Dulce et Decorum Est

Wilfred Owen on the mythology and reality of war

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Note: The latin at the end means “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.”

Wilfred Owen was an amazing person. He died on the front lines in France on 4 November, 1918, only a week before the armistice, at the age of 25. He is widely regarded as the greatest poet of the First World War, and was part of a tectonic shift in attitudes towards warfare. Before the industrial revolution, warfare was often seen as a place to win honor and glory, especially for the nobles. Gradually, this perception changed into a much darker image, from a combination of factors including the new weapons of war and the new means of portraying warfare, especially the photograph.

This poem is personally meaningful to me. As a young man in a family with lots of military service, in a culture full of heroes and stories about growing up or becoming a man in war, I always knew that I would join the military- the question was what branch, what job. I watched Saving Private Ryan again and again, and I took to heart the line from the movie quoting Emerson: “War educates the senses, calls into action the will, perfects the physical constitution, brings men into such swift and close collisions that man measures man”. I never realized that line was meant to show the naivete of the character who spoke it. I joined the Marine Corps infantry on my 18th birthday, first deployed at 19, and was a squad leader in Iraq by the age of 20.

I have written before about how powerful a positive force in my life the Marine Corps was for me. However, this poem helps me articulate my complicated emotions when my little brother joined the army, or when people ask me about whether I would recommend joining the military to their son or daughter.

You can grow up in a million ways. You can Teach for America. You can backpack the Appalachian Trail. You can just go to college or start a job. The lessons I learned in the Marines were lessons about people, hard work, and responsibility- the military does not have a monopoly on these life lessons. Many people don’t even need some event or structure to get these lessons. There are other ways of paying for college, there are other ways of striking out on your own.

If someone is thinking about joining the military at 18 like me, I always tell them the reasons not to join first. If they still want to join, then I help them not make dumb mistakes with crafty recruiter language, because I have also seen how not joining can have a downside: my father dealt with the regret of not living up to the warrior ethos of his father, a Colonel in the air force whose entire identity was wrapped up in the military, for decades.

The complexity of the question for me comes down to the counterfactual. When moral, competent people forgo military service, this creates a power vacuum. Power vacuums are not filled with nice people. Noah Smith has written about what he calls the Tamerlane Principle, writing:

Tamerlane is always over the horizon, waiting to strike. There will always be conquerors waiting for the chance to conquer and pillage the soft civilized nations of the world. If you think Tamerlane is ancient history, just look up Pol Pot, Joseph Kony, Hitler, etc. This is a recurrent phenomenon.

The Tamerlane Principle

The invasion of Ukraine by Vladimir Putin is a perfect example of this principle in action. In the words of Noah again:

The story of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine fits that archetype perfectly. Ukraine wasn’t threatening Russia in any way; Ukraine never fired a shot into their neighbor, even though that neighbor had already carved off pieces of their country in 2014 and subjected them to a grinding eight-year war. Putin simply declared that Ukraine is historically part of Russia and sent in his troops. Soon, Russian missiles were blasting practically every city in Ukraine, Russian tanks were rolling into Ukrainian cities, and Ukrainian children were huddling in bomb shelters…

My friend David once told me that “reconciling the military as ‘being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street, and for the bankers’ and my second proudest accomplishment…was something”. David has a penchant for literary exaggeration, and I do not believe that the US military is only a muscle man for big business. I saw firsthand what happens in a power vacuum (admittedly, a power vacuum completely caused by the US). I saw the true evil we were fighting. I heard once that you can tell who the bad guys are by looking at who uses human shields. However, I know the sentiment he is expressing- personal pride intensely complicated by knowledge of the military industrial complex, something veterans have been railing against since the beginning of time. Read two-time Medal of Honor recipient Smedley Butler’s War is a Racket, or Harry Truman’s farewell address.

I want a society that has good people willing to defend their country against those that would tear it apart, and I want a world where good people do not have to defend their country and can make art, help people, and be good parents instead. A subgroup of the US considers the military to be almost hyper-honorable, with those who didn’t “serve” not worthy of anything from the nation. Other groups barely think of the military at all, or else have a reaction similar to the first part of David’s comment. I don’t know how to fix any of this, but I know that I can help bear true witness to what war is. I know that many people in my social class have never had a real conversation about what war is like, and this gap in the society’s worldview can lead to some dangerous paths if not corrected. We must not forget the reality of war. In the words of Dwight Eisenhower, “We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

I also know that we as veterans cannot overcorrect. We cannot glorify warfare such that we continue overfeeding the machine. Unfortunately, one person’s gritty depiction of the needless suffering and bullshit of war can be another’s recruiting call- just look at my response to Saving Private Ryan. It is a difficult balance to walk, but an essential one.

My former platoon commander in Iraq, Jeff Phaneuf, is right now trying to fight the urge of Americans to simply look away from the carnage of war. He works with an organization called No One Left Behind to support people who worked with the US and are now in extreme danger in Afghanistan, “to ensure the United States honors its commitments to those who helped us in our time of need”. I did not write this post with Jeff in mind, but his work is a great example of the kind of advocacy we need from our veterans- and the lack of political traction or public awareness they have gotten is an unfortunate reminder of how easy it is to look away.

The powerful last lines of the Owen poem again are:

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.