What Pork Chop Hill Can Teach Us About Meaning

Misanthropy and a Sabbath

John Singer Sargent. Atlas and the Hesperides. 1925.

Bad vibes and humans hating humans—We can see misanthropy everywhere at present, a negative view of humanity as a whole. The vibes are bad. As if earth is littered with men and women who are irredeemably stupid and corrupt. Mere abstractions on the news or in photographs online. This is the fallacy of the middle ground.

It is strange but true that combat reveals both the worst and the best within us. This is a truth rarely seen the safer life becomes because reality often lives at the extremes. This truth can be accessed with a Sabbath but of a different sort—a Combat Sabbath. Crucially, my experience is this Sabbath that can be accessed without the Combat.

Take this striking story—Pork Chop Hill—called Hill 255 by those who prioritize precision over imagination—got its name because it was shaped like a pork chop on the map. It was defended by Thai, Colombian, South Korean, and American forces. Politicians solemnly held peace talks publicly, while privately directing military engagements to show the enemy they would back their words with blood.

Unintentionally, this leads us to a stunning revelation of the human situation.

Pork Chop hill was overrun again and again. And it was recaptured again and again. An enemy battalion would silently stalk narrow valleys under black skies. They would sit and wait for their heavy artillery to set Hill 255 on fire, then scream and sprint up and over the hill with courage verging on insanity. The besieged allied unit would be massacred and a few survivors would tumble down the hill. Later, the allies would recapture it with bunker-to-bunker fighting: flamethrowers, rifles, and grenades; bayonets, knives, and hands. Over 360 allied fighters died on that hill, over 1,000 were wounded, and over 100 were never seen again. Well over 2,000 enemy combatants were killed and several times as many were wounded.

On one hill.

And on this hill there was one moment that stuck in my skull and I had to write about it. The Thai soldiers were dubbed the Little Tigers because their little frames were inversely proportional to the enormity of their souls in combat.

When the Thai’s time was up and they turned over the hill to their American brethren, the Americans found this written on the wall: “Take good care of our Pork Chop.” [421]

Take good care of our Pork Chop.

There is love in this command.

Now take this striking paradox—Now how could they have loved this blackened bit of earth? They were pawns in the hands of politicians, many of whom would never have the balls to place their boots on that hill. Why, then, did they care for Pork Chop when they stared at thousands of rotting corpses and wondered if their own corpse would be laid out for the crows far from mom and home?

My hunch is they cared for Pork Chop not despite these miseries, but because of them.

A Sabbath of a different sort—A Sabbath is a day with no work and a lot praying. Combat too is a Sabbath of sorts. Instead of abstinence from work, it is abstinence from superfluities and unlimited opportunities. Rather than the addition of prayer (or rather in addition to prayer) it is the addition of concrete enemies who very much want us dead.

Pascal said “Man finds nothing so intolerable as to be in a state of complete rest, without passions, without occupation, without diversion, without effort.” It is a paradox that war can be more tolerable than sitting in an office, a silent living room, or traffic. My sense is one out of a thousand who have been in a gunfight feel more alive in a cubicle than in a bullet punctured tent.

The men of Hill 255 had enemies. They knew the Chinese and North Koreans wanted to kill them. They also suspected—not without reason—their own political leaders who had zero skin in the game could not have cared less if they died, were it not for the public image and those pesky, grieving parents. It is not impossible, a soldier may have thought, that these leaders secretly enjoyed the tit for tat game they played with their suit wearing Commie counterparts. Who knows, maybe they got a little hit of power every time they sacrificed a human life for a hill that was worth less than the dining room chandeliers they ate under every night.

It is in this state our warfighters experienced one half of their Sabbath: enemies.

What about the other half?

Life is stripped to its skeletal necessities as it inches towards eternal rest: we have no driver’s license, no college, no childhood drama, no parental expectation, no money, no ads, no news, no houses, no windowless office, no 9-5s, no skin color, no ethnicity, no politics, no endless distractions to fragment attention and murder contemplation.

The middle ground is reduced to a single extreme: the task of survival. The fighters came to know, as if placed before them by God Himself for some special purpose, the lilac colored striations of cirrus clouds on the horizon, the taste of clean cold water in a metal canteen after hours of cotton mouthed combat, the crude, sarcastic, and infantile jokes heard suddenly out of nowhere and laughter so hard their face muscles hurt.

What then is the significance of the Combat Sabbath?—When life is reduced to breathe, blood, bright eyes, and slightly shaking hands, and all we have left is our ability to scratch meaning out of dirt, bronze shell casings, and moonless skies whistling and cracking with invisible rockets, mortars, and bullets—it is here we see the universe stare down at us from the stars, colossal and mighty and silent, and ask us a question that is felt rather than heard: What sort of human are you inside?

The men of Pork Chop hill answered with a simple and yet profoundly human action: they stood their ground. They owned their slab of earth when they wanted to run away, quit, beg for mercy, and crawl into a hole and cry and never wake up again. They stood in the face of an infinite cosmos and fought for their little sparks of life with a No. They stood with each other, because all that mattered were their own little sparks and the little sparks around them.

Maybe our Thai who wrote those words on the wall was not referring to Hill 255, but to the concrete evidence of what each man and woman on this earth is capable of. Maybe he never wanted to forget it.

These two statements are non-contradictory—One: war, injustice, and suffering are wretched. Two: without war, injustice, and suffering, humans devolve into fragmented, alienated, and radically unwanted selves.

This world is beautiful. The symphony of cicadas and frogs at night should not be disturbed with the cracks of gunfire and grenades in some revolution or genocide. But few will ever listen to the cicadas and frogs without a bit of suffering to wake them up. Without this suffering, those who do not listen to the noises of the night may bring on the next revolution, genocide, or war in order to be done with the bad vibes and worthless men and women they share this earth with.

“There are boxes in the mind with labels on them”¹—Let us name a few: Things I know are a waste of my time and I choose to do anyway. The virtues of suffering beautifully. Aspects of humanity I hate and refuse to see in myself. What would Gandalf do? Questions the universe asks me when the silence grows a little too loud. Reasons to thank my enemies. What I can accomplish and see with a Sabbath if I strip life to its skeletal necessities by choice rather than by force.

Welcome to the new subscribers. These essays are not dogma no matter how strongly worded. They are hypotheses and experiments—they are a hunt for ideas that lead to vibrant aliveness. This involves the risk of being wrong which I gladly accept. If we do not push the boundaries and follow any thread wherever it may lead, right or wrong, then what is the point? This is why I am here and it is why I write.

How to Find Meaning Through Failure

1. Paul Valéry had an excellent thought experiment with this title.