Read the full text free in "lightbox" format

Once you’re in the lightbox, open the window wide till you see PREVIOUS | NEXT in the lower left hand corner; then just “turn the pages.” Clicking on a page also turns it. There’s a CLOSE button in the lower right when you want to quit.

The Warrior Ethos is also available on amazon.com as a paperback and a Kindle e-book. We’ll have an audio version soon.

Now: next week.

The response has been so enthusiastic to these Monday posts that I didn’t want to shut that day down. So next week we’ll inaugurate a different-but-related series.

We’re calling it War Stories until we come up with a better name. What it’ll be is a “greatest hits” sampling from the hundreds of obscure (and not so obscure) books that I’ve been pouring into my brain for the past thirty or more years.

I’ll be your guide. We’ll go deep into the vault and bring back stuff that’s rich in wisdom, lore and B-vitamins.

Just how deep and obscure will that get?

We’ll start next week with the love story of Panthea and Abrocomas from Xenophon’s The Education of Cyrus. Is that arcane enough? Bring a handkerchief, trust me. If you’re not in tears by the end, you have no heart.

I plan to feature stuff from Hemingway to Homer, from von Manstein to Moshe Dayan. Posts will come from movies and plays, myths and legends, from journalism and personal correspondence and combat reports. Not all of it will be “war stuff.” But it will all deal with issues of honor and virtue and courage in the face of adversity. A lot of it will be real literature. All of it will be inspiring.

I also want to invite everyone to chip in with their own stories. Write me at steve@stevenpressfield.com. Suggest passages–1000 words or less–from favorite books. Or send in something you’ve written yourself. Tell us about a patrol in Kunar province, or a letter your Dad sent to you from Pleiku in 1969. If it’s great, we’ll run it.

Thanks to all who have followed The Warrior Ethos from the start. I hope this new series will maintain the momentum and even take it a little further.

I know just how he feels.

I’m the opposite. I love this stuff.  Unearthing Frontinus’ The Strategemata deep in the library stacks, I was as psyched as Quentin Tarantino when he first got his hands on the master tapes for Didn’t I Blow Your Mind This Time by the Delfonics.

I can’t get enough of these obscure old texts. They’re like salted peanuts to me. Tracking them down, I’m like Harry Potter digging through the Wizard Files. This stuff is occult gold. It’s Alchemy 101. What I love most is the flashes you get across thousands of years when you recognize people just like us.

There’s a totally obscure manual from the fourth century B.C. called How to Survive Under Siege by Aineias the Tactician. That’s what the book is about: literally how to survive in a fortified city when you’re being besieged. One of the tricks the Tactician suggests, to fool the enemy into thinking you have more warriors than you actually have, is to dress the city’s wives and mothers in men’s armor and helmets and have them parade around the battlements, carrying spears alongside the men. Aineias appends one critical proviso however:

Instruct these women not to hurl any stones down from the parapets, as the besiegers, when they discern the feminine throwing motion, will see through the ruse and reckon that your defenders are not men.

Herewith the bibliography for The Warrior Ethos.  Dip in if you dare.

Arrian, The Campaigns of Alexander

The Bhagavad Gita , numerous translations

Curtius, The History of Alexander

Demosthenes, Philippics

Frontinus, The Strategemata

Herodotus, The Histories

Homer, The Iliad

Moore, Robert and Douglas Gillette, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine

Plutarch, Plutarch’s Moralia (including Sayings of the Spartans and Sayings of the Spartan Women)

Plutarch, Life of Lycurgus

Plutarch, Life of Lycurgus

Plutarch, Life of Lycurgus

Polyaenus, Stratagemata

Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War

Vegetius, De Re Militari

Xenophon, Constitution of the Spartans

Xenophon, The Education of Cyrus

Xenophon, Anabasis [“The March Upcountry”]

This post wraps up the text part of The Warrior Ethos series. Thanks to everyone who has followed from the beginning ten weeks ago. Next week we’ll put up a “lightbox” eBook with the full text readable for free. You can read The Warrior Ethos on-site now by clicking on the link at the end of this post. Paperbacks and a Kindle version can be ordered from amazon.com. To read from Chapter One in sequence, click here.]

Jung was a student of myths and legend and of the unconscious. He discovered and named the Collective Unconscious, meaning that part of the psyche that is common to all cultures in all eras and at all times.

