Book summary “What It Is Like to Go to War”: summary

Introduction

Modern society sends young people to war with intense physical training and advanced technology while ignoring their spiritual preparation. You face an environment of extreme violence that shatters your psyche and leaves you unequipped to process the reality of killing. Karl Marlantes draws on his experience as a Marine platoon commander in Vietnam to examine the psychological and moral costs of combat. He argues that combat functions as a sacred, terrifying space requiring deliberate moral framing, communal support, and rigorous homecoming rituals.

The book investigates how to survive the spiritual wounds of war and successfully return to civilian life.

• How does killing change the human soul?
• What causes the emotional numbness that haunts veterans?
• Why do returning soldiers struggle to find their place at home?
• How can society better prepare warriors for the moral burdens they must carry?

1. The Temple of Mars

Combat functions as a terrifying sacred space or temple of Mars, sharing components with mystical experiences but substituting heaven with hell. You enter an environment that forces you into the role of God by taking life.

Combat functions as a terrifying sacred space akin to a temple of Mars, sharing components with mystical experiences while leaving soldiers spiritually unequipped for the weight of killing.

Mystical and religious experiences share four components:

• awareness of inevitable death;
• total focus on the present;
• valuing others' lives above one's own;
• belonging to a larger community.

All four exist in combat. You face intense existential terror without adequate preparation for the spiritual weight of killing.

Karl Marlantes describes holding the line on Mutter's Ridge in Vietnam while listening to a wounded marine named Zoomer breathe through a chest wound all night. He reflected on the ancient doggedness of life compared to a sturgeon caught with his grandfather Axel.

Initiation and the Sacred Space

Military training provides essential societal initiation to create effective fighters, but completely omits spiritual initiation regarding mortality and the gravity of killing. Boot camp successfully removes societal restraints and transforms young people into disciplined shock troops by building group loyalty and teaching obedience under stress. Eighteen-year-olds make the best warriors due to a lack of introspection.

Marlantes recounts being forced to stand naked in a swamp filled with mosquitoes by a drill instructor as a test of discipline. This earned acceptance into the Marine Corps but failed to connect with humanity or the spiritual realm.

The Failure of Comfort

Offering superficial comfort or alcohol to combat troops in extreme situations avoids the deeper existential terror instead of providing necessary spiritual guidance. When leaders attempt to cheer up troops in combat zones with alcohol and lighthearted jokes, they inadvertently numb the warriors to spiritual reality. You need a spiritual guide to help process terror and guilt rather than a distraction from the sacred weight of the situation.

A battalion chaplain visited Marlantes's isolated mountaintop firebase near Christmas, bringing bottles of Southern Comfort and dirty jokes. The firebase guarded a 105mm howitzer, located thirty kilometers east where the rest of the regiment fought a fierce battle. The visit left Marlantes seething because he needed spiritual help rather than numbing comfort.

Modern technology and communications blur the boundary between the battlefield and civilian life, increasing the psychological difficulty of returning home. Advances such as air travel, cell phones, and remote-control drone warfare allow individuals to inflict death and destruction and immediately return to ordinary domestic conversations or family dinners. This psychological split prevents you from ever truly leaving the battlefield.

Marlantes describes his jarring transitions during R&R aboard a Boeing 707 aircraft, stepping straight out of intense combat and dead friends into air-conditioned clubs in Da Nang or Kowloon with plush carpets, ice-filled glasses, and miniskirts. He earned seven medals, including the Navy Cross and Bronze Star.

The cumulative psychological and moral damage of combat leads to high rates of self-destructive behaviors and suicides among veterans that society largely ignores. When you return home, the lack of spiritual framing for your combat experiences manifests as intense internal distress. Society often overlooks the true toll, which appears years later in the form of drug and alcohol overdoses, single-person car crashes, bar fights, and uncounted suicides.

