What is it like to go to war? What does the experience have to teach us, and could it in any way be a spiritual endeavor? What does the Temple of Mars have to teach us in a climate-changing world?
Karl Marlantes is a Rhodes Scholar who put aside graduate studies at Oxford University to lead a Marine rifle platoon in Vietnam in 1968. He is featured extensively in the Ken Burns/Lynn Novick documentary series, The Vietnam War. His memoir, What It Is Like to Go to War, and novel, Matterhorn, address what we ask our nation’s young warriors to do from within a cultural environment that denies the multifaceted truth of what it means to be a warrior. His recent novels Deep River and Cold Victory address big questions of agency and what it means to recognize oneself as a historical actor.
Is combat terrifying? Exhilarating? Mystical? Carnal? Is it everything all at once? If we only acknowledge the experience as negative, how might that cause repression and misunderstanding in a world unlikely to leave war behind permanently?
If climate change is not successfully addressed as soon as possible, the geopolitical situation may become more rivalrous and difficult. We need to understand the nature of war, of our relationship to our shadow, in order to chart an honest course to a better future.
Resources
Ken Burns & Lynn Novick's The Vietnam War series
Karl Marlantes' books:
- What It Is Like to Go to War
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Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by the team at Nori, the carbon removal marketplace. This is a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs developing solutions to climate change. I am so happy to have with me here Karl Marlantes. You might recognize him from the Ken Burns and Lynn Novick series The Vietnam War, which is outstanding. I’ve seen it all the way through several times. Trent Reznor does the score, which is always incredible, and Karl kicks off the entire series, so it’s not like you need to watch seven or eight hours to get to Karl. He’s right there at the start.
As a young man, Karl was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, but he gave it up to become a Marine rifle platoon leader in Vietnam. He’s written several books about his experiences there, such as his novel Matterhorn and his memoir What It Is Like to Go to War, and has since written several more novels, including Deep River, about labor activism in the logging communities in the Pacific Northwest around the turn of the century, and Cold Victory, about post-war Finland in the beginnings of the Cold War.
Karl has much to say that is profound about what it means to be a warrior, what it means to understand our own spiritual selves, and how those lessons might be applied in a world which may be headed towards more instability and conflict. I hope you enjoy the show. Oh, and fair warning for those of you that like to listen with your kids: there’s a decent amount of swearing in this episode and it deals with some adult subject matter, as you might have guessed. So I hope you enjoy. Thanks for listening, and here’s your show. Well, thanks for being here, Karl.
Karl Marlantes: Yeah, great to be here.
Ross Kenyon: We’re both in Seattle, but it’s a Zoom away. I used to do shows only in person back before COVID, and I was so strict about it, thinking that the only way it could be really exceptional radio was to be in person with someone. And then COVID happened, and now being in person, I think I would trip myself up the other direction. I almost prefer it this way, but we are not very far apart right now.
Karl Marlantes: No, and I do still feel that the personal, you know, like they say, I don’t know, 90% of communication is non-verbal, and Zoom cuts out almost, you know, at least half of that. And yeah, but on the other hand, I don’t have to fight the bridges, and you know, so it’s good.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that is a nice thing about not having to travel across Seattle, especially if you’re going west like that. I’ve read all of your books, some of them more than once. I’ve seen the Ken Burns and Lynn Novick series The Vietnam War multiple times. I think if you took the statistical distribution of viewership of that show, I’m in the, like, one to three top percentile of it, I think. I think it’s amazing. I think the score is incredible. I think you’re the first Ken Burns subject I’ve had on the show, though. That’s a unique thing. What was that like, and how did that happen?
Karl Marlantes: Well, it happened because of Matterhorn. Lynn Novick read it, and they had already started this project, The Vietnam War. And I was in New York and she sent, sent me, sent my publisher an email, wanted to know if she could meet me. And so we met at my hotel in New York and hit it off well. She’s a wonderful person and a really talented producer and director. And then I met Ken, and you know, we hit it off, because Ken had to sort of do the final approval. And then it took several years of, you know, Lynn said that they shoot 100 hours for every hour of documentary that they get.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, wow. That’s why they’re so good.
Karl Marlantes: They mean it. And the other thing that I loved about it, it’s the A-Team. I mean, Sarah Botstein, who is also very important in the production, and Ken himself. He’s a great manager, real intense. But I think that they’re mostly young people that sort of like probably don’t work for anything but get to work with Ken Burns and then go on to their careers. And they’re all really talented, you know, young people. And then he’s got some old hands, like, what’s his name, Geoffrey Ward, the guy that writes all the stuff. Yeah. And he’s really good. So I mean, it’s the A-Team. I mean, there’s documentary stuff that they invented, you know, the—
Ross Kenyon: The real slow zoom.
Karl Marlantes: Right, yeah. And making the stills look like they’re moving, and you know, that kind of stuff. The other thing that was really interesting about it is that there were the other sort of talking heads, and we were all together, and even with some, like, the Vietnamese talking heads, and that was extremely interesting too. And, you know, we had to find—
Ross Kenyon: Have you met many folks that fought on the North Vietnamese side and been able to connect with them personally like that?
Karl Marlantes: No, not many. But yeah, I’ve met more that fought on the South Vietnamese side, ’cause they’re here. But I was just in Vietnam in September. I’m involved with an organization called PeaceTrees Vietnam, and they clear unexploded ordnance, and I was over there. They were sort of doing the, you know, what do they call it, the nemawashi, trying to keep the North Vietnamese government happy with PeaceTrees, and, you know, had us over there. I was able to go explode some unexploded ordnance and it was really interesting. But I met quite a few people who’d fought on the North Vietnamese side then.
And it’s sort of interesting. There’s like two kinds of veterans. There’s the sort of ones that are sort of where I am, which is like, what was that all about? And it really wasn’t worth fighting. I mean, they’re going as capitalist as fast as their government will let them, and now are on our side against the Chinese. I mean, did we have to kill several million of them? And I don’t know, what, 60,000 Americans, 70,000 Americans, a lot. So there’s that group that are sort of with me. It’s like, you know, they fought for freedom and getting out from under the boot of imperialists, and they ended up in a totally authoritarian government.
Then there’s the ones that gloat, you know: we were hiding in the bushes and you stupid Marines smelled like cigarette smoke and we were able to wipe you out, you know. And it just galls me, because of course they are the winners and they get to make that stuff up. But it wasn’t quite like that. You know, we could also smell nuoc mam on them. So, you know, it wasn’t, generally speaking, smell was not a major factor in identifying the enemy.
Ross Kenyon: Of the soldiers in the former category, it seems like authors often fall into this, where Vietnam, for both the obvious terrible reasons and the elation that combat provides that you document especially in What It Is Like to Go to War, there is something that’s really profoundly powerful and empowering and visceral about it, that is something that people are still processing. I also see Tim O’Brien’s novels especially, with someone who, that was probably the peak experience of his life, and everything after that was just trying to figure out what that meant and why it happened and why he is where he is now.
