Sitting with Warrior - Sample Chapter
Sitting with Warrior
Carl Hitchens (author)
we cried for acceptance.
The sweat of our struggle,
the blood of our fallen comrades,
leaching out of their wounds
into our dreams and sleep,
crashing into our thoughts and feelings,
rising to a stabbing point of need
for it all to have meaning.
In the darkness of our dismissal,
we packed away our medals,
uniforms, and self-worth,
and faded into the shroud
of black lights and pulsing strobes.
Hitchhiking on the streamers
of the psychedelic age,
we hoped to ride into oblivion.
So great was our pain
from the fracturing of our relevance
that we disappeared
into a world of vanquished dreams.
War and Peace
“Warrior, what you have just said is so liberating. The conflict, which I have carried for years, concerning personal honor and dishonor has evaporated like a pool of stagnant water. Still, if peace is the ideal, what can we make of society’s conflicted attitude on war? How does society reconcile paying tribute to sacrifice and devotion in war, while denouncing it as an evil of human dysfunction?”
“Let’s consider how the evolved warrior will come to view things. Society could benefit from this, because in reality, every society, whether militaristic or pacifist regarding armed conflict, is comprised of individuals and groups self-actualizing their lives from the warrior-within. We will first consider the warrior in the context of taking up arms.
“The evolved warrior understands clearly his station in life, that he is the agent of moral persuasion of the edifice he serves: its fist, its sword, its gun. If blood is shed by society’s decree, it will be on his hands. If morality sides against society’s policies, he will be forced to carry the weight of that judgment. Again, it goes with the territory.
“Warriors stand between society and its ghosts and demons, real or imagined. They stand in the gulf of society’s fears, giving physical form to society’s psychological defenses against panic or hysteria. They are called on to do society’s dirty work, when force is required to take control over the vagaries of life. Warriors walk the ground between life and death. This can be a blessing or curse.”
“What do you mean by that Warrior—I interrupted—a blessing or a curse?”
“I am referring to the spiritual shadow land of transition that inhabits combat areas. Warriors sense the insubstantiality of the veil that separates physical and spiritual reality. This awareness is a blessing because it opens the warrior’s consciousness to subtle realizations related to the nature of life. It is a curse because it reveals the transitory nature of physical existence, and thus the warrior’s own vulnerability.
“Nevertheless, mortality is a powerful motivator for self-discovery. It is the great equalizer of the human condition, which evokes much reflection on the ultimate meaning of life. Yet, ironically, death often becomes trivialized in warfare, reduced to data for measuring success or failure. This final life event is treated as strategy and tactics, rather than as a great passage from one reality to another.
“The evolved warrior, though, sees through the dichotomy of friend and foe. He knows the future enemy is a warrior of a different allegiance, who, compelled by that allegiance, might one day face him on the field of battle. Speeches will have been made, offenses noted, the gauntlet thrown down by their respective sides. But in their struggle, they will be mirrors of each other, and thereby strangely connected.”
“So you’re saying the evolved warrior sees the shadow element he must work in, where he and his foe are alter egos and rivals at the same time?”
Warrior closed his eyes, sucked in a breath, and tilted back his head slightly. A few seconds passed before he exhaled and opened his eyes again. “Alter egos at the ultimate level of human identity, but rivals within the relative circumstances of their birth or citizenship, called into service against each other.
“The more enlightened warrior sees beyond the relativity of one’s herd, one’s territory, one’s social, philosophical, or religious branding. He knows the intrinsic warrior nature is related to the connecting force of consciousness that binds the universe and binds all beings. This consciousness brings the individual into the perception of others—sometimes in harmony, sometimes in disharmony, but always in a dynamic of relating from physical, psychological, and spiritual dispositions.
“The warrior nature is not about survival, in the sense of surviving this or surviving that. It’s about survival at the fundamental level of who and what we are. The warrior nature is myself in you and all human beings … myself in all other life forms. Remember, I said the warrior nature is life preserving life.”
“Yes, you said the warrior nature is the whole of life in the act of preserving all of its parts.”
“Correct … And what else?”
“That each part … uhh … has an indwelling warrior nature working in its behalf on behalf of the whole.”
“Exactly!” “Oh yeah! The warrior-within.”
“Not just the warrior-within. What else?”
“Hmm …” I shrugged my shoulders. “The unobstructed warrior-within.”
“Oh, that’s right.”
“I am the unobstructed warrior-within. I am life living life. I am the living instinct that causes the plant to put out a new shoot, the rabbit to eat the plant, and the wolf to eat the rabbit.
“I am the juniper tree that knows other junipers, and feels their joy of rain and their pain of drought. I am the mountain lion that lives by the killing of the prey. I am the elk that lives by the speed of the hoof.