Marlantes admits that for years after returning home, he shoved his combat experiences deep into his unconscious, maintaining high-adrenaline jobs and keeping his family constantly on the move. His oldest daughter attended twelve different schools during an eight-year period due to his constant moving. He spent more than forty years reading, writing, and thinking to come to terms with his combat experience, which ended with the death of Joseph Henderson at age 104 in 2007.

2. Killing and the Psyche

Society asks warriors to kill but ignores the deep psychological weight the act creates. You must learn to integrate this experience and piece your psyche back together, a process that is typically neglected.

Killing creates a profound psychological split in the warrior that requires conscious moral framing, noble intentions, and structured peer-led integration.

The author reflects on shooting a teenage NVA soldier whose desperate eyes locked with his across an M-16 rifle barrel during a fierce bunker-clearing fight. Forty years later, the author felt sadness rather than guilt when remembering this event.

In active combat where life is at stake, you often feel no horror at killing. You experience adrenaline-fueled exhilaration or subsequent numbed exhaustion.

The author recalls feeling a primitive, savage joy and satisfaction seeing his radioman Ohio blast an NVA soldier with a full automatic rifle. Actual fighters do not cheer after winning battles; they experience numbed exhaustion.

Technological distance and aerial warfare increase psychological dissociation. You can kill without immediate human empathy when viewing the enemy as non-human targets or pests.

The author directed Marine A-4 jets using napalm and phosphorus against NVA soldiers pursuing a 5-man Marine reconnaissance team 100 miles from Da Nang, excitedly shouting Crispy Critters over the radio.

The Psychology of Killing

Integrating the feelings of rage, grief, and sadness associated with killing should be standard operating procedure for combat veterans. You can heal the psychological split through simple peer discussions.

• Form groups under a fellow squad or platoon member who has had a few days of group leadership training.
• Encourage people to talk about their experiences and feelings.

Guilt over killing in war can be mitigated if you act with a noble heart, right intentions, and dedication to a higher good. Finding yourself on one side of a conflict of opposites requires focusing on intention and conduct rather than second-guessing fate.

The author shared a dinner and whiskey with mythologist Joseph Campbell, who offered him absolution regarding his Vietnam War guilt.

Guilt, Duty, and Absolution

The ancient dilemma of the reluctant warrior facing kinsmen in battle illustrates that humans must choose sides and act despite moral contradictions. In the Mahabharata, written down and first preserved in AD 400, Arjuna collapses in his chariot, throwing away his bow and arrows out of compassion for the relatives and friends he faces on the enemy side. Krishna advises Arjuna that inaction is impossible and work must be performed as a sacrifice for the general good, getting the ego out of the way.

• Remember that no man can be still, even for a moment, as work is a law of nature.
• Perform a sacrifice for the general good so that others may benefit.
• Dedicate all work to a higher universal, spiritual, ethical, or political principle and fight without personal gain.

Most people killed in war are conscripted individuals who are ultimately victims. When you kill to save comrades, guilt is inappropriate, but deep sadness and mourning remain inevitable.

The author compares putting down a 134-pound German shepherd named Sancho or a suffering seagull to killing in combat: a necessary, sorrowful duty devoid of elation or hatred. Gaining awareness of the choice to kill sets a moral hook in you, requiring conscious responsibility for future actions rather than blind neutrality. The author knows twenty people who are dead directly as a result of his behavior.

3. Numbness and Violence

Society condemns destruction morally, yet celebrates it through media, toys, and historical precedents. Destruction is an easier path to transcendence than creation. As weapons technology improves, this destructive path becomes even more tempting.

There is a deep, savage joy in destruction that offers a form of transcendence akin to religious ecstasy or the shadow side of creativity.

You can observe a lifelong fascination with war play and strategy board games. Marlantes felt pride in the destruction he caused in Vietnam, likening it to a child toppling a block tower or a huge bonfire.

Advanced weaponry and logistical might provide soldiers with an intoxicating, godlike feeling of power. When armed with heavy artillery, air support, and superior numbers, infantry officers experience a dangerous sense of immortality and power. They want enemies to test their might against them.