Karl Marlantes: Yeah, no, I know Tim, and he’s a great writer, and I think his best is Going After Cacciato. He kids me, because I’m a little bit envious, because The Things They Carried is taught in every 8th grade class in America.
Ross Kenyon: I think that’s where I read it for the first time, yeah.
Karl Marlantes: And he laughs at me. He says, Karl, he says, Matterhorn’s that thick. There’s not an English teacher in the world that would assign your novel.
Ross Kenyon: I think. Would you cut the [unclear] of it up?
Karl Marlantes: But he’s, I like him. He’s a great writer. And yes, he’s different than me in that regard. I know he’s still quite concerned about the choices he made. I am not, you know, so it’s a big difference between—
Ross Kenyon: You feel pretty settled about your experience in Vietnam?
Karl Marlantes: Yeah, I feel like you can’t justify a war on external grounds. I mean, you could argue that, oh, the domino effect was really true, or no, the domino effect was not true. You know, we had to stop communism. Actually, they weren’t international communism, they were just nationalism. I mean, you can go endlessly on with that. And on that level, I think it was a policy error. Big mistake. And they tried to lie their way out of it because of elections coming.
I mean, the Ken Burns thing, they had tape of Kennedy, of Robert and John, saying we can’t talk about this, the election’s coming up. And then we have Johnson and McNamara, that memo in ’65, where there were only by that time about 2,000 dead Americans, and McNamara said we can’t win this war. And Johnson said, just keep this under your hat, we’ve got an election coming up. And so that part of the war, the first part, is they got into it. And I think because, I mean, all those guys were, you know, Dean Rusk and Kennedy, they were all World War Two veterans. And what they did is they fought fascism and Tojo, and they saw it coming again. You know, the dictators are coming again. That’s the way they framed it and that’s the way they went after it. We can’t do Munich, you know, all that stuff.
I will give them credit for making a mistake. They did not understand anything about the North Vietnamese or Vietnam or Ho Chi Minh. He was in fact just trying to get out from underneath the heel of the French and later us. But during World War Two, I mean, he tried to join us. He literally tried, sent letters, and was just ignored. So I say, OK, that was a mistake. Mistakes happen. I wish they hadn’t. But what I get angry about and still hold a grudge, if you know, I’m half Finn, they say, you know what Finnish Alzheimer’s is? You forget everything except the grudges.
Ross Kenyon: That’s a great line.
Karl Marlantes: Yeah, it’s a great one. So anyway, they lied and they continued to hide it. They knew they couldn’t win it. And then we lost another 57,000 dead Americans and how many, you know, dead Vietnamese, simply because they were afraid of losing the election. Soft on communism, you know. That’s when self-seeking and self-serving was, I don’t know what you want to call it, a sin, you know. And a lot of guys died for that. I don’t feel so bad dying for a policy error that was made in good faith. But I do feel bad about watching friends die for saving somebody’s election.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. The worst example of that that I remember from the show is Nixon back-channeling in ’68, and LBJ knew about it, but couldn’t say how he knew about it, as detailed in the show. And therefore we just had, you know, the better part of a decade still in Vietnam as a result of Nixon saying, just let me get elected, I’ll get a better deal.
Karl Marlantes: Right. Yeah, I know. No, I mean, yeah. So I mean, Burns did it, and Novick, they did a great job on presenting both sides. And I know that for a fact, because I have friends who are, you know, on the right and who say it was terrible, I hated that documentary, he just did nothing but applaud the North Vietnamese, and you know—
Ross Kenyon: He talks about how brutal the land reforms are in the north. He says bad things about the communists.
Karl Marlantes: Awful. But then I have people on the left that said all you did was extol the virtues of the American military and [unclear]. And so I said, well, I guess we must have gotten it right, because it riled up people who were on the left and on the right. I mean, I think they kind of hit right down the middle and everybody was pissed off. So I think it was like, OK, we got it right. I was proud to be part of it.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, it’s an incredible piece of work. I want to ask about some of the lessons from Vietnam, which I know is a huge category here all of its own. But one that you’ve already referenced here is that there’s a bit of paradigm blindness, where there’s a lot about Ho Chi Minh as being more anti-colonial or decolonial than communist. Like, how much of it is nationalism, how much of it is communism? And because of the Cold War paradigm, we basically just applied that onto there. And then he had more support from communists who were supporting anti-colonial movements worldwide, and it just sort of fell into that orbit. I don’t know to what degree that story is true. I’m sure some people probably fight about to what degree his true interests are. His ultimate goal, though, was an independent Vietnam, whether it was communist or not. Is that secondary, tertiary, or is that actually like a co-primary goal? Do you have any idea?
Karl Marlantes: Well, I have an opinion, which is that he was forced to. He was a communist, but being part of an international conspiracy to force communism on the rest of the world, I don’t think he was. He revered the American Constitution and Declaration of Independence. He was extremely helped and encouraged by our OSS operatives that were helping him during the Second World War. He could just get no traction with the American government, and he needed weapons. Guess who’s next door with weapons? Chinese communists. So I think he had to make a hard choice. He was also, you know, had been in China too, because of hiding out from French repression. So he was favorably disposed.
But I think if we’d have helped him and not helped the French, I don’t think he’d have done what he did, you know, and I don’t think we’d have had the war we had. I think it would have just, you know, there may have been some civil war, but I think it would have been over with pretty quick, because the French would have been out fast without our help. And the part that people still don’t really know is what was the deal that was made. I mean, some theories are that the French, that we won’t support unification of Germany unless you support us in Vietnam. That’s one plausible theory and one that I think is probably pretty good. There’s others which I forget right now.
Ross Kenyon: I mean, this part in the doc, I’ve stopped that several times and I’ve tried to find documentation of it, but Charles de Gaulle, it feels like a bluff, but he says he would fall under the Soviet sphere of influence if the Americans did not support French retaking of Indochina. And that strikes me as, but also de Gaulle is really squirrelly like that. They care about France more than anything. It wouldn’t surprise me either.
Karl Marlantes: Yeah, you know that great Churchill quote, you know, the cross I have to bear is the Cross of Lorraine.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah.