The Warrior Archetype takes many forms in many different cultures

The Collective Unconscious, Jung said, contains the stored wisdom of the human race, accumulated over thousands of generations.

The Collective Unconscious is the software we’re born with. It’s our package of instincts and pre-verbal knowledge. Within this package, Jung discovered what he called the archetypes.

Archetypes are the larger-than-life, mythic-scale personifications of the stages that we pass through as we mature. The youth, the lover, the wanderer, the joker, the king or queen, the wise man, the mystic. Legendary tales like that of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table are populated by archetypes. Movies are full of archetypes. Even a deck of cards has archetypes: king, queen, joker, jack.

Archetypes serve the purpose of guiding us as we grow. A new archetype kicks in at each stage. It makes the new phase “feel right” and “seem natural.”

One of the primary archetypes is the Warrior. The warrior archetype exists across all eras and nations and is virtually identical in every culture.

Siegfried. Another incarnation of the Warrior Archetype

In their book King, Warrior, Magician, Lover, authors Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette tell us that the human individual matures from archetype to archetype. A boy, for instance, evolves sequentially through the youth, the wanderer, the lover, the warrior, through husband and father to teacher, king, sage and mystic.

The warrior archetype clicks in like a biological clock sometime in the early to mid-teens. We join a gang, we try out for the football team, we hang with our homies, we drive fast, take crazy chances, we seek adventure and hazard. That’ll change later. When the husband/father archetype kicks in, we’ll trade in our 500-horsepower Mustang and buy a Prius. But not yet.

For now, the warrior archetype has seized us. Something inside us makes us want to jump out of airplanes and blow stuff up. Something makes us seek out mentors—tough old sergeants to put us through hell, to push us past our limits, to find out what we’re capable of. And we seek out comrades in arms. Brothers who will get our backs and we’ll get theirs, lifelong friends who are just as crazy as we are.

Chapter 29   The Naked Wise Men

Moore and Gillette say something further. They state that the experiences and wisdom we accumulate under one archetype become the foundation for all the succeeding archetypes.

In other words, the lessons we learn are not wasted. The virtues we acquire during our time in the warrior archetype we can use when we mature into the husband and father, the mentor, the king. We get to keep them—and profit from them—our whole lives.

Alexander in India encountered some gymnosophists (literally “naked wise men”) yogis, sitting in meditation in the sun on the banks of the Indus. Alexander’s party was trying to get through the busy street, but the yogis had their spot and they wouldn’t move. One of Alexander’s zealous young lieutenants took it upon himself to chase the holy men out of the king’s path. When one of the wise men resisted, the officer started verbally abusing him. Just then, Alexander came up. The lieutenant pointed to Alexander and said to the yogi, “This man has conquered the world! What have you accomplished?” The yogi looked up calmly and replied, “I have conquered the need to conquer the world.”

At this, Alexander laughed with approval. He admired the naked wise men. “Could I be any man in the world other than myself,” he said, “I would be this man here.”

What Alexander was acknowledging was that the yogi was a warrior too. An inner warrior. Alexander looked at him and thought, “This man was a fighter when he was my age. He has taken the lessons he learned as a warrior dueling external enemies and is turning them to use now as he fights internal foes to achieve mastery over himself.”

Chapter 30   The Hardest Thing in the World

The hardest thing in the world is to be ourselves.

Who are we? Our family tells us, society tells us, laws and customs tell us. But what do we say? How do we get to that place of self-knowledge and conviction where we are able to state without doubt, fear or anger, “This is who I am, this is what I believe, this is how I intend to live my life”?

How do we find our true calling, our soul companions, our destiny?

In this task, our mightiest ally is the Warrior Ethos.

Directed inward, the Warrior Ethos grounds us, fortifies us and focuses our resolve.

As soldiers, we have been taught discipline. Now we teach ourselves self-discipline.

As fighting men and women, we have been motivated, commanded and validated by others. Now we school ourselves in self-motivation, self-command, self-validation.

The Warrior Archetype is not the be-all and end-all of life. It is only one identity, one stage on the path to maturity. But it is the greatest stage—and the most powerful. It is the foundation upon which all succeeding stages are laid.