Marlantes led a heavily armed jeep convoy carrying an M-60 machine gun, multiple LAAWs, and contact with three artillery batteries down Route 9 to a bridge. He felt like he was in a chariot of the gods. The distance from the company position to the bridge on Route 9 was 12 kilometers. There was a 105mm howitzer battery just north of Camp Carroll and 155s and 175s artillery batteries firing out of LZ Stud.

Trivial pressures can drive inexperienced leaders to commit horrific errors in combat. The fear of looking like an uninitiated new guy leads leaders to bypass critical thinking and rely on standard military responses. During his first patrol in the mountains bordering Laos, Marlantes called in an artillery fire mission on an unseen transportation unit. It turned out to be a herd of elephants, leaving him filled with shame.

Destruction offers a seductive form of transcendence, requiring conscious non-visual awareness of compassion and immediate battlefield rituals to prevent emotional jamming.

Restoring Compassion

Modern society inures people to violence through escalating entertainment and everyday conditioning, much like extreme poverty desensitizes populations. Boot camp only serves as a finishing school for inurement because the neurological circuitry for short-circuiting compassion is already wired from childhood and daily media exposure. Ego survival frequently overrides compassion and physical survival.

The American public reacts to violence with the same indifference as local citizens in Calcutta who walk past a little girl whose hands were cut off for begging. This mirrors the release of Psycho in 1960 or the score of roughly 100,000 to 127 in the first Gulf war.

Military technology and martial fantasies promote the illusion of the clean kill to shield users from the gruesome reality of war. Fantasizing about effortless, bloodless destruction through precision-guided weapons, lasers, or surgical strikes allows policy makers and soldiers to experience the hero trip without facing rotting parts. A 200 yards rifle accuracy compares to modern precision weapons and Tomahawk missiles with a 500 miles range.

Marlantes fantasized about a laser beam so fine it could slice an airplane wing or a man's head off without any blood at all.

Recognizing that the human psyche contains multiple conflicting parts eliminates the false assumption that a person is entirely a killer or entirely a saint. Warriors often suffer from the belief that loving the destruction of war makes them completely psychotic or evil. Understanding the shadow self allows individuals to acknowledge their dark impulses without acting on them.

Marlantes found relief from his internal conflict when Oxford philosophy tutor John Mackie asked why he assumed there was only one person inside him. He followed this by reading Carl Jung on the shadow self. Military training must explicitly address the psychological shadow and the reality of human aggression to prevent violent excesses during combat.

Soldiers, police, and bodyguards are routinely sent into professions involving violence without being taught about their shadow sides. This leads to dangerous projections onto enemies and criminals. Society often condemns police brutality or war crimes without providing the necessary psychological preparation or leadership intervention beforehand.

Overcoming the short-circuiting of compassion requires utilizing non-visual senses that have not been dulled by media and technology. Visual media filters out the true horror of carnage. By exposing decision-makers and citizens to non-visual inputs such as smell, touch, and sound, the direct emotional channels to the heart are reopened.

Congressional junkets should walk through burned-out villages to smell rotting human meat, hear the wailing of orphaned children, and feel the dead weight of bodies. When faced with decisions resulting in killing or carnage, you should:

• Make a conscious attempt to use other senses besides the visual.

Rituals must be implemented immediately on the battlefield to process grief, express forgiveness, and prevent the permanent jamming of emotional circuitry. Ancient epics demonstrate that warriors spent significant time in ritual. Without structured rituals to mourn lost comrades and process the killing of enemies, emotional wiring becomes jammed, leading to delayed psychological trauma.

Marlantes punished soldiers who cut off enemy ears by making them bury the bodies. The mechanical task broke down into tears, highlighting the need for proper burial ceremonies. To facilitate healing during combat tours, you should:

• Carve out time during combat tours to reflect and conduct solemn group time.
• File by graves and throw a handful of dirt on the bodies of both sides.
• Say a prayer out loud thanking dead on both sides for their part in the drama.
• Allow people to curse the dead for murdering friends.
• Have older leaders trained in conducting rituals of forgiveness and healing say structured prayers of release.

