Honor

One morning about 0300, at the gate of a lonely outpost on Monkey Mountain near Da Nang, the radio crackled where I stood watch. It was transmitting among contacts from the main base below. A roving watch was stopped at the base of a tower where I had stood watch many times since I had been in-country, some at this very time morning. The patrol was receiving no response from the guard in the tower.

I listened to the exchange between the patrol and headquarters as a sailor carefully climbed the tower, expecting to find, no doubt, that the guard was asleep.

He was … forever. A knife still protruded from him as he sprawled against the very seat where I had sat so many times. I stood, chilled and shaking, thinking how it could be me there with my eyes staring, unseeing, at a starry sky.

The victim, a well-liked young sailor with only a few weeks left in country, would go home in a body bag like nearly 60,000 young American men. What was different about him? He would return home, NCIS determined, a victim of a fellow shipmate operating under an evil impulse.

The reasons for the murder have faded with time. Let’s just say the motive was evil, gross, and a blight upon the proud United States Navy. My point is this: not all those who serve or have served, in the military gain respect. The overwhelming majority do, a far greater percentage than the non-serving cohort.

But there are psychopaths and sociopaths who make their way into uniform. There are those who, when handed a firearm, turn toward dark impulses. I’ve seen men change, as Hemingway described them, gaining erections from the slap of pistol holster leather against their thigh. They’ve always been there. Soldiers returning from POW camps during and after WWII found their back pay stolen by paymasters. American veterans would tell of comrades picking off enemy combatants who were clearly marked as medics. When Robert E. Lee’s army marched into the north, he allowed his men to seize free African-Americans and send them south into slavery. General Pershing refused to stop fighting, as did all the other armies, on August 11, 1918, hours before the armistice, sending young men to kill and be killed for no reason other than bloodlust. General Almond, a MacArthur favorite, sent an entire Marine Division to destruction in Korea for personal aggrandizement.

Then there was Mai Lai.

My point? The military is like any great organization, or the human genome itself. There are mutations. Some benefit us, like those that produced an Audie Murphy. Some denigrate us and produce those who murder the innocent due to their personal demons.

What makes the military cohort produce such a low number of miscreants is a simple concept: honor. It produces greatness. It also allows the organization to self-police. Finding the aberrations and bringing them to justice completes the code of honor. It’s honor that sets them apart from ordinary people.

Until, that is, a president seeking to politicize the service and feed a base, many of whom have no concept of honor, intercedes for political gain.

Thus, is honor debased. The mighty infected by a common worm.