Sebastian Junger - War

The parallels with military structure are almost exact. Battle Company had around 150 men, and every man in the company knew every other man by face and by name. The molten core of the group bond was the platoon, however. A platoon — with a headquarters element, a radio operator, a medic, and a forward observer for calling in airstrikes — is the smallest self-contained unit in the regular army. Inserted into enemy territory and resupplied by air, a platoon could function more or less indefinitely. When I asked the men about their allegiance to one another, they said they would unhesitatingly risk their lives for anyone in the platoon or company, but that the sentiment dropped off pretty quickly after that. By the time you got to brigade level — three or four thousand men — any sense of common goals or identity was pretty much theoretical. The 173rd had an unmanned observation blimp tethered over Asadabad, for example, and one night a thunderstorm caused it to crash. When the men at Restrepo heard that, they broke into a cheer.

Self-sacrifice in defense of one’s community is virtually universal among humans, extolled in myths and legends all over the world, and undoubtedly ancient. No community can protect itself unless a certain portion of its youth decide they are willing to risk their lives in its defense. That sentiment can be horribly manipulated by leaders and politicians, of course, but the underlying sentiment remains the same. Cheyenne Dog Soldiers wore long sashes that they staked to the ground in battle so that they couldn’t retreat from the spot unless released by someone else. American militiamen at the Alamo were outnumbered ten to one and yet fought to the last man rather than surrender to Mexican forces trying to reclaim the territory of Texas. And soldiers in World War I ran headlong into heavy machine-gun fire not because many of them cared about the larger politics of the war but because that’s what the man to the left and right of them was doing. The cause doesn’t have to be righteous and battle doesn’t have to be winnable; but over and over again throughout history, men have chosen to die in battle with their friends rather than to flee on their own and survive.

While Stouffer was trying to figure this phenomenon out among American troops, the Psychological Warfare Division was trying to do the same thing with the Germans. One of the most astounding things about the last phase of the war wasn’t that the German army collapsed — by the end that was a matter of simple math — but that it lasted as long as it did. Many German units that were completely cut off from the rest of their army continued resisting the prospect of certain defeat. After the war, a pair of former American intelligence officers named Edward Shils and Morris Janowitz set about interviewing thousands of German prisoners to find out what had motivated them in the face of such odds. Their paper, “Cohesion and Disintegration in the Wehrmacht in World War II,” became a classic inquiry into why men fight.

Considering the extreme nationalism of the Nazi era, one might expect that territorial ambition and a sense of racial superiority motivated most of the men on the German line. In fact, those concepts only helped men who were already part of a cohesive unit; for everyone else, such grand principles provided no motivation at all. A soldier needs to have his basic physical needs met and needs to feel valued and loved by others. If those things are provided by the group, a soldier requires virtually no rationale other than the defense of that group to continue fighting. Allied propaganda about the moral wrongfulness of the Nazi government had very little effect on these men because they weren’t really fighting for that government anyway. As the German lines collapsed and the German army, the Wehrmacht, began to break up, the concerns of fighting began to give way to those of pure physical survival. At that point, Allied propaganda campaigns that guaranteed food, shelter, and safety to German deserters began to take a toll.

But even then, Shils and Janowitz found, the men who deserted tended to be disgruntled loners who had never really fit into their unit. They were men who typically had trouble giving or receiving affection and had a history of difficult relations with friends and family back home. A significant number had criminal records. The majority of everyone else either fought and died as a unit or surrendered as a unit. Almost no one acted on their own to avoid a fate that was coming to the whole group. When I asked Hijar what it would mean to get overrun, he said, “By a brave man’s definition it would mean to fight until you died.” That is essentially what the entire German army tried to do as the Western Front collapsed in the spring of 1945.

The starkest version of this commitment to the group is throwing yourself on a hand grenade to save the men around you. It’s courage in its most raw form, an instantaneous decision that is virtually guaranteed to kill the hero but stands a very good chance of saving everyone else. (Most acts of heroism contain at least an outside chance of survival — and a high chance of failure.) When Giunta ran into heavy fire to save Brennan from getting dragged off by the enemy, I doubt he considered his own safety, but somewhere in his mind he may have thought he had a chance of surviving. That would not be true with a hand grenade. Throwing yourself on a hand grenade is a deliberate act of suicide, and as such it occupies a singular place in the taxonomy of courage.

It is a particularly hard act to understand from an evolutionary point of view. The driving mechanism of human evolution is natural selection, meaning that genes of individuals who die before they have a chance to reproduce tend to get weeded out of a population. A young man who throws himself on a grenade is effectively conceding the genetic competition to the men he saves: they will go on to have children whereas he won’t. From that, it’s hard to imagine how a gene for courage or altruism could get passed forward through the generations. Individuals in most species will defend their young, which makes genetic sense, and a few, like wolves, will even defend their mates. But humans may be the only animal that practices what could be thought of as “suicidal defense”: an individual male will rush to the defense of another male despite the fact that both are likely to die. Chimpanzees share around 99 percent of human DNA and are the only primate species yet observed to stage raids into neighboring territory and to kill the lone males they encounter. Raid after raid, kill after kill, they’ll wipe out the male population of a rival troop and take over their females and their territory. When these attacks happen, other males in the area flee rather than come to their comrade’s defense. Researchers have never once observed a chimpanzee turn around to help another male who is getting beaten to death by outsiders.

By that standard, courage could be thought of as a uniquely human trait. Courage would make even more evolutionary sense if it were also followed by some kind of social reward, like access to resources or to females. The glory heaped upon heroes in almost all societies might explain why young men are so eager to send themselves to war — or, if sent, to fight bravely. That would only work in a species that is capable of language, however; acts of bravery can’t follow a chimp home from the battlefield any more than acts of cowardice. Without language, courage just becomes suicidal foolishness. But once our ancestors escaped the eternal present by learning to speak, they could repeat stories that would make individuals accountable for their actions — or rewarded for them. That would create a strong incentive not to turn and flee while others fought off the enemy. Better to fight and die than to face ostracism and contempt back home.