecting to be routed.” He could sleep – and we can all sleep – due to the Half-Yellow-Faces who walk among us with one foot in the world of waking and the other in the dreams of the mind. But these dreams take one of two forms: either self-realization or self-victimization. The choice has been given to us.
This, then, is what Half-Yellow-Face teaches us: we have not been given control of our fate, but we have been given complete and irrevocable command over how we meet it.
Can we not ask ourselves throughout the day, “What would Half-Yellow-Face do?” Can we not harden ourselves for future trials? Can we not have our yellow war-paint at hand when we must walk that “strange trail” for those who depend on us? Can we not smile at our fate, habituate a savage pleasure in adversity, and view death as no less terrifying than the sun and the moon and the Milky Way overhead, as Half-Yellow-Face did?
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There are varying accounts of exact wording since it was passed to Custer through an interpreter. Plenty Coups, and Frank Bird Linderman. Plenty-Coups, Chief of the Crows. New ed, University of Nebraska Press, 2002.
Thank you, Sam. I am reminded of Viktor Frankl who endured the concentration camps and found his purpose in the midst of unthinkable horror. This quote is among my favorite: "Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way." Half Yellow-Face would have understood those words.
Sam, another gem. In my civilian & business world I use visualization of “worst case scenario”. The result is peace of mind. To arrive at this, I use the S.W.O.T. (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) to organize one’s thoughts. I actually shared this with a few friends to prepare for the worst case scenario of the results of the most important election. The result could be 1984 or golden age for our next generations.