To prevent destructive excesses before they start, training programs must adopt specific safeguards:

• Introduce all military personnel to the concepts of the shadow, rage, and repression from the very start of their training.
• Spend more individual time through therapy and education with NCOs and officers in combat units that operate directly with the enemy or with prisoners.

4. Loyalty and Moral Dilemmas

Warriors must navigate conflicting loyalties and the intoxicating surrender of the unit while maintaining upward and downward trust.

Concepts of loyalty change over time. You shift from personal fealty toward leaders to loyalty directed at a nation or state. In 1967, Karl Marlantes and his friend John struggled at Oxford University over whether to give up their Rhodes scholarships to fight in Vietnam, become permanent exiles in Canada, or desert to Sweden or Algeria. You must navigate these competing loyalties, recognizing that failure is inevitable and something you must learn to live with.

The Psychology of the Unit

The intense feeling of loyalty to a military unit stems from your own psyche rather than physical reality. It functions as a mythic, historic, and psychological projection. Physically, the unit consists only of mud, fire, mangled corpses, and frightened people. You draw strength from the ghosts of tens of thousands who came before you and did the job despite incompetent leaders.

Marlantes compares the intoxicating surrender to a historic unit to playing for the Yankees. The team is not just current players, but Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio, and Mickey Mantle. Voluntarily surrendering your individuality to a group creates an intoxicating sense of greatness. It also impairs sound judgment and leads directly to groupthink.

Under conditions of extreme pain, grief, and responsibility, you willingly become a cog to avoid confronting ugly realities. You escape personal accountability for the misery and destruction around you. Marlantes reflects on how he avoided confronting his personal responsibility for death and destruction in Vietnam because doing so required examining uncomfortable facts.

The Breakdown of Command Loyalty

True military effectiveness requires reverse loyalty from top to bottom. Career officers focused on superiors often display a complete lack of downward loyalty. When leaders issue stupid or dangerous orders based on arbitrary timetables rather than genuine life-and-death necessity, downward loyalty breaks down. Your trust in the command structure evaporates.

During the monsoon in the mountains along the Laotian border, Marlantes's company was pushed hard to make map checkpoints for a new firebase without food or air support. This led to exhaustion, injury, and a decision by the company commander to lose communications. The company spent two days without food before rations ran out. An executive officer refused to sell a can of peaches for 35 dollars, an amount equivalent to around $120 in modern money.

When basic military psychology and trust are violated, unit loyalty shifts downward to immediate peers and direct leaders. This contrasts with the extreme absolute loyalty demanded by codes like Bushido. The samurai code treats loyalty as more important than life itself, even requiring the sacrifice of one's child. In Inazo Nitobe's retelling of a Bushido tale, a retainer named Genzo and a mother sacrifice her son by substituting him so a lord's true heir can escape execution. True adherence to conscience sometimes demands active resistance against a flawed master or order.

You must maintain deep skepticism toward any moral choice in combat that appears entirely painless. When a situation presents a seemingly painless moral choice, it is a sign that you have not looked deeply enough into underlying ethical complexities and potential consequences. Marlantes notes that while his company's decision to lose communications protected them from dangerous night movements, it required their skipper to sacrifice his career and face an eventual transfer.

To avoid subconscious self-deception, you must consciously rank personal goals and use a detached observer psyche to choose which aspirations to satisfy:

• Consciously rank personal goals so their order of importance is clearly differentiated.
• See which subpersonalities of the psyche will most benefit from each of those goals.
• Step in with a detached observing part of the psyche to choose which goal gets satisfied and which ones are put aside.

5. Homecoming and Reintegration

Returning from the initiatory space of war requires extended family support, spiritual cleansing rituals, and institutional transition policies.

