You will do harm

There is a combat veteran in my Freud class. He fascinates me. I am deeply affected by damaged men; I suppose this is a fair point to acknowledge. Usually I am drawn to men damaged by love or depression, the high drama of the everyday. I suppose if we incorporate an Oedipal element, we may assume that the figure of my father hovers about here somewhere; perhaps I should not be surprised that my fellow student draws my attention in such a complex way. My father never saw combat, but his time in the Marines was the great psyche-shattering episode in his life. The shame and anger, the fear and hurt of being trained to kill and being profoundly ill-suited to the task has not, I think, ever left him.

The man with whom I am fascinated describes Afghanistan and Iraq, and life in war itself, as simultaneously mundane and in-credible. This is the puzzle implicit in his descriptions and accounts, a trying-to-make-sense to every verbal gesture he makes. These are the things I did. These are the things I had to do and the things I had to see. This is what every day was like. And yet now I am sitting here with you — how can this be?

Cognitive dissonance — the discomfort of holding two contradictory ideas simultaneously. My father could not, would not be turned into a killer. He escaped in drugs and ran away in physical space, until “the service” finally let him go. And yet he was ashamed of his escape, ashamed if its terms, felt somehow a failure in his great relief. The combat veteran, in contrast, went where he was told to go, and did what he was told to do. He killed, under the premise (promise?) that this action was righteous, was called for. In war, the story goes, killers are not murderers. I do not know, but I suspect that he cannot quite believe that the state of exception applies to what he has done. He is waiting for punishment, wonders if the punishment is constituted by the torment of memories and uncertainty.

This is one of the untenable choices we offer men — be a killer, or be a coward. Be a brute, or be a failure.
All men are told: “You will do harm.
One way, or the other.
Either you will disappoint us with your lack of resolve,
Or you will disappoint us with your brutality.
There is no exit.”