Let us be, then, warriors of the heart, and enlist in our inner cause the virtues we have acquired through blood and sweat in the sphere of conflict—courage, patience, selflessness, loyalty, fidelity, self-command, respect for elders, love of our comrades (and of the enemy), perseverance, cheerfulness in adversity and a sense of humor, however terse or dark.

[This concludes the text of The Warrior Ethos. We’ll wrap it up next Monday with the Bibliography and a summing up. To read from Chapter One in sequence, click here.]

The Bhagavad-Gita is the great warrior epic of India. For thousands of years, Indian caste structure has been dominated by two elite social orders—the Brahmins (poets and holy men) and the Kshatriyas (warriors and nobles).

The war chariot of Arjuna and Krishna

The Bhagavad-Gita is the story of the great warrior Arjuna, who receives spiritual instruction from his charioteer, who happens to be Krishna—i.e., God in human form.

Krishna instructs Arjuna to slay his enemies without mercy. The warrior-god points across the battlefield to knights and archers and spearmen whom Arjuna knows personally and feels deep affection for—and commands him to kill them all. But here’s the interesting part:

The names of these enemy warriors, in Sanskrit, can be read two ways. They can be simply names. Or they can represent inner crimes or personal vices, such as greed, jealousy, selfishness, the capacity to play our friends false or to act without compassion toward those who love us.

In other words, our warrior Arjuna is being instructed to slay the enemies inside himself.

Human history, anthropologists say, can be divided into three stages—savagery, barbarism, and civilization. Warrior codes arose during the period known as High Barbarism. Many noble cultures fall under this category, from Native American tribes to Cyrus’s Persians to the Greeks and Trojans made immortal in Homer’s Iliad. The Warrior Ethos’s origins are primitive. Its genesis lies in the eye-for-an-eye ethic of humanity’s most ancient and primordial epochs.

The Bhagavad-Gita changes this. It takes the Warrior Ethos and elevates it to a loftier and nobler plane—the plane of the individual’s inner life, to his struggle to align himself with his own higher nature.

Chapter 26   The Lord of Discipline

In the Gita, the warrior Arjuna is commanded to slay the “foes” that constitute his own baser being. That is, to eradicate those vices and inner demons that would sabotage his path to becoming his best and highest self.

How is Arjuna instructed to do this? By the practice of self-discipline. In other words, by the interior exercise of his exterior Warrior Ethos.

Arjuna’s divine instructor (one of whose titles in Sanskrit is “Lord of Discipline”) charges his disciple to:

Fix your mind upon its object.

Hold to this, unswerving,

Disowning fear and hope,

Advance only upon this goal.

Here is the Warrior Ethos directed inward, employing the same virtues used to overcome external enemies—courage, patience, will, selflessness, the capacity to endure adversity—but enlisting these qualities now in the cause of the inner struggle for integrity, maturity and the honorable life.

Chapter 27   A Rite of Passage

Why do young men and women in a free society enlist in the military? The act seems to defy common sense. Why volunteer for low pay, lame haircuts and the chance to be killed—particularly in a society that rewards such behavior with little of more substance than a “Thank you for your service” or a yellow ribbon on a bumper sticker? Why do it? Why sign up?

One answer may be that the young man or woman is seeking a rite of passage.

When we enlist in the Army or the Marine Corps, we’re looking for a passage to manhood or womanhood. We have examined our lives in the civilian world and concluded, perhaps, that something’s missing. Do we lack self-discipline? Self-confidence? Do we feel stuck? Are we heading in the wrong direction?

We want action. We seek to test ourselves. We want friends—real friends, who will put themselves on the line for us—and we want to do the same for them. We’re seeking some force that will hurl us out of our going-nowhere lives and into the real world, into genuine hazard and risk.

We want to be part of something greater than ourselves, something we can be proud of. And we want to come out of the process as different (and better) people than we were when we went in. We want to be men, not boys. We want to be women, not girls.

We want a rite of passage. We want to grow up.

One way to do that is to go to war. Young men have been undergoing that ordeal of initiation for ten thousand years. This passage is into and through what the great psychologist Carl Jung called “the Warrior Archetype.”

[Continued next Monday. To read from Chapter One in sequence, click here.]

But what about us? What about the soldier or Marine who steps off the plane from overseas and finds himself in the scariest place he’s seen in years:

Home.