Karl Marlantes: He was like a lot of these sort of very egotistical, self-centered, you could even say narcissistic leaders. He happened to have his heart in the right place. I think de Gaulle is very important, you know, to French history. And yes, he was, well, I don’t know the right words. French nationalism trumped everything for him, everything, including relationships with Roosevelt and Churchill. And everybody viewed him as just this recalcitrant son of a bitch. And I’m going, yeah, he probably was, but it was all about France, France, the glory of France. And that was what Vietnam was for him, and Algeria: the glory of France. You’ve got to help us with that. I think that’s de Gaulle.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I suspect you’re probably right about that. OK, well, as far as pertains to climate, this broad concern about paradigm confusion, about applying the wrong one, can really cause you to misunderstand problems and intervene in the wrong places. One other thing that is documented both in your work and also in the documentary is this obsession with the wrong metrics. If you can’t measure what matters, you just measure whatever you have at hand, essentially. And that was body count.
And then there’s, you talk about the game theory of lies in Vietnam, which is so destructive. And you do talk about how you want to be a truth teller. You seem like you care about that type of abstract honor, and yet you often felt that justice would be served by lying or deceiving. And it just puts you in a horrible spot where you want to be the sore thumb that sticks up and gets hit with a hammer. And does that even help anyone? Those stories are horrible. Like, if you’re trying to be a good person and you’re encountering that system, I don’t know how it doesn’t corrupt you and make you just play along in this terrible way.
Karl Marlantes: It is highly, what’s the right word, conducive to playing along. I mean, look at our current Republican Party. You know, there’s a wonderful book, I can’t remember the name of the writer, he’s a New York Times writer: Thank You for Your Servitude.
Ross Kenyon: That’s just hilarious.
Karl Marlantes: But it is just that, knuckling under to the system for your own gain. And I think that one thing is that I was young and I was like a lieutenant way down the ranks. I didn’t have a whole lot to lose. If I’d been General Westmoreland or Lyndon Johnson with a lot to lose, I may have, and this is personal, a lot to lose, which goes back to what are your morals. It would have been harder. I think that all those choices are pretty clear, what’s right and what’s wrong, and, like, you’re free and all that. I’m sort of with Sartre on that: you are always free. You just have to decide how much consequence you want to suffer for the choice you make. But you can never point to the system and say, oh, it made me do it, I had no choice.
And I think that people who make those choices, I’m hoping, wake up at two in the morning sometimes and go, oh my God, what did I do? I killed X number of people so that I could get re-elected. I hope that it hits him hard. So when you say, you know, difficulty being in that system, and what do you do in that system? And I’m thinking of, like, you know, throwing kids in jail for smoking dope and ruining their lives. Well, in that case, I feel proud of my choice. But there were other choices I made, like the time I talked about, we decided that we were just too angry to take prisoners. And I talk about that.
So I try to be honest, and I do think absolutely one of the fundamental components of civilization is truth telling. You can’t make decisions based on dumbass assumptions or false assumptions. And that’s what we’re facing right now. I mean, I think that one of the fundamental problems is that we’ve decided that, well, you know, I used to laugh, CNN would count up the lies. You remember that, it was about eight, seven years ago: oh, this is the 423rd time Donald Trump’s made a lie. You know what it’s like now, people just, like, you know, it’s become commonplace. I think that’s why truth telling is so important. You can’t function without it. You can’t function efficiently. And you look at, you know, totalitarian governments don’t tell truths. They can’t. They don’t function.
Ross Kenyon: Your work does have a very strong radical honesty to it. I mean, there are even places where maybe to a veteran your experiences will read as entirely normal, but to the civilian world, there are parts that don’t make you look that good, like the example that you gave. Or even just the feeling of how pumped combat can make you feel, how exciting it is, how it feels to win in a firefight. That’s, people don’t talk about that. Maybe The Hurt Locker does a great job of showing this, right? You come back from the war, you’re at the store and you’re just looking at the cereal boxes and there’s a thousand of them and you’re like, I don’t care about this shit, ’cause I’ve done meaningful work where lives are on the line, and this is nothing over here.
People miss that. I think that’s sort of a scary thing to admit. I think you’re one of the only people that have relished in the Temple of Mars, as you call it, and we don’t know how to even deal with the Temple of Mars. I think we’ve mostly pretended that it doesn’t exist, and it puts you in a spot where being a truth teller makes you look like a maniac.
Karl Marlantes: Hopefully it doesn’t look like a maniac, but—
Ross Kenyon: I think if people don’t read you charitably, I think they might have a reaction that’s pretty strong.
Karl Marlantes: Yeah, yeah, I know. Bill Moyers said, what does it feel like to be a killing machine? What does it feel like? I’m sure in parts it feels amazing and I’m sure in parts it haunts you forever. Why do you think, you know, people get involved in this stuff if it was all bad? You know, I mean, there are positive political reasons. I mean, wars have solved problems like slavery. I mean, that was good. I can’t say that was not a noble fight. I mean, not everybody in it was fighting against slavery, we all know that. But that’s what it did, you know, and that’s a noble fight. And then there’s a few people, very few, who just get off on it.
But I use that analogy of crack cocaine. You can’t go to somebody and say, well, just stop doing it because it’s bad. No, crack gives you an incredible high, apparently, I haven’t done it. But it costs. I mean, you get that high at an enormous, enormous cost. And so why lie about the high? You can’t kid some 17-year-old and say don’t do this, it’s horrible. And the 17-year-old goes, yeah, but you know, I hear my friends say it’s fun. You just can’t. You have to let them choose, and you can’t suppress it.
So I thought that one of the things that I could do, in a way trying to sort of do the great work, trying to move consciousness along, is to get people to see that, like I opened with the Ken Burns thing, is that we’re not the top animal on the food chain because we’re nice. I mean, we are a mean goddamn monkey, you know, and we seem to relish in killing things. And since we got to the top of the food chain, here’s, I don’t know if this is just me spouting, but we don’t have any more animals to kill, so we kill each other, you know. And we’re going to destroy the planet, which goes back to your theme, which is that we just keep doing, we have to get conscious of this drive. And you only get conscious of this drive if you put it out in front of you.
And so I said part of what I wanted to do was say, no, I mean, it’s horrible, but there is the crack cocaine aspect of it, and that is incredibly exciting. And that sense of meaning: everything you do, someone’s life depends on. And you’re 18, right? I mean, people come back and they go, oh, well, they miss the adrenaline. They don’t miss the adrenaline. They miss counting, counting for something. You go to work at McDonald’s flipping burgers. You don’t show up for work, McDonald’s isn’t going to suffer a moment. But if you don’t show up on the [unclear] at four in the morning when you’re supposed to, people die. So what a difference. What a huge difference. And that’s that Hurt Locker image of looking at, you know, 100 cereal boxes. It’s like, this doesn’t mean anything. I’ve got to get out there and do something meaningful.
But going back to the whole meaning issue, I’ve landed, you can only make the meaning out of what you did. ’Cause war is basically sort of a, the state, it’s a failure, you know, it’s a failure of the adults that mostly kids have to solve by dying. And I think that you must recognize these impulses in us in order to get control of them. It’s like sex. I mean, shit, when I was 18 to 28, and it’s not the same now, but I wanted to just, you know, have sexual intercourse three times a day, you know? Well, I didn’t, ’cause I had to get through school and I had to, you know, make a living and eat, all that stuff. Well, that’s just consciousness saying, OK, this drive has to take a secondary seat here. But that’s hard.