“I am the vigor of living combating the inertia of non-living. I am force, motion, and drive activating still light into dynamic light, infusing life into every moment! I am the all of life, compelling itself to live.
“Society instinctually celebrates life triumphing over non-life.”
“Non-life?”
“The giving up, the allowing of outside influences to forego the effort at living. The withering up to the elements without a fight: not putting the roots deeper for water or stretching higher to catch the sun.
“Naturally, war, the taking up of arms, is the bane of humankind. But it springs from the same source as taking up peace.”
“Whoa! You can’t mean that the altruism, of say Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr. sprung up from the same source as the imperialism of Napoleon or Genghis Khan.”
“Yes and no. The same ultimate source, but filtering through the personal consciousnesses of the different individuals you named. Remember the unobstructed warrior-within is the preservation instinct of the one life.”
“What do you mean by unobstructed again?”
“Unobstructed refers to the unrestricted flow of consciousness as a unified whole: each of us is life and life is us … Us, no them. When my warrior nature is unobstructed by any manifestation of life—whether matter, energy, space, or time—I am channeled toward the preservation of the whole. When arrangements of consciousness obstruct my universal nature by filtering it toward only fragments of the whole, or an insular us … Well, there’s your difference between Gandhi and King and Bonaparte and Khan.
“Now, when you and your squad carried that young Vietnamese girl to sick bay on Hill 55, did she feel like a gook you wanted to kill?”
It was a day-patrol off the hill. We had hardly gotten into it when we were approached by a mama-san and two papa-sans carrying a young Vietnamese girl in a thatched rice basket, suspended from a bamboo pole draped across the men’s shoulders. We instinctively went into high alert for danger from them or from others using them as a decoy to ambush us. Heeding our armed and dangerous stance, the villagers cautiously halted in front of us and sat the basket with the girl on the ground.
One papa-san motioned toward the girl, and then repeatedly gestured with a striking motion toward the ground with his hands and arms until we got it. The child, who appeared to be around eight, had been hoeing the soil out in the rice paddies, when she struck some kind of booby trap set for American and South Vietnamese troops or their sympathizers.
The explosion had nearly ripped off her lower jaw. A bloody handkerchief loosely held it in place. The poor girl made not a sound, not even a moan. She was obviously in shock, her plaintive eyes starring out at us.
Her family, in broken English, got across to us that they wanted her to be taken to the doctor on the hill. We felt torn about what to do. We were a small squad, vulnerable on our flanks to begin with, and now this situation, which could have been a trap. Still, we couldn’t ignore the suffering before us. I called it in.
We were instructed to bring only the youngster to the hill. We had already checked for Chicoms—Chinese weapons or explosives—in the basket, and had found nothing. While that didn’t satisfy us completely, what could we do? The right thing is what we concluded.
Once we got the girl to the hill and into sickbay, we relaxed. A shiny glow brushed itself onto the drab monotony of our daily grind. One clear, unmistakable good had come out of the ambiguity of daily sweating and bloodletting, and filled us with a sense of satisfaction.
“No. She felt like a child, any child needing to be cared for.”
“Exactly!”
“It was the obstructed warrior-within shaping the group identities of North Vietnam and the United States that set the stage for your us-or-them self-identity to clash with their us-or-them self-identity on the battlefield. It was the unobstructed warrior-within that saw that little girl beyond the very real threat of the enemy them to the human family us in need.”
“Okay, I think I get all of this. But Napoleon, Genghis Khan, King, Gandhi—cut from the same cloth?”
“The indwelling warrior nature is the catalytic spark of creation, by which infinite modes of expression are manifested out of the infinite, static field of potentialities. The warrior, then, is the active principle of life by which the static is made dynamic.
“Every being instinctually feels the imprint of infinity from which it has sparked, and accordingly seeks fuller inclusion in life. Even the hermit seeks his or her place in the greater whole. It is not life the hermit seeks to withdraw from, but the disturbance of activities and expressions of life that interfere or disrupt his or her sense of connectedness, of belonging.
“The conqueror seeks inclusion in life by bringing greater and greater portions of it under his control and influence. The more of life he subdues, the more of it he feels connected to.
“The peacemaker seeks inclusion in life by awakening greater and greater portions of it to the truth of its sameness and oneness. The more of life he frees from self-separation, the more of life he feels connected to.
“The warrior-within is the will of creation to renew itself. On the universal scale, this goes on into infinity, as energy and matter transform from one state to another. Within the relativity of finite organisms, this goes on from birth through maturity, decay, and death.
“The conqueror renews by increasing the range of his dominance over life. It is the warrior-within directed by egotism, conceit, and pride. The peacemaker renews by increasing the range of his embracement of all of life. It is the warrior-within directed by love, caring, and altruism.”