Jon Voight and Jane Fonda in the Vietnam-era "Coming Home"

Has everything he knows suddenly become useless? What skill set can he employ in the civilian world? The returning warrior faces a dilemma not unlike that of the convict released from prison. Has he been away so long that he can never come back? Is the world he knows so alien to the “real world” that he can never fit in again?

Who is he, if he’s not a warrior?

The answer may not be as far away as he supposes.

The returning warrior may not realize it, but he has acquired an MBA in enduring adversity and a Ph.D. in resourcefulness, tenacity and the capacity for hard work.

He may find that the warrior skills he has acquired are exactly what he and his family need. And more: that these skills possess the capacity to lift him and sustain him through the next stage of his life and through every succeeding stage. The war remains the same. Only the field has changed.

The returning warrior possesses the Warrior Ethos, and this is a mighty ally in all spheres of endeavor.

Chapter 24   “Purity of the Weapon”

The civilian sometimes misconstrues the warrior code; he takes it to be one of simple brutality. Overpower the enemy, show no mercy, win at all costs.

But the Warrior Ethos commands that brute aggression be tempered by self-restraint and guided by moral principle.

The principle of "purity of the weapon" is taught to all recruits of the Israeli Defense Forces

Soldiers of the Israeli Defense Forces (who often must fight against enemies who target civilians, who strike from or stockpile weapons within houses of worship and who employ their own women and children as human shields) are taught to act according to a principle called Tohar HaNeshek: “purity of the weapon.” This derives from two verses in the Old Testament. What it means is that the individual soldier must reckon, himself, what is the moral use of his weapon and what is the immoral use.

When an action is unjust, the warrior must not take it.

Alexander, in his campaigns, always looked beyond the immediate clash to the prospect of making today’s foe into tomorrow’s ally. After conquering an enemy in the field, his first act was to honor the courage and sacrifice of his antagonists—and to offer the vanquished warriors a place of honor within his own corps. By the time Alexander reached India, his army had more fighters from the ranks of his former enemies than from those of his own Greeks and Macedonians.

Cyrus of Persia believed that the spoils of his victories were meant for one purpose—so that he could surpass his enemies in generosity.

I contend against my foes in this arena only: the capacity to be of greater service to them than they are to me.

Alexander operated by the same principle.

Let us conduct ourselves so that all men wish to be our friends and all fear to be our enemies.

The capacity for empathy and self-restraint will serve us powerfully, not only in our external wars but in the conflicts within our own hearts.

[Continued next Monday. To read from Chapter One in sequence, click here.]

INNER WARS

Chapter 21   Casualties of War

All of us know brothers and sisters who have fought with incredible courage on the battlefield, only to fall apart when they came home.

Jeremy Renner as "Sgt. James" in The Hurt Locker. He had a hard time coming home.

Why? Is it easier to be a soldier than to be a civilian?

For the warrior, all choices have consequences. His decisions have meaning; every act he takes is significant. What he says and does can save (or cost) his own life or the lives of his brothers. The nineteen-year-old squad leader and the twenty-three-year-old lieutenant often exercise more power (and in spheres of greater and more instant consequence) than their fathers, who are fifty and have been working honorably and diligently their entire lives.

Is adrenaline addictive? Is the fight? Are these tours of combat, hellish as they may feel in the moment, the best years of our lives?

Chapter 22   The Civilian World

Spartans and Romans and Macedonians, Persians and Mongols, Apache and Sioux, Masai and Samurai and Pashtun all share one advantage over us Americans:

They were (and are) warrior cultures embedded within warrior societies.

This is not the case in the United States.

The American military is a warrior culture embedded within a civilian society.

This state is, in the American view, highly desirable. A too-strong military, unfettered by civilian restraint, might be inclined to adventurism or worse. No citizen disputes this or wishes to set things up any other way. The joint chiefs answer to Congress and to the president—and ultimately to the American people. This is the state that the Constitution intended and that the Founding Fathers, who were rightly wary of unchecked concentrations of power, had in mind.

But it is an interesting state—and one that produces curious effects.

First, the values of the warrior culture are not necessarily shared by the society at large. In fact, many of their values are opposites.

Civilian society prizes individual freedom. Each man and woman is at liberty to choose his or her own path, rise or fall, do whatever he or she wants so long as it doesn’t impinge on the liberty of others. The warrior culture, on the other hand, values cohesion and obedience. The soldier or sailor is not free to do whatever he wants. He serves; he is bound to perform his duty.