There’s a lot of people that can’t handle that, foregoing pleasure now for something later. I mean, those are all conscious moves that only come by getting conscious about it. I have this drive. I think I would really get off on a very exciting firefight if I could live and, you know, overcome my enemy and get them right between the eyes. All those things I talk about. If you don’t recognize it, then you’re going to do it unconsciously. And we have a lot of violence and a lot of, you know, people make enemies out of people because of this unconscious drive.
Well, I’ll tell you, you know, as long as we’re on unconscious drives. Jane Goodall, you know who, the woman who studied the chimpanzees? There was a wonderful description of a moment she was observing the chimpanzees. I think she called them tribes, I don’t know, but anyway, the group. And they were all just sort of, you know, the kids are playing around and the mothers are sort of with each other and they’re eating roots and berries and the males are sort of wandering around. It’s just an amorphous organization. A lion pride came by, and immediately that amorphous organization switched into what we could basically call war mode.
The alpha male went right to the center of the group. The strong females took the children and were right next to the alpha male, and interspersed between the outer ring of males and the inner ring of males were the other females, in a circle. It was a completely automatic, genetically orchestrated response to fear. What’s happening in our politics today? They’re coming across the border. They’re rapists. The men are going to be in the women’s bathrooms. That is fear. And what is the unconscious response to it? Get the alpha male in the center. And fascists know this very well, and most of us don’t. They think it’s about politics. I think it’s about genetics.
And you have to overcome, you have to see that the fear is false, it’s being generated. And you have to say that the response to this fear is not to suddenly, you know, salute the man on the white horse. The response is something different, which requires thinking instead of just reacting like a bunch of chimpanzees. Genetics. And I think that’s where we are now. People are not talking about this unconscious drive that comes from, you know, a million years of evolution to defend against fear.
Ross Kenyon: You spend so much of your writing discussing Jung’s idea of the shadow and how this can be confronted. It sounds like this is what you’re driving at, is that we have something inside of us that we’ve repressed, we’re not thinking about. In order for us to make peace with it, we need to acknowledge that it’s a part of us so we can integrate it successfully.
Karl Marlantes: Absolutely. If it’s not out in front of you where you can see it, it drives you. You don’t drive it. It’s just that simple. I sort of call it, you have to ride that horse. You can’t let the horse go away, you know. And that takes consciousness, and consciousness is very difficult. I mean, it takes a long time. And that’s where art comes in, writing comes in. Writers don’t have any power, but they have influence. And the major influence is that they can change the consciousness of people. But boy, it’s slow.
Oh, it’s slow. I have the image, so he asked me how I felt about it, and I said, you know, I have this image of, here’s the Queen Mary, you know, and it’s going the wrong direction, it’s heading toward the [unclear]. And I’m a two-and-a-half-horsepower Seagull outboard on the bow trying to make it change its course. You know, well, if you know physics, if you have a vector force, no matter how slight, eventually it’ll change course. But God, oh my God, it’s so, I’m just, and that’s the way I feel about politics today.
Ross Kenyon: What is evil that we have to deal with? With your little outboard motor, what are you trying to steer us toward? What is the shadow that we need to confront so we can be less chimp-like?
Karl Marlantes: Wow. I think violence, aggression. I think that’s the automatic defense of, I’ve talked about the warrior mentality, which, you know, is neutral, but it’s like suddenly we’re taking sides and the other side is the enemy. That is something that needs to be overcome. They’re not the enemy. You have a difference of opinion with them. If they’re trying to kill you, they’re the enemy. But there’s a big difference, you know, and somehow our responses are as if they’re trying to kill us. And it’s just a dumb response, ’cause all you do is end up in wars.
And so I think that the primary thing there is aggression, and aggression’s healthy. I mean, there are times, and I write about it, that you just have to be aggressive. Like, what I came up with is, when you meet the serial killer on the jogging path, you know, use your words is not going to help. You know, you’ve got to be able to fight. It’s healthy. But if you don’t know that you have that capability, and if you don’t know how to use it, like I said, ride that horse, then you use that response for really inappropriate things, all the way from domestic violence to wars.
Ross Kenyon: So we have to acknowledge that there is a part of being violent or aggressive that can both be necessary. But is it also joy? Does there need to be a positive association with violence in this way in order for us to integrate the shadow, or no?
Karl Marlantes: I think that the problem is that there’s an automatic, it’s built into us, just like sex. You can’t say, well, I think I’ll choose to enjoy this orgasm or I’ll choose not to enjoy it. All right? It’s just the way your body’s built, from again millions of years of evolution. And I think that saying I will or I will not enjoy this act of violence, I don’t think it’s up to you. I think you just have to say, I’ve got to just recognize that I will enjoy it. Maybe I will. Some people might not, but I know I did. I mean, I was a Marine, you know, I didn’t join the Marines because I was a pacifist.
And you can’t help the response. I mean, it, but what you can help is your response to the response. But, you know, so I think that trying to repress that, which is what you’re talking about, is the same as trying to repress sex. And then you end up with, you know, weird-ass S&M, bondage and pornography. I mean, all kinds of stuff that just comes around. And you can’t be in, like, a Victorian society and have the repression of sex without all kinds of weird outcomes. You just have to say it’s there. You know, we have to deal with it. You can’t politically decide to make it go away. It just won’t. I mean, you know, so it’s a bad strategy. Repression is a really bad strategy. Control over the urges is the right strategy.
Ross Kenyon: You discuss in your writing that the training given to officers, especially non-commissioned officers as well, or not receiving training that helps people integrate these experiences and the feelings of it. They teach you how to do it. You might get some explanation for why you’re doing it, but there isn’t a lot of understanding of the feelings that come along with it, because there are complex feelings too. I’m sure there’s immense terror, there’s sadness at lost friends, there’s pride at having won over the enemy. And the warrior archetype, that’s a robust archetype. There’s a lot of feelings in there. It’s not just a bully, and the warrior’s not just a bully who takes pride in dominating others for its own sake.
There’s a whole gallery of emotions that should come along with an archetype like that. But the military is still slow to acknowledge it. And I don’t really understand why. That doesn’t make sense, because surely you’d make warriors, you’d end up with some like mystical Lawrence of Arabia type figures if you could teach them how to be more spiritually inclined in that way. But we don’t really do that, it seems.