Returning from the battlefield to the normal world is a severe psychological challenge. You have experienced extremes of good and evil and touched the infinite. The author walked in uniform down M Street in Washington, D.C., and was jeered by young people chanting slogans while other citizens hurried past.

A major homecoming mistake is the lack of extended family involvement to ground you. The author returned to a small airport gathering consisting only of his parents, Maree Ann, her four-year-old daughter Lizzy, and an aunt. The hypermasculine warrior energy of the returning soldier must be balanced by feminine energy. In Irish mythology, when Cúchulainn returned from combat, the women of Emain Macha stripped naked before him, forcing him to plunge into cold water to cool his rage.

The Mystery of Homecoming

Simple personal connections can break through defensive barriers. The author's friend Biggs picked him up every weekend to drive to the Maryland shore and make sensuous hamburgers, while Ben defended him aggressively when a shopkeeper refused to sell him beer.

You must create and share a personal artistic expression or story about your war before you can walk back into the community. In Navajo mythology, Sky Woman taught two warrior brothers returning from fighting monsters to sing of their adventures so the villagers would no longer be afraid of them.

Rituals of Healing

Healing the soul requires deep spiritual confrontation with the dead, including fallen comrades and former enemies. The author and his friend Brother Mark conducted a Mass for the Dead at Old Mission Santa Inez at two in the morning, bringing twenty thousand years of our common ancestry representing deep historical roots of ritual. He brought his battered Vietnam diary and read messages of forgiveness to his fallen comrades using a paschal candle.

Confronting the archetypal shadow through ritual can manifest as the Presence, a terrifying psychic presence that requires traditional cleansing methods:

• Obtain a clay bowl and sage personally picked and blessed by a shaman.
• Crumble the sage into the bowl and set it on fire.
• Imitate traditional chants while letting the sage smoke seep all over the house and yourself.
• Toss holy water around the windows and doors of vulnerable rooms.

Successful reentry requires comprehensive institutional reforms. Norm Bowker suffered from the lack of a place to go after the war, eventually ending in tragic suicide after driving aimlessly around a small lake.

You must apply practical transition rules:

• Never discharge people immediately from combat without a transition period.
• Take veterans in groups, preferably their combat units, through ritual ceremonies and counseling.
• Conduct a ceremony of handing over weapons to physically sever the psychological tie to combat gear.
• Provide counseling supplied or paid for by the Veterans Administration for as long as desired.
• Gather veterans in small groups with trained career veterans to talk themselves down and break the code of silence.

10 Key Ideas

1. Combat functions as a terrifying sacred space akin to a temple of Mars, sharing components with mystical experiences while leaving soldiers spiritually unequipped for the weight of killing.
2. Killing creates a profound psychological split in the warrior that requires conscious moral framing, noble intentions, and structured peer-led integration.
3. Guilt over killing can be mitigated when warriors act with a noble heart, right intentions, and dedication to a higher good, such as Karl Marlantes experiencing absolution after speaking with Joseph Campbell.
4. There is a deep, savage joy in destruction that offers a form of transcendence akin to religious ecstasy or the shadow side of creativity.
5. Understanding the shadow self allows warriors to acknowledge their dark impulses without acting on them and prevents violent excesses during combat.
6. Military technology and martial fantasies promote the illusion of the clean kill, but decision-makers can overcome this inurement and restore compassion by utilizing non-visual senses like smell, touch, and sound.
7. Under conditions of extreme pain and responsibility, soldiers willingly surrender their individuality and become cogs in the unit, leading to groupthink and the evasion of personal accountability.
8. When basic military psychology and trust are violated by incompetent leaders pushing arbitrary timetables, true unit loyalty shifts downward to immediate peers and direct leaders.
9. Returning from the initiatory space of war requires extended family support, spiritual cleansing rituals, and institutional transition policies to ground the hypermasculine warrior energy.
10. Society must implement comprehensive institutional reforms, such as never discharging veterans immediately from combat without a transition period and providing long-term counseling through the Veterans Administration.