When it is Good to Do Devious Shit: A Stoic in Army Recon
A riff on Epictetus' laws of the gods, laws of the dead, and a path forward
There are few things more visceral than flying into a hot LZ beneath the whomp whomp whomp of helicopter rotors. I recently read a story that reminded me of both helo infils and one of my favorite lines from Epictetus.
I find it striking how the same Epictetus quotes seem to be shared and discussed. His most penetrating quotes, at least for my part, are rarely ever culled from the depths of his Discourses. Maybe because these quotes make people uncomfortable and do not fit the armchair-Stoicism formula. Or the quotes need flesh on their bones and take too much time to mull over. Or both.
Anyway, I want to dig into one of these quotes in this essay.
Let us begin.
Epictetus was a monotheist, a polytheist, and a pantheist. He believed in God, the gods, and god-in-everything. God is nature, nature is reason, and reason means being a father, mother, son, daughter, brother, and sister for the good of the whole.
And to the fools he deemed failures in this worthy task, Epictetus said the following: “Do you see where you are looking? That it is to the ground, that it is to the pit, that it is to these wretched laws of ours—the laws of the dead—and that you are not looking to the laws of the gods?”1
So what does a life according to the laws of the gods look like in practice? Not in an armchair, a classroom, or a podcast studio in front of cameras for the world’s attention, but in that which Stoicism was designed to prepare us for—service to the whole.
Well, what if Epictetus were in an Army recon platoon in Vietnam? Not looking with his eyes, but seeing with them?
He might sound like one warrior telling this story…
“… if one of the recon outfits, the shit hit the fucking fan, we’d be out the fucking door on the helicopters. And I don’t care a shit if we were totally fucking exhausted…
One of the teams got trapped, and… we got on a pickup. They picked us up, we flew in, and the pilot said, “Can’t go in. They’re receiving fire.” I'm on the radio talking to this fucking pilot, and y’know, we’re all sitting on the doors, three on each door. And I said to the pilot, “Well, get down fucking close and we’ll kick ammo to them… you got to get like about ten, fifteen feet off the fucking ground. You gotta roll in, because I want to drop it right on them.”
Then I whipped the fucking headset off, and I said to the guys, “Listen, when this motherfucker gets close, we gotta go.”
An’ we all went. Now, you’re talking about a fucking plane that’s moving like a fucking tornado. And we crashed and burned, too. I remember my fucking head was all bruised and shit. It didn’t matter. Now we’re all here. Now the bond begins. The bond begins of you can count on everyone. The other team appreciated what we did. Y’know, they weren’t alone. And I knew if that same situation happened that I could count on six more to come and get me… Half of us couldn’t fucking walk after we got out of there, we were so fucking bruised from the fucking brush and trees and whatever else we landed on. But we weren’t going to leave them, even though the pilot said it was impossible to do this…
And thus we have a window into the cultured language of our warfighters in which the X-rated adjective for intercourse precedes every noun. To tell you the truth, I am surprised he cursed this much what with his being in the Army and not the Navy. But that is not the point.
Now we know what Epictetus’ quote looks like in the real world. So what does it all mean?
The followers of the laws of the gods do not give a fuck. I can see Epictetus on that bird, white-bearded, tiger-striped, calling the pilot a slave before jumping into the jungle. My point is the followers of the laws of the gods fight for the whole, no matter if it is inconvenient, illegal, or suicidal.
The laws of the gods ask us to be where the “bond begins.” Ask is the key word, for nature gives us the freedom of choice—choose to risk bone and marrow for brother and sister, or choose not to. These laws feel as primordial as they feel tinged with death. Not only does it feel good to fight for this universal order of which we are one part as the leaf is to the fig tree, but it can feel even better to fight against those who seek to sabotage this order.
This brings us to the laws of the dead.