Karl Marlantes: Yes, that’s true. And I would just differentiate a little bit. The warrior archetype is the protector, the protector of your tribe, the protector of your family, of your society. The bully is a pathological, I write, the right word is, well, it’s a pathological expression of various drives and inadequacies. That’s not the warrior. But the reason I think it’s so difficult is, first of all, you’re under pressure to get young men out there in the field with weapons, and things like consciousness about your feelings, especially if you’re an 18-year-old, are really, really hard to get across.
So I know a lot of officers in the military and, you know, in our other organizations, CIA, things like that, that they’re very thoughtful, but they’re all 35 or 40, OK? And you don’t have really good special forces people until they’re well into their 30s, ’cause that’s, but if you have to take a beach, where you have to take a fortified position, that’s your 18-year-old, that’s who you want. He’s not conscious. He just will go do the job, and he’ll do it without water and without food and without sleep. People have got to understand that the kids are the best fighters, but they need the control of the adults so that they’re not misused.
And that’s, their warrior archetype is in full fling, like you said, but what they’re fighting for is the guy next to them. They’re protecting the guy next to them. And that’s a very strong archetype. But to try and get them conscious in, you know, six weeks of boot camp or 12 weeks of boot camp, not going to happen. So I think a lot of the military is unconscious. I remember I was at the Air Force Academy and the guy was, you know, spouting off to the cadets about they’re warriors, the warriors of the air. And come on, to a Marine it’s like, the Air Force hardly ever sees anybody fight. They’re not, you know, just quit that bullshit. You know, they’re there because of air superiority. They’re absolutely crucial to our defense.
But to try and, you know, do this kind of, I don’t know what you’d call it, weird nonsense about you’re all warriors, we all should be out to kill the enemy. And this was some general that was trying to gin them up. And I just was like, this is ridiculous. I mean, so there’s an example of a very unconscious man who’s in a position of power, but that’s not unusual, not at all. Not just then, it’s in government and it’s in education and it’s, you know, it’s all around us. These guys get into power, mostly guys, and they’re unconscious, and they cause a lot of damage. And so I think you can’t lay it on the military. You have to lay it on the whole education system. You have to start when the kids are four years old, teaching them about how to handle aggression.
Well, that’s why it’s so hard. That’s why I’m a two-and-a-half-horsepower Seagull engine on a Queen Mary, because that’s unfortunately the only way we’re going to get control of it.
Ross Kenyon: Do you think there would be a cultural change if they read the Iliad and they watched Achilles grieving Patroclus? Is that going to make the difference?
Karl Marlantes: Totally. Yeah. Yeah. Because literature allows you, unlike any other art form, to experience the world through the eyes of somebody else. We have to get out of our own skins in order to be empathetic. We have to be able to see the world through other people’s eyes. What’s the training for that when you’re 8 or 10? Well, you know, I mean, you, Brer Rabbit, don’t throw me in the briar patch. I mean, that’s where that kind of empathy training starts. Fairy tales, I mean, and then on to great literature.
It’s, I still think the only art form, ’cause everything else you see and you’re separated from it. The way you’re reading literature, you’re in it. Even the great plays, you’re still watching them in the audience. And so you see the action, but you don’t see it through the eyes of one of the actors. Literature, you do see the actions with the eyes of the character who’s describing it, and you identify. And so I think that I wouldn’t pooh-pooh it at all as a way of cultural change. As I said, writers and other artists don’t have power, but we do have influence, and some have more than others. And that’s just something that I think has to be recognized. And we, you know, we should feel good about it.
Ross Kenyon: Matterhorn is successful because it shows the choices and how circumscribed those choices are for basically every rank. Their decisions are entirely logical, individually logical, for their own advancement, to satisfy their wives back home. The stand-in for you wants a political career after he leaves. He isn’t just some noble Ivy League boy, he also has his own venal interest that he’s serving doing this, I think. And I can feel empathy for all of those people in their desires. It makes a lot of sense.
And I think Tolstoy is someone who does that very well, where I’ve read Anna Karenina a number of times and I’m like, oh, Vronsky, I really identify with him a lot of times. And Anna, and even Karenin, and I’m like, oh, I get him. If you make me feel empathy and understand all of the ways that people do that, I always think that’s a mark of high success.
Karl Marlantes: Yeah, I mean, Tolstoy is my favorite.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, me too. Anna Karenina—
Karl Marlantes: People say, what’s your favorite novel? It’s War and Peace, you know, for sure. Like I said, the thing I love about Tolstoy is that he can make a character out of a racehorse in three sentences. You know, I mean, that’s his talent, his talent. I mean, the book is long and he drifts off, just sort of like Moby Dick. He drifts off into, you know, discussions about religion, and you go, OK, come on, Leo, let’s get back to the story. But he’s a great, great writer. And yeah, he’s my favorite.
Ross Kenyon: Matterhorn, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, some of these large epic novels, you have to have a genealogical chart at the beginning. Deep River has this too.
Karl Marlantes: Yes.
Ross Kenyon: It’s a very Tolstoyan thing to have at the beginning of a novel. But your latest, Cold Victory, I felt like you really did, do you have an editor who was just like, keep this tight, Karl, get this out, we can’t have another 30 years, that’s not going to cut it?
Karl Marlantes: No, it was absolutely the opposite. No one would review Deep River. I mean, it just, yeah, I mean, I just couldn’t get any reviews. And I actually had a reviewer from the New York Times tell my publisher, we’re not doing older white males anymore. And this was a time period that I hope we’re finally getting through. But it was just, you know, it’s about logging. Who cares? You know, we’ve got other more important issues, like, you know.
Ross Kenyon: About logging, that’s so dismissive.
Karl Marlantes: That’s, you know, I’m not going to review a logging book, you know. So anyway, I was angry about that. I mean, I do have a temper. And so I said, well, goddamn it, I’m going to write a three-act play and make a movie next time. And so I sat down and I whipped out Cold Victory as a three-act movie. And the first draft was like 50,000 words. I mean, for me, that’s a short story. And my wife is always my first reader. I handed it to her. I said, there, goddamn those people back East. She read it and she looks at me, she says, Karl, just get over yourself and write a novel.
So we went from 50,000 to 120,000. I more than doubled the size, actually finally, you know, getting over my temper tantrum and saying, it’s a good story, and it has a lot of meaning, ’cause the Ukrainian war was really heating up by that time. And I was very incensed about the way we handled Crimea, did nothing, and did nothing in Chechnya, and did nothing in Georgia. And we reap what we’ve sown. And so I thought this is a very good, that was motivating me. When I said, goddamn it, I’m going to make a movie, I thought it’s just important. And I think it is important.
I think that we allowed Finland to go under because we were just afraid to help them and didn’t want to get bothered, didn’t want to get involved.
Ross Kenyon: Right.