Civilian society rewards wealth and celebrity. Military culture prizes honor.

Aggression is valued in a warrior culture. In civilian life, you can go to jail for it.

"King Leonidas of Sparta" by DiAnne Cooper

A warrior culture trains for adversity. Luxury and ease are the goals advertised to the civilian world.

Sacrifice, particularly shared sacrifice, is considered an opportunity for honor in a warrior culture. A civilian politician doesn’t dare utter the word.

Selflessness is a virtue in a warrior culture. Civilian society gives lip service to this, while frequently acting as selfishly as it possibly can.

Is it healthy for a society to entrust its defense to 1 percent of its population, while the other 99 percent thanks its lucky stars that it doesn’t have to do the dirty work?

In ancient Sparta and in the other cultures cited, a warrior culture (the army) existed within a warrior society (the community itself). No conflict existed between the two. Each supported and reinforced the other. Remember the stories about the Spartan mothers? When the Three Hundred were chosen to march out and die at Thermopylae, there was weeping and wailing in the streets of Sparta—by the wives and mothers of the warriors who were not chosen. The wives of the Three Hundred walked about dry-eyed and proud.

A hundred and fifty years later, Demosthenes, the great Athenian orator, delivered a series of speeches in the assembly on this very subject—willing sacrifice by all. The orations were called Philippics because they warned Athens against the rise of Philip of Macedonia, Alexander’s father, whose ambition was clearly to bring all of Greece under his heel.

Men of Athens, will you send your sons to contest this monster, Philip? Or have you grown so fat and happy that you care not, and dispatch instead hired troops, who are not of our blood or kin? Will these mercenaries, who fight only for profit, possess the will to hold Philip back? Or will the day come when we awake to discover that we have ceded future liberty to current ease?

The greatness of American society, like its Athenian progenitor, is that it is a civilian society. Freedom and equality are the engines that produce wealth, power, culture and art and unleash the greatness of the human spirit.

What is the place of the Warrior Ethos within a greater civilian society? That question has been asked from the days of the Minutemen through the World War II “Greatest Generation” to Vietnam and, today, to the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The greatness of American society is that our citizens are still debating it—protected by those who have freely chosen to embrace the Warrior Ethos. And still debating it freely.

[Continued next Monday. To read from Chapter One in sequence, click here.]

The warrior sense of humor is terse, dry—and dark. Its purpose is to deflect fear and to reinforce unity and cohesion.

Bill Mauldin won a Pulitzer for this "Willie and Joe" cartoon

The Warrior Ethos dictates that the soldier make a joke of pain and laugh at adversity. Here is Leonidas on the final morning at Thermopylae:

“Now eat a good breakfast, men. For we’ll all be sharing dinner in hell.”

Spartans liked to keep things short. Once one of their generals captured a city. His dispatch home said, “City taken.” The magistrates fined him for being verbose. “Taken,” they said, would have sufficed.

The river of Athens is the Kephisos; the river in Sparta is the Eurotas. One time, an Athenian and a Spartan were trading insults.

“We have buried many Spartans,” said the Athenian, “beside the Kephisos.” “Yes,” replied the Spartan, “but we have buried no Athenians beside the Eurotas.”

Another time, a band of Spartans arrived at a crossroads to find a party of frightened travelers. “You are lucky,” the travelers told them. “A gang of bandits was here just a few minutes ago.” “We were not lucky,” said the Spartan leader. “They were.”

In Sparta, the law was to keep everything simple. One ordinance decreed that you could not finish a roof beam with any tool finer than a hatchet. So all the roof beams in Sparta were basically logs.

Once a Spartan was visiting Athens and his host was showing off his own mansion, complete with finely detailed, square roof beams. The Spartan asked the Athenian if trees grew square in Athens. “No, of course not,” said the Athenian, “but round, as trees grow everywhere.” “And if they grew square,” asked the Spartan, “would you make them round?”

Probably the most famous warrior quip of all is that of the Spartan Dienekes at Thermopylae. When the Spartans first occupied the pass, they had yet to see the army of the Persian invaders. They had heard that it was big, but they had no idea how big.

As the Spartans were preparing their defensive positions, a native of Trachis, the site of the pass, came racing into camp, out of breath and wide-eyed with terror. He had seen the Persian horde approaching. As the tiny contingent of defenders gathered around, the man declared that the Persian multitude was so numerous that, when their archers fired their volleys, the mass of arrows blocked out the sun.

