More about Warriors

There we were three months ago, talking about archetypes, and I was waxing along on the subject of the Warrior, specifically in the person of John McCain. I expanded on how he's a true Warrior, if one of a not-too-advanced soul age (bear with me here), and while I wouldn't trust him with my country, I absolutely trust him to be charming, and arrogant, usually honorable, and not terribly interested in the fine points of, well, anything. Minutiae are fodder for staff: for his exec, his adjutant, his Aide de Camp, his driver, his orderly, and so forth; they're the detail men, and God help the poor bastard who misses one.

That's the stuff I learned from my daddy, Ur-Warrior. I learned a lot more from him, of course, but I did absorb, osmotically, How Things Work in the Officer's World, in a time of war, in a time of peril, when those guys really shine. Or shone, anyway, in the previous life of this planet. I'm not so sure how things work now, but I surely know that the mind-set of the spiritually young warrior of advanced officer's rank remains the same.

Then there was my Uncle Sam Griffith ("uncle" and "aunt" were the affectionate titles we used with the closest friends of our parents), another Marine general, and a gold-standard Warrior, but with a strong dollop of Scholar in his DNA. He retired from the Corps as a Brigadier, entered Oxford University in pursuit of an advanced degree, studied Chinese, and taught it there for several years. He also wrote a number of books on military history. Sam Griffith was extraordinarily gifted intellectually, just as smart and as arrogant and tough as my father was, but approached life from the opposite position -- as Scholar, as an observer and note-taker, whereas my father plunged right into a situation, brandishing his sword and operating from the (very reliable) information he was receiving from his instincts. Historians, my father felt, do or don't get things right, but whatever they have to say about a battle, it is always afterwards, and they get to say how it was because they're the ones writing it down. The guys who were mixing it up DURING the event, meanwhile, are either dead or wounded or very drunk for a very long time trying to recover from it. Daddy never accused Sam of avoiding a fight (God knows he never did) but I think he envied Sam's ability to view whatever was going on from a certain distance, and so he belittled it when he was drunk enough.

Obviously, Daddy and Uncle Sammy did not agree on much (though they did agree that the truly manly argument had three stages: 1) Flat statement; 2) Categorical denial; 3) Personal abuse), and the two of them had some epic battles of their own, usually in the Griffiths' living room or in ours, and always after a great deal of scotch had been consumed. Neither knew what the other was talking about, neither listened very carefully or with much interest to the other, but each joined the fray with great vigor and enthusiasm, knowing from many years' experience that he was engaging a worthy opponent. Daddy seldom gave in, and these battles usually ended with Uncle Sam making a dramatic exit from the scene, his last words being something on the order of "I will not stoop to discourse with a Philistine [peasant/ignoramus/etc.]".

Those old lions wrestled together for 40 years, and I have no doubt that they loved each other dearly, lacking only the psychological vocabulary to express it. Towards the end, when my father lay dying in Bethesda Naval Hospital, Sam Griffith went to visit him only once. Daddy saw him come in the room, said, "Oh, hell, Sam," nothing more, and General Griffith burst into tears, right in front of the orderlies and corpsmen, all of whom were equally distressed, as much by the emotional collapse of the other, visiting, alpha male as by the approaching demise of The General.

I understand now, better than I did then, how the Marine Generals Cresswell and Griffith were two sides of the same coin: between them, they represented the absolute best of the essential Warrior, and that without the other, neither was complete, nor could he be all that we needed him to be. Impulse and fearlessness in one, careful reason and thoughtful execution in the other, and great humor, deep sorrow in both, they were my first heroes in the art of living life beyond and after the idiocy of actual war.

I saw today a flash of that watching Senator Jim Webb (D-VA) on television this morning. He was there ostensibly to flog his new book (Sam Griffith!), but he faced instead a relentless probing on his interest in becoming the nominee for vice president on the Democratic ticket with Barack Obama. Webb was deft in deflecting the speculation, while not ruling out the possibility either. He mentioned several times Obama's composure in the face of the attacks he absorbed during the primary season, and how he, Webb, admired that composure, all the time barely changing the expression on his own Irish mug. I may be one of the few people who know on a visceral level the great emotional sea that heaves in the core of Jim Webb -- about the Iraq war, about the unnecessary spilling of so much blood, about the valor of his own son in that mess -- and I know just as well the great good humor that has saved Webb's life. That sense of humor has saved mine many times over, it kept my father and scores of his peers from doing serious damage to the world they came home to, and Webb's example of how to make a useful, steady life under fire is a pretty good one.

Barack Obama could use those skills; I hope he knows that.