Karl Marlantes: You know, isolationism is still with us. I guess worse than that now, ’cause it’s couched in terms of, you know, who cares about those people, when in fact the war is being fought between totalitarians and people who believe in the rule of law. And it’s not like we’re helping Ukraine, they’re helping us. They’re fighting a war, they’re dying. And so we don’t want to help them. Wait a sec, you know what the war is, is we’ve been engaged in it for several decades now, and they’re the front line, and it’s not like we’re helping them, it’s like they’re helping us. We need to really actually sort of come to believe we’re on their side. We haven’t yet as a political entity.
What’s the goal? As long as it takes. That’s not a strategic goal, sorry. The goal is push them out of Ukraine, or crush the Russians. I don’t know, those are goals. As long as it takes is, I don’t know what that is. It’s a political statement.
Ross Kenyon: I was wondering how this relates to the Vietnam experience. And also Afghanistan and Iraq have both been such expensive in blood and treasure disasters too. They also were badly defined. The goals were not really achievable, sort of like achieve a permanent steady state of some sort of stable democracy that had never really existed in these places. They’re weird goals. I guess Ukraine has a just keep the Russians out. That’s a much more straightforward kind of goal. And, well, maybe, I don’t know. Do you think it actually is?
Karl Marlantes: Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think that Ukraine must kick the Russians out of Crimea, and they must kick them out of the land bridge, quote unquote, on the eastern borders. Otherwise they’re never going to be a secure nation. Odessa will be trapped by a Russian fleet in Crimea, and so their entire export economy is under the knife of the Russians. And the supply route to Crimea, not only that Kerch bridge, but the land route, has to be controlled by Ukraine. And so their only nation-surviving goal is to kick the Russians out. They have to kick them out.
And I know that their tempers are up. And, you know, I think that the United States has some right to say, well, you know, try and restrain yourself and not, you know, start killing Russians in supermarkets, even though they’re killing you in supermarkets. Keep your eye on the ball. But we have not, we have not strongly indicated that that’s what we want. I hear too many people, even politicians. I mean, Jayapal here in Seattle: well, you know, we need to talk to Mr. Putin, and, you know, maybe they should come to some kind of agreement. You know what, give him a third of Ukraine.
And as Zelensky says, you’re not giving them land, you’re giving them people. People are dying and people are going to have to live under this stupid Putin regime. You know, if we’re talking about land here, stop that. You know, and she really angered me when she did that. I think she got over it. But the whole government’s frightened of, you know, nuclear response. Fair enough. I mean, absolutely they have to take that into consideration, but I don’t think that now is the time to let Ukraine go down. And we’re letting them go down. They’re out of ammo. They’re out of fucking ammo. That is really, really bad. And we’re the major reason for it. And you know, the feckless Congress is impeaching some cabinet member. They’re just chewing up legislative time.
And Vietnam and Afghanistan, Iraq, they had no military goals. Those were political issues. Those were civil wars. There’s no military solution to those things. Those mean political solutions. You could do everything you want. I mean, you know, Radio Free Afghanistan, or aiding educational systems, or any number of ways that you can fight those political wars without killing people. But the minute you commit some 18-year-old to losing his life over something, I don’t believe in escalation. I mean, oh, ten lives is worth it. No, no, 23 lives is worth it. Oh, well, maybe 24. Stupid. One life, is it?
So if you’re going to say I’m going to risk this kid’s life, then you give him everything he’s got with a clear-cut goal, or you don’t go in. And we haven’t had a clear-cut goal since World War Two. We had a goal in Korea that no one believed, which was to keep them out of, which was to stop them from being in South Korea. But you’ve got to remember that South Korea had only existed three years about that time, and it was run by a dictator. It was messy already. But World War Two, you know, it’s the good war, Studs Terkel. That’s because there was a clear-cut idea. No, we’re going to just defeat these people. We’re going to crush them. And I think that, you know, if you’re willing to kill people, then you’ve got to do it. You know, what’s that old expression? Gentle surgeons make stinking wounds.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, yeah.
Karl Marlantes: No, you can’t be gentle about war.
Ross Kenyon: That’s one of the tragedies of the Cold War that I’ve been processing for so long, where you ended up having to ally with Syngman Rhee, or the Duvaliers in Haiti, or the Dominican Republic with Trujillo. You have these sort of anti-communist but totalitarian dictators, that they’re not communist, but maybe on the margin they’re better, because communism’s pretty horrible, but it isn’t that much better either. And then it puts us in a position where it’s like, are we the good guys? And then we end up 30 years later with every piece of prestige drama that we watch is shades of grey. There’s no good guys. I’m like, do I want Walter White to win, or the other guy who’s slightly worse than him? Like, our culture is sort of corrupted. I don’t even know that we believe in good guys versus bad guys. I think the Cold War really messed us up in that way.
Karl Marlantes: Well, I think the Vietnam War in particular, which was part of the—
Ross Kenyon: Oh yeah.
Karl Marlantes: That was the first, that was when we finally started distrusting government, really. You know, we moved into cynicism, which was sort of, what’s that great word, enantiodromia or something, when you actually switch your whole view and one thing turns into the opposite. And that’s what we were doing there. But I think what the United States fails to do is to recognize the values that were put down in our founding documents. Who cares if Nicaragua goes communist for 15 years, all right? I mean, we don’t need to support a dictator to stop that. We should be able to support the forces that believe in the same founding documents we do.
And like I said, there’s lots of ways. My favorite example is we didn’t like apartheid in South Africa. So among other things, we refused to play rugby with them, OK? We didn’t send the Marines. We isolated the apartheid forces. We socially made them look bad. We did all kinds of things that finally, you know, Mandela didn’t overthrow that all by himself sitting in a prison cell. There was a lot of pressure applied and without any violence on our part. So we misuse the violence because we don’t believe in the power of our theories, which is that individuals making free choices, Bill of Rights, you know, rule of law, no one is above the law. These things are incredibly powerful, and you could just support those without forcing it.
You can’t export that to somebody. You can’t put that down someone’s throat. You know, they have to learn it the hard way. It’s a theory of learning. That was Karl Popper. You cannot coerce, either positively or negatively, someone into changing their theory. If somebody thinks communism is good, it’s a theory. And even if the child thinks that if he touches the stove it won’t hurt him when it’s hot, it’s a theory. You can’t tell the kid, you can’t give him candy bars. He still will hold the theory until he touches the stove, and then suddenly he’s going to change his mind.
And I think it’s that way with these systems, these totalitarian systems. You just got to do everything you can without, you know, supporting the dictators that are so-called, you know, my enemy is your enemy sort of thing. You can play that game politically, but there’s no reason to support them. I mean, because you just got to say, well, if that country chooses to go down that path, they’re going to suffer. And we’ll still trade with them. We’ll still do things with them, and we’ll try our best to, you know, let them into our country if they want to leave. I mean, there’s all kinds of other ways of dealing with it. So the support of dictators is a result of not believing. It’s a result of failure to appreciate that we have a better system, and we just don’t believe it. And I wish we could do a better job of living that.