“Good,” declared Dienekes. “Then we’ll have our battle in the shade.”

Several aspects of this quip—and Leonidas’s remark about “sharing dinner in hell”—are worth noting.

First, they’re not jokes. They’re dead-on, but they’re not delivered for laughs.

Second, they don’t solve the problem. Neither remark offers hope or promises a happy ending. They’re not inspirational. The deliverers of these quips don’t point to glory or triumph—or seek to allay their comrades’ anxiety by holding out the prospect of some rosy outcome. The remarks confront reality. They say, “Some heavy shit is coming down, brothers, and we’re going to go through it.”

Lastly, these remarks are inclusive. They’re about “us.” Whatever ordeal is coming, the company will undergo it together. Leonidas’s and Dienekes’s quips draw the individual out of his private terror and yoke him to the group.

Even the epitaph of the Three Hundred (by the poet Simonides) is lean and terse. It leaves out almost every fact about the battle—the antagonists, the stakes, the event, the date, the war, the reason for it all. It assumes that the reader knows it all already and brings to it his own emotion.

Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that here, obedient to their laws, we lie.

The ancients had no monopoly on economy of speech or deadpan humor. A couple of years ago near the Habbaniyah Canal in Ramadi, Iraq, a visitor from the States came upon a squad of Marines digging a trench in 125-degree heat. Raw sewage was sloshing into the ditch; the heat seemed to concentrate and intensify the stench. To make the chore even more miserable, regulations required that the Marines wear their helmets and heavy body armor. One private seemed to be struggling more severely than his buddies. “How you doing, Marine?” asked the visitor. The private looked up with a grin and kept on shoveling.

“Living the dream, sir,” he said.

[Continued next Monday. To read from Chapter One in sequence, click here.]

When Alexander was a boy, a party of traders came to Pella, the Macedonian capital, selling trained warhorses. Philip the king and all his officers went down to the plain to put these mounts through their paces.

Head of Bucephalus from the Seleucid era

One horse, called Bucephalus, was by far the fastest, strongest and bravest—but he was so wild that no one could ride him. Alexander watched as his father let the steed go without making an offer. “What a fine mount you lose, Father,” he said, “for want of spirit to ride him.” At this, the king and all his officers laughed. “And what will you pay for this horse, my son—if you can ride him?” “All of my prince’s inheritance.” So they let the boy try.

Now, Alexander had noticed something about the horse that no one else had—that the beast was spooked by its own shadow. So he took Bucephalus’s bridle and turned him to face into the sun. Then, little by little, speaking gently to him and stroking his neck, he succeeded in quieting the steed down; next, with a quick leap, he sprung onto the horse’s back. Philip and the officers watched in breathless trepidation as the prince took this fiery mount out onto the track and spurred him to the gallop. Would the horse throw Alexander, trample him or break his neck? Alexander coolly brought the animal under control and raced him full tilt around the circuit. When he returned to the grandstand, the officers cheered him wildly, while Philip came forward with tears in his eyes and took his son into his arms. “Look you out for a kingdom far greater than ours, my son. For Macedonia is plainly too small for you!”

Alexander aboard Bucephalus at the battle of Issus

Patton said, “Americans play to win at all times. I wouldn’t give a hoot in hell for a man who lost and laughed. That’s why Americans have never lost a war and never will lose one.”

The will to fight, the passion to be great, is an indispensable element of the Warrior Ethos. It is also a primary quality of leadership, because it inspires men and fires their hearts with ambition and the passion to go beyond their own limits.

Epaminondas, the great Theban general, was the first to beat the Spartans—at the battle of Leuctra in 371 B.C.

The evening before the fight, Epaminondas called his warriors together and declared that he could guarantee victory on the morrow if his men would vow to perform one feat at the moment he commanded it. The men, of course, responded aye. “What do you wish us to do?” “When I sound the trumpet,” said Epaminondas, “I want you to give me one more foot. Do you understand? Push the enemy back just one foot.” The men swore they would do this.

Battle came. The armies clashed and locked up, shield against shield, each side straining to overcome the other. Epaminondas watched and waited till he judged both armies had reached the extremity of exhaustion. Then he ordered the trumpet sounded. The warriors of Thebes, remembering their promise, summoned their final reserves of strength and pushed the foe back only one foot. This was enough. The Spartan line broke. A rout ensued.

