What Marines Teach Us About Gratitude
The Battle of Peleliu, the dangers of ease, and a path forward
Combat does not lend itself to exquisite cuisine. I lived on MREs for months at a time, a grey and gooey mixture that might last a century on a shelf. Each flavor is sure to include the chemical taste of plastic. Each time I returned from the desert, the supermarket was no longer an annoyance on my way home from work but an object of awe: cases of red raspberries, thick slabs of london broil, stacks of green melons. I looked upon the market and its treasures as if I had never before realized how abnormal a gift it is.
I felt safe and lucky. I felt grateful.
An irony of our world would become forever burned in my mind, and this irony forms the basis of much of my thinking: gratitude is inversely proportional to ease. We often find gratitude in the worst case scenario and a striking level of ingratitude in the best case scenario.
Why might this be?
Marines in war will start us on our path.
The Battle of Peleliu in 1944 was a battle for an island in the South Pacific. Marines crouched on their landing craft as they surged the surf to the shore. Naval warships behind them launched bombs which rattled their bodies and shuddered the sea. The air above them hissed with crisscrossing smoke-streams of planes and missiles. The island in front of them trembled beneath a barrage of yellow balls of fire and pluming black clouds above. Then suddenly silence. The American hell of fire came to a halt when the Marines landed — a moment later, the Japanese hell of fire filled the void. They soon realized “The island — flat and mostly featureless — was an altar being prepared for the immolation of seventeen thousand men.”1
Let us zoom in on a single Marine and consider the matter of gratitude.
What says our Marine? The voice in his mind might run thus: How can I be ungrateful for this foxhole when the beach is littered with blackened hulls of tractors, the screams of the dying, the corpses of the dead, and a never ending chain of mortar shells and machine gun bullets tearing the air, sand, and flesh? For my brothers when Japanese tanks come bearing down on us? For my two hands when a severed hand is lying over there on the ground without its owner? For the taste of one clean sip of water if I survive this night, since our water was placed in gasoline drums and is now undrinkable on an island that has no water? For proof of an almost godlike level of courage when a Company is decimated running across the airfield and the Marine at our side says, “Well, it’s our turn now”? How, too, can I be ungrateful for existence when I may be dead?
Who would call someone fighting for a noble mission and about to die on a bloody patch of sand ungrateful? What madness. The significant point is our Marines found gratitude for the most primitive things possible. The basics. Their world was stripped to its primal conscious core: a breath, a pastel pink sunset, a sip of water without the yellow-purple swirls of gasoline, an “Are you ok, brother?” — and each of these became an occasion for gratitude so deep a man may mull on it though he be eighty and the memory made when he was twenty.
So much for gratitude in the worst case scenario.
What happens now?
Unlike our Marine in hell, it is all too common to find ingratitude in heaven: safety, peace, affluence, luxury, privilege, and ease — in the best case scenario. It is here we hear the dreaded words: This model car/phone/computer is too old, or This dinner of salmon from Alaska smothered in mango salsa from Thailand and washed down with red wine from France does not really live up to my standards, or I am bored, or What is the point of it all?
Everything is colored by endless plenty. By endless options. By the sense we will never die.
It is here we may speculate that deep down inside, most people do not want comfort so much as they want to feel alive. It is here the ground starts to quake and tremble beneath our feet, for this is when the ungrateful may seek to bring back the primitive gratitude of Peleliu. What might they do in order to feel alive again? What will a subconscious rebellion against the novelties of safety, ease, and luxury lead to? If the ungrateful do not see the value in clean water and streets free from gun fire, then they may seek their thrill in a bit of destruction; but if they seek destruction, they will turn plenty into scarcity, luxury into poverty, and safety into peril; and if they invert these best case scenarios, what then? They they may feel the burn of pain and hunger and war. At last, as the world smolders in ashes, they may sit — if they are still alive — and find a bit of gratitude for something as small and simple as the prettiness of the crescent moon above the wasteland they brought unto the world. And then… a question may rise from their lips: “How can we make sure this never happens again? That peace and ease may reign?” And so the cycle may go.
The outcome of this chain of logic appears ridiculous, and yet all too believable. We are built to train for the worst case scenario through necessity: a growl in the grass outside the stone-ringed fire or the screams of the enemy from the depths of their coral caves on Peleliu. If we do not learn to find gratitude in our novel era of peace and plenty, we may forget why the best case scenario was desirable in the first place.
And so we return to our paradox: the very things we should be most grateful for are the same things that allow for the most ingratitude.
Maybe there is a worship of gratitude at present because a simple sense of gratitude is now an extraordinary feat in a world made numb by ease.
What then is the solution?
I believe we need to suffer in order to know the gift that is life, for suffering is the gift of perspective.
As Peleliu was a forced altar for hardship and thus gratitude, let us make of peace and ease a voluntary altar for the same.
No more than a water fast can turn the taste of a single red raspberry into a communion with God. The feel of roots beneath the soles of our feet on a muddy walk in the woods with a mutt can amplify the flawlessness of clean sheets on our skin. The rise and fall of our lungs as our hearts flood our bodies with blood to fuel the exertion can make sitting with an old paper book in a cone of light a moment of serenity. And comparing our island of peace and plenty to islands of metal and fire can transform primitive experiences into sacred ones: that we and those we care for are conscious and this will not always be the case; that our lungs know how to breathe even while we are asleep; and that each trip to the grocery store or the farmers market and their marvels is a gift beyond measure.
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This and following examples come from Robert Leckie’s excellent book: Leckie, Robert. Helmet for My Pillow: From Parris Island to the Pacific, a Young Marine's Stirring Account of Combat in World War II. Bantam, 2010
There is no up, without down. No black, without white, no good without bad. The one is the measure of the other. Those who have known only ease have no means to appreciate it.
When this Marine served on active duty, there were still WWII Marines on active duty and many around Camp LeJuene that were retired. They were a different breed and many had been to Korea as well, not too mention some as senior NCO’s and senior Officers, in Vietnam. They had a a grace about them, rough and tumble for sure. We need them back, as we look at the Professional military today, who pander and make nice with politicians and make the young Marines and Sailors suffer, place them in situations with ROE’s that are unsustainable and then walk when it gets to too hard. At OCS in Quantico we carried two canteens of water on our web gear everywhere we went. They had to be full at all times. Whoa onto them that drank the water and the enlisted instructors found a light canteen! Bends and thrusts until the cows came home. Why have canteens full of water and not drink from them. Who knows! But it was a discipline that stays with me to this day. Maybe it came from gasoline drums with undrinkable drinking water or long patrols through fetid rice paddies. Who cares. As a side note after a grueling final test of the Endurance Course a little slice of Hell now no longer used, an officer candidate collapsed at the finish line. While the corpsman and some others pulled a water buffalo over to dump water on him, we were all directed to dump our canteens of water on the inert and close to dying from heat stroke candidate. His core temp we later learned was near 108….he lived….did the 100 canteens of water make a difference? Who the Hell knows, but a lesson learned. It was a defining moment. What strikes me most about your posts Sam is how grateful you are to be alive, and to transmit that joy to us through your writing. No easy days but who wants those anyway. We few we happy few….Semper Fi!