Ross Kenyon: A lot of climate people think that we’re heading into a period where there’s a possibility of greater collaboration in the world coming together. I think it’s more likely that as the stressors increase, the geopolitical rivalries will increase. I personally suspect that there will be war in the Arctic at some point in this century. And I think if we’re in a global hegemonic struggle, it’s going to be Russia, the US, China. I think it’s fairly obvious that the US is the best option among those to be the world leader, and we should probably root for ourselves in that way, but I’m not sure that we always have the stomach to get behind that in that way.
Maybe it goes back to our thinking on what it means to be a warrior and what it means to believe there. But I think there is a role of stepping out to be the protector and behaving in a way that is honorable, so that we can convince people that we are the best leaders of the world, more than the rivals. And that’s not because we’re the strongest, but because we actually have a moral authority that is credible.
Karl Marlantes: We’ve got the better idea.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, it sounds very similar to what you’re saying. Can we pull that off? I feel like it’s been so damaged at this point that I’m not even, I think the average person might look and say, is Trump better than Putin? Is China maybe even better than the US on many metrics? Why shouldn’t we want a world that is governed by the Chinese primarily? What do we do with that? I feel like we’ve lost our way.
Karl Marlantes: Yeah, I think so. I mean, you know, it is the amount of major mistakes that are being made in China, like the complete over-investment in the real estate sector, those—
Ross Kenyon: Ghost town pictures are bonkers. They’re insane.
Karl Marlantes: Yeah, the complete destruction of river valleys because the government decides to do something with no input from anybody else. I mean, that’s what you want? No, I mean, that’s not for the environment. And they’re all about the Communist Party. They’re not about the environment. You’ve got to have a system where individual people who say I don’t like the air I’m breathing, or I don’t like the fact that there’s plastics in my body right now, their self-interest will translate through a democratic process into policy. But if it’s a dictator, it’s him and his cronies. Self-interest is going to get translated and it ain’t going to be yours.
So I think that almost any form except the one we’ve got, which is messy and difficult, is the best, even for climate problems. I mean, everybody talks about, well, you know, there’s the, what’s that, right, the benevolent dictator. I don’t think we’ve ever had one. Cincinnatus is, I think, the only one. He—
Ross Kenyon: But he left. Isn’t that why he’s benevolent?
Karl Marlantes: Yeah, right. Yeah. So, no, I mean, that’s another myth that is just not true. But I think you’re right. And I despair. But we’re going to have to have more catastrophes before people start to, you know, get behind it. And we’re going to have to have catastrophes here and in the major population centers, India, China, European Union, and then things will start to happen. But there’s going to be some pain.
And, you know, I was talking to an ecologist and he says, well, he says, you know, humans may not survive it. The world will be fine, the Earth will survive it. And it’s always true. It’s always true. So, you know, I’m going like, I don’t know if that’s comforting or not. But rule of law, I mean, if there was rule of law, the Arctic wouldn’t turn into a football match up there. I mean, it’s about freedom of the seas and sovereignty of territory. That’s already been defined. People have already drawn the lines. Who owns what part of the Arctic? You know, it’s when people are going to say, no, I want more. That’s what it is. But rule of law is not what it’s all about. I mean, you know, either you defend it or you don’t. And I think that we’re failing to defend it. I really do think we’re failing.
I’m talking about this will to actually do something. In, I think it was, February 1942, the United States had one aircraft carrier, all right? By August of ’45, three and a half years later, we had, counting jeep carriers and escort carriers, 300.
Ross Kenyon: Maybe a little unfair to count the jeep carriers, but yeah.
Karl Marlantes: Yeah, yeah, the United States did that in three and a half years. You don’t think you can solve climate problems? If we had any willpower, we’ve got the technology now, all we have to do is apply it. But there’s all these forces of I want to make more money, or, you know, I don’t want to cause problems, or I don’t know what. It’s self-serving. I think that you can’t get people behind this because their ox isn’t being gored. My cynicism comes out. I mean, the protests against the Vietnam War didn’t heat up until they took away the 2-S deferment.
Ross Kenyon: The students, right?
Karl Marlantes: Yeah, certainly. It’s like, oh wow, what are we doing over there? You mean, you know, send me? Oh no, you know. I mean, there was a lot of moral people that were trying to do it because it was just a stupid idea. But basically what motivated the anti-war movement was getting drafted.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that’s self-interest.
Karl Marlantes: Yeah, well, that’s what all these guys, all these theorists said, Locke, and just, like, self-interest is what has to be harnessed. The hidden hand, you know, what’s his name, Smith. And the hidden hand is nothing but self-interest that guides the economy into useful, productive paths. You can lay your money on self-interest, you know. So why don’t we organize it that way?
Ross Kenyon: I don’t know if this will fit perfectly as it is, but I did want to ask you one other thing, because you had mentioned that you don’t, I don’t want to put words in your mouth about something so sensitive as this, but you were saying that you don’t regret, or you’ve integrated your choices in your Vietnam time. Even with the Sartre reference about total existential freedom here, you’re comfortable with the choices that you’ve made during that time.
Karl Marlantes: My son once asked me and said, have you ever regretted any choices you made? I said to him, I don’t regret the choices, I regret the outcomes. So, you know, at the time I made my choices, I struggled, I tried to do the right thing. And there were times in the war, in combat, that I just reverted back to a more primitive self, which I regret. But to wallow around in that, I mean, what good is that going to do? And I think that I just accept, yeah, I did some horrible things. I’m no saint. Oh, really, Karl, you’re no saint? Well, gosh, welcome to humanity.
I mean, in a way, I think that people who hold themselves to some ideal standard and then beat themselves up ’cause they don’t make it, there’s nothing wrong with the standard, but falling short of it is just to be human. And again, going back to Jung, the goal is integration of the whole self, not some ideal that’s impossible. So, yeah, I’d like to be Gawain, you know, always do the right thing. But unfortunately, the reason he’s in literature is because it shows that he’s a bit of a [unclear]. He’s not really a person. He’s just an ideal. Persons are dark. They have shadows, you know, full on. The rest of them are caricatures. And so I don’t want to be a caricature. I mean, I don’t want to come back and say, oh, I’m a warrior. You know, people like that just bother me. It’s like, I know what a warrior is. I’ve seen warriors, you know.
Ross Kenyon: There’s a story in What It Is Like to Go to War where you talk about spiritual, I don’t know if it has a paranormal element or more of a Jungian sign and symbol element, of confronting the spirits of people you served with and the people that you fought. Do you literally feel like you experienced something ghost-like, spirit-like in that moment, or is that something that’s more symbolic?