The will to victory may be demonstrated in places other than actual battle.

A Roman general was leading his legions toward the enemy in a swampy country. He knew that the next day’s battle would be fought on a certain plain because it was the only dry, flat place for miles. He pushed his army all night, marching them through a frightening and formidable swamp, so that they reached the battle site before the foe and could claim the high ground. In the aftermath of victory, the general called his troops together and asked them, “Brothers, when did we win the battle?” One captain replied, “Sir, when the infantry attacked.” Another said, “Sir, we won when the cavalry broke through.” “No,” said the general. “We won the battle the night before—when our men marched through that swamp and took the high ground.”

[Continued next Monday. To read from Chapter One in sequence, click here.]

Among all elite U.S. forces, the Marine Corps is unique in that its standards for strength, athleticism and physical hardiness are not exceptional. What separates Marines, instead, is their capacity to endure adversity.

U.S. Marines on the island of Tarawa, November 1943

Marines take a perverse pride in having colder chow, crappier equipment and higher casualty rates than any other service. This notion goes back to Belleau Wood and earlier, but it came into its own during the exceptionally bloody and punishing battles at Tarawa and Iwo Jima, the Chosin Reservoir and Khe Sanh. Marines take pride in enduring hell. Nothing infuriates Marines more than to learn that some particularly nasty and dangerous assignment has been given to the Army instead of to them. It offends their sense of honor.

This is another key element of the Warrior Ethos: the willing and eager embracing of adversity.

In 1912, the Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton was seeking volunteers for an expedition to the South Pole. He placed the following ad in the London Times:

Men wanted for hazardous journey, small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful; honor and recognition in case of success.

The next morning, 5000 men lined up to volunteer.

The payoff of a life of adversity is freedom. There’s a story of the tribes in ancient Afghanistan. When Alexander was preparing to invade the Wild Lands of the Scythians in 333 B.C., a tribal delegation came to him and warned him, for his own good, to stay away. In the end—the Scyths told Alexander—you and your army will come to grief, as all other invaders have in the past (including our friend Cyrus the Great, who was killed north of Mazar-i-Sharif and whose body was never recovered).

“You may defeat us,” said the tribal elders, “but you will never defeat our poverty.”

What the Scythians meant was that they could endure greater adversity even than Alexander and his Macedonians.

When the Spartans and their allies overcame the Persians at Plataea in 479 B.C., the spoils included the great pavilion tents of King Xerxes, along with the king’s cooks, wine stewards, and kitchen servants. For a joke, the Spartan king Pausanias ordered the Persian chefs to prepare a typical dinner, the kind they would make for the Persian king. Meanwhile, he had his own cooks whip up a standard Spartan meal.

The Persian chefs produced a lavish banquet composed of multiple courses, served on golden plates, and topped off by the most sumptuous cakes and delicacies. The Spartans’ grub was barley bread and pig’s-blood stew. When the Spartans saw the two meals side by side, they burst out laughing. “How far the Persians have traveled,” declared Pausanias, “to rob us of our poverty!”

Chapter 18   Duty, Honor, Country

If shame is the negative, honor is the positive. Nang in Pashto is honor; nangwali is the code of honor by which the Pashtun tribal warrior lives. Bushido is the samurai code. Every tattoo parlor adjacent to a U.S. Marine base has this in innumerable design variations:

Death Before Dishonor

In warrior cultures—from the Sioux and the Comanche to the Zulu and the mountain Pashtun—honor is a man’s most prized possession. Without it, life is not worth living.

In 413 B.C., the Spartans sent a general named Gylippus to help their Sicilian allies in the city of Syracuse, which was under siege by the Athenians. Gylippus’s first job was to pick from the civilian population those men who would make the best military officers. Gylippus instructed his lieutenants to seek neither men who craved wealth nor those who sought power, but to select only those who desired honor.

Honor, under tribal codes, is a collective imperative. If a man receives an insult to his honor, the offense is felt by all the males in his family. All are mutually bound to avenge the affront.

The American brand of honor is inculcated on the football field, in the locker room and in the street. Back down to no one, avenge every insult, never show fear, never display weakness. Play hurt, never quit.