These laws are wretched because they incentivize us to say, “That is not my responsibility” when a risk may be taken for the whole, or “I must follow orders” when some crime is about to be committed. They decouple humans from their humanity. So who are the writers of such laws? Of the many categories we can choose from, let us use war to scope this out: those who start wars for the wrong reasons; who start them and do not fight in them; who start them and do not allow the warfighters to win them; and we can also include those who refuse to start wars only for millions more to die than would have died otherwise. The writers may be khans, tsars, emperors, kings, presidents, appeasers, bureaucrats, pacifists, and bullies. Their common trait: refusing men and women their blood-bond and cosmic-covenant to the whole.
And who, then, obeys these laws? Who are the disciples of the dead? Those who choose to turn a blind eye to the whole and walk the easier path of avoiding wrong-think and making vertical corpses of themselves.
Why, a skeptical reader asks, does any of this nonsense matter today? Who cares what that slave Epictetus said on his stoa in Nicopolis two-thousand years ago? Who cares what you, the writer of this essay, thinks he might do in a shoot-out in Vietnam?
It matters because doing devious shit no longer means evil, selfishness, or betrayal—it now means doing the right thing. The laws of the gods have not changed. So what has changed?
Everything else.
It is now devious shit to save some bloodied soldiers in a fight and decent to let them die; to rise before the sun and sprint some hills with the security of those we love in mind; it is now devious to eat enough food for one person and unembarrassing to eat enough food for five; it is devious to suffer in silence and heroic to demand pity; it is devious to prevent a violent assault and respectable to film it with a smart phone; it is devious to let a nine-year old walk alone to the park and learn a bit of self-reliance; to excel through merit; to report corruption in the government; to own no televisions and too many books; to derive more pleasure in the electric lightshow behind our eyelids than in doom-scrolling social media; to be a rugged individual and thus an asset rather than a liability; to live free or die and thus a sovereign rather than a slave; to feel a savage thrill when the Crow warrior Bloody Knife says to the sun “I shall not see you go down behind the hills tonight” because he would not leave his friend to die alone.
In sum, it is now devious shit to act with courage, decency, and nobility, for our era now punishes what was once honored and rewards what was once condemned.
H.G. Wells wrote that if you make men sufficiently fearful or angry the hot red eyes of a caveman will glare out at you. In the same way, if you make them sufficiently privileged and decadent the cold black eyes of a slave driver will glare out at you, and if you make them docile and submissive the empty glass eyes of a wraith will glare back at you.
But we can only make people do so much, for Epictetus would remind us we choose what we become in this life. Either we choose the laws of the dead or the laws of the gods. Either we choose to look or we choose to see.
Thus if we choose to follow the laws of the gods and place ourselves in no-mans-land, where looking is death and seeing is life; where savagely bright eyes stare down the dark and do devious shit for the good of the whole no matter the cost of flesh or blood or bone; it is here we may begin to understand what Epictetus is taking about.
It is here we learn why some quotes of Epictetus are left buried.
It is here we find a good fight.
Maybe even the meaning of life itself.
To help What then? reach more readers, please consider adding a like, restacking, and sharing this essay to help spread the good word.
Epictetus. Discourses. 1.13.5
Shay, Jonathan. Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character. Scribner, 1994.
This is in no way an insult to helo pilots. I worked with exceptional pilots who flew into the worst situations imaginable, and there were plenty in Vietnam as well, James Fleming being but on example.
"Decency" has become a cover story for cowardice, an excuse for those who wanted to do what they knew to be right but didn't. Few things are as irritating as a coward posturing as the adult in the room and pretending it's "only decent."
It's also awesome when someone still gets it. A friend of mine from my old Muay Thai gym dropped some guy at a football game for mouthing off to my friend's girlfriend at the time. My friend is 5'6" and the other guy was around 6'. When they went into the courtroom, the judge looked at the other guy and in a sarcastic, poor-baby voice said, "Oh, are you the victim?"
I think we have now a Commander in Chief who does what is right even if it’s devious. President Trump Delivered Commencement Speech At West Point: "Fight, Fight, Fight And Win, Win, Win" but lead with peace.