Karl Marlantes: No, I had some very real experiences of something beyond us. I mean, I described, I had an out-of-body experience that got us out of a terrible jam. And I didn’t expect it. And, you know, people will say, well, you were just, you know, in a schizophrenic state, you were just in altered reality, nothing really happened. But I believe I left my body and went and looked down on what was going on. I can’t think of any explanation for seeing all those bunkers and seeing where the fire was coming from, and then figuring out how to get through it and out of it, and coming back down.
And people have described out-of-body experiences and, you know, a lot of sort of quote, scientists will say, oh, that’s ridiculous. But that’s not being scientific. I mean, someone who’s an honest person says, I had this experience. You’ve got to take that into consideration. Well, I wonder what that’s about, at least, you know.
And then the idea of the feeling of the spirituality. I mean, again, it’s in the book, in What It Is Like. It’s just all the things that people do to prepare themselves for mystical experiences, you experience in combat: love of other above yourself, being in the moment all the time. I articulate all those things. And that’s what people, they’ll go to monasteries for just all that same. And so to say that it’s not a spiritual experience I think is wrong. To say that the spirit you’re experiencing may be wonderful joy and love, or it may be hell, but those are both sides of the spiritual component.
I mean, the Buddhists in Tibet have horrible monsters guarding their temples. Well, that’s part of what they consider the sides of God that are also real to them. So I think again, you know, you can’t solve this problem if God’s all-powerful and good, you know, and why do their children suffer. I mean, you have to just finally come about that the spirit is not some ideal. It’s something much more real. And sometimes you experience the good side of it and sometimes you experience the tough side of it. And I learned that in combat. So, you know, I tend to be somewhat empathetic toward people that experience these things. And what has to happen is talking about it later with someone who’s, you know, older or wiser than you are. And I’m getting to the point where there’s not too many.
Ross Kenyon: People. I think it’s you at this point, Karl.
Karl Marlantes: Yeah, I know. It’s like, as my daughter told me, I said I don’t like that, I don’t feel qualified. But even that, I mean, those older, wiser people that we always adored or idolized, they actually weren’t. They were also like you and me. They didn’t have it all together, but they were better off than an 18-year-old also. Anyway. So then when you talk about the spirit, that’s what I mean about the spiritual. It’s the actual feeling of being in some other reality, being unified with some greater thing than yourself. But that greater thing than ourself is not all good, I don’t think.
I mean, clearly it’s beyond the world of opposites. That’s what everybody keeps talking about. And that’s what the great mystics talk about. There’s no male, there’s no female, there’s no good, there’s no bad, there’s no death, there’s no life. Those are all the world of opposites that we live in. That’s what we’re born into. All the mystics will say, well, that’s Maya, that’s illusion. Then I kind of go out and I don’t experience it the way they do, but I can kind of buy their position and go like that. That makes a certain amount of sense.
Ross Kenyon: As we head towards the conclusion, is there anything that I didn’t ask you about that you wanted to talk about? I bet you’ve been thinking about this for a while.
Karl Marlantes: Well, yeah, most of my life. No, I can’t think of anything except that I wish people would pay more attention, not be so unconscious about, you know, I like this analogy that I’ve come up with, and I think that it’s worth telling people, which is that there’s a rifle, and the rifle gets made in a factory that was financed by bankers. And it’s designed by scientists who were taught by second grade school teachers when they were learning their arithmetic, and the farmer grew the crops that fed the teachers. And you can see this whole chain of interconnected events. And at the end of this long chain of interconnected events that form the rifle, some 18-year-old pulls the trigger, and then everybody says he did the killing.
I think that’s something that has to be overcome. When we’re at war, we’re at war. We pay our taxes, we buy gas. Everybody’s got shit on their shoes, and we don’t want to say that it was all he did, the killing, and then the poor veteran comes back, he’ll have to deal with it. No, no, we were, we were involved. I’m sorry, we’re involved. If you get in the car and turn the key on and burn some gas that was supplied by Russian oil, I’m sorry, you’re contributing to the economy of Russia. Now, we’re in positions where we can’t do much about it, but at least you can understand it. And I think it would help a lot to just be cognizant that we’re all involved. We’re all responsible. Not just that 18-year-old. Don’t lay it on him. He had his part. He wasn’t the one that did the killing. We did the killing. So I think that’s something I think is important for all people to try and understand.
Ross Kenyon: I think that’s very true. It’s just one of the reasons why I think Christianity has a lot to teach too. People get really upset about sin and original sin, but the way that you just described our interactions and our connectedness is another way of talking about sin and how it’s inescapable in our lives. And the job is to acknowledge and to ask for forgiveness. It doesn’t necessarily mean you can avoid it. I think that maybe saints avoid it, maybe Jesus avoided it, but for basically everyone else, you’re in it. You are embedded in sin. And so accepting that and asking for help, I think, independent of the religious content, just the poetic content of that, I think should help people understand what it means to be human.
Karl Marlantes: Yeah, no, I’m with you 100%. I don’t believe that the desert fathers were whole human beings. I think they were kind of screwed up, you know?
Ross Kenyon: They’re a little odd in their own way. A little different, yeah.
Karl Marlantes: But yeah, I mean, I think that again, like I said, you can’t repress these natural reactions that we have, the result of millions of years of evolution. You just have to accept that you’re part of it. Somebody, I don’t remember who, like, I’m not a scholar, so I can’t remember that quote, but somebody said that the origin of all religions was because of our feeling of guilt over killing plants and animals for us to live. That’s the human condition. We have to kill things in order for us to keep living. I don’t care if you’re a vegetarian or what, you’re killing things to keep living. That’s a fundamental issue of being human, killing other living things to stay alive yourself. How do you deal with that? This person that came up with that idea was saying we deal with it by inventing religions.
But anyway, it’s a point that I think goes back to this being conscious of things. You know, I’m a vegetarian, I don’t kill chickens. Well, you kill, you know, corn, it’s all living. Why is a chicken better than corn? You know it isn’t. I mean, that’s a shadow right there. You’re trying to take yourself out of the cycles of life and death and saying I don’t participate in death, but you do, and now you’re just, you’re lying to yourself. Whereas I have friends that go, oh, I’m not interested in politics, I don’t watch the news, as if that’s some kind of virtue. It’s like, yeah, goddamn you, you should. You know, I’m angry about you not watching the news.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Karl, thanks for being here. Thanks for taking a risk. This is a weird invitation to say yes to. I’m very grateful that you did.
Karl Marlantes: What do I got to talk about? Climate change? Yeah, great. I had a good time.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I did too. And if you’re listening, all of Karl’s books are worth reading. I’ll have links to them in the show notes. Please go read them. Also watch The Vietnam War, the Ken Burns and Lynn Novick series. Well worth your time. And thanks so much for listening.
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