At Thermopylae in 480 B.C., the Persian king Xerxes, at the head of an army of two million men, demanded of the Spartan king Leonidas that he and his 4000 defenders lay down their arms. Leonidas responded in two words: “Molon labe.”

“Come and take them.”

If you travel to Thermopylae today, you’ll see the Leonidas monument. It has only two words on it.

The American brigadier general Anthony McAuliffe went Leonidas one better. Surrounded by the Germans at Bastogne in World War II, the commander of the 101st Airborne replied to the enemy’s demand to surrender with one word:

Nuts.

Warrior cultures employ honor, along with shame, to produce courage and resolve in the hearts of their young men.

Honor is the psychological salary of any elite unit. Pride is the possession of honor.

Honor is connected to many things, but one thing it’s not connected to is happiness. In honor cultures, happiness as we think of it—“life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”—is not a recognized good. Happiness in honor cultures is the possession of unsullied honor. Everything else is secondary.

In the West, pride and honor are anachronistic these days. The practitioners of honor are often ridiculed in popular culture, like Jack Nicholson’s Marine colonel in A Few Good Men: “You can’t handle the truth!” Or Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now: “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”

[Continued next Monday. To read from Chapter One in sequence, click here.]

Decorations for valor, from ancient days to modern, have seldom been awarded for raw bloodthirstiness or the brute act of producing carnage. The feat that inspires witnesses to honor it is almost invariably one of selflessness.

The Croix de Guerre from WWI

The hero (though virtually no recipient chooses to call himself by that name) often acts as much to preserve his comrades as he does to deliver destruction onto the foe.

In citations, we read these phrases again and again:

“Disregarding his own safety . . .”

“With no thought for his own life . . .”

“Though wounded numerous times and in desperate need of care for himself . . .”

Selflessness. The group comes before the individual.

Chapter 16   “Follow Me!”

During the Six Day War, the Yom Kippur War and all of Israel’s subsequent conflicts, casualties sustained by officers have exceeded proportionally by far those suffered by men of the enlisted ranks. Why? Because the primary leadership principle that Israeli officers are taught is “Follow me.”

During the Sinai Campaign of 1956, the commander of an Israeli armored regiment violated orders and attacked down the length of the Mitla Pass, sacrificing numerous men and vehicles to capture a strongpoint that was later given up. Despite public outrage at this act of insubordination, the Israeli commander-in-chief, General Moshe Dayan, refused to discipline the man. “I will never punish an officer for daring too much, but only too little.”

In the historic clashes of the Granicus River, Issus and Gaugamela, Alexander the Great’s order of battle ran like this: allied horse on the left, infantry phalanx in the center, “Silver Shields” to their right, then the elite Companion Cavalry. At the head of this 1600-man detachment rode Alexander himself, on his warhorse, Bucephalus, wearing a double-plumed helmet that could be seen by every man in the army. He led the charge in person and prided himself on being first to strike the enemy.

This is the concept of leading by example. But it also embodies the ancient precept that killing the enemy is not honorable unless the warrior places himself equally in harm’s way—and gives the enemy an equal chance to kill him.

The samurai code of Bushido forbade the warrior from approaching an enemy by stealth. Honor commanded that he show himself plainly and permit the foe a fighting chance to defend himself.

During the North Africa campaign of 1940–43, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel led from so far forward that, three times, he either drove or flew himself smack among the British enemy and escaped only by blind luck and wild daring. Rommel’s aggressiveness was matched by his sense of fair play and honor.

A company of the Afrika Korps had surrounded a British artillery battery and was demanding its surrender. The German captain had captured an English officer named Desmond Young; at gunpoint, the captain commanded Young to order his men to give themselves up. Young refused. At this moment, Rommel chanced to come upon the scene in his staff car. The captain explained the situation, certain that Rommel, his commanding general, would back him up. Instead the Desert Fox ordered the captain to put away his weapon and to cease demanding of his British prisoner that he order his own men to surrender. “Such an act,” Rommel said, “runs counter to the honorable conventions of war.” He ordered his captain to find some other solution, while he himself took the Englishman Young aside and shared with him cool water and tea from his own canteen.

Desmond Young, a few years later, authored Rommel the Desert Fox, the first great biography of the Afrika Korps commander.

[Continued next Monday. To read from Chapter One in sequence, click here.]