On Warrior Culture

• Editor’s note: This piece is slightly different to our normal ones. It’s more akin to a blog and written in the first person. However, we deemed it interesting given the writer, where they are, and the wider context.

Although I am not an infantryman, I am assigned to an infantry unit here in the USA. At our recent dining out, talk inevitably turned to Saint Maurice. For those who do not know, Saint Maurice is the patron saint of infantrymen. When it came time for the commander to induct a select few into the Order of Saint Maurice, I heard the script—which includes the story of Saint Maurice—as if it was for the first time.

Maurice was ordered to have his legionnaires offer pagan sacrifices before battle near the Rhone at Martigny. The Theban Legion refused to participate, and also refused to kill innocent civilians in the conduct of their duty, and withdrew to the town of Agaunum. Enraged, Maximian ordered every tenth man killed, yet they still refused. A second time the General ordered Maurice’s men to participate and again they refused. Maurice declared his earnest desire to obey every order lawful in the eyes of God. “We have seen our comrades killed,” came the reply. “Rather than sorrow, we rejoice at the honor done to them.”

I had been in a funk for the preceding few weeks. Like all members of the profession of arms I had been trying to make sense of the changes in Department policy and U.S. foreign policy that had been cascading out of the National Command Authority. Everything seemed to be in flux. Opinions among my peers differed. Nothing seemed to make sense. And then I heard this story and suddenly I felt better.

I am not a religious man. And even if I were, the religion of my ancestors did not include the veneration of saints (if you must know, I’m Jewish, but you can only get military inspiration from the stories of the Maccabean Revolt so many times before you need to look further afield for inspiration).  But in a time when everyone is talking about “warrior culture”—and not necessarily in a way that made good sense—the story of Saint Maurice seemed like it held some sort of answer.

As a good cavalryman, I went straight to the story of Saint George.

As a result of his personal bravery, this man — then known as Nestor of Cappodocia — became a member of the Roman Emperor Diocletian’s personal bodyguard. In 303 AD, Diocletian issued an edict in Nicodemia, now a part of Turkey, that ordered the destruction of all Christian Churches, sacred writings and books, and outlawing all Christians who did not, on the surface at least, conform to paganry.

Upon seeing the edict, Nestor tore it down. For his act and his refusal to abide by the pagan emperor’s edict, Nestor was imprisoned, tortured, and executed. Early Christians changed Nestor’s name to George, and he became associated with bravery, dedication to faith, and decency.

The legend of St. George’s defeating the dragon perpetuates the might of the mounted warrior over the forces of evil. It is an Italian legend dating from the 12th Century, and the story goes like this: Near the city of Silene, a frightful dragon came to live in a marshy swamp, and its breath poisoned all who attempted to drive it away. To protect themselves, the citizens offered the dragon two sheep every day. Soon, however, they ran out of sheep, and human sacrifices were then drawn by lot. One day, the lot fell to the king’s daughter. She was left in the swamp to face the dragon, and this is where St. George finds her during his travels. In a fierce combat, George defeats the dragon but does not kill it. Instead, he ties the princess’ waistband around the dragon’s neck and has her lead it back to the city. There he promises to slay the dragon if the people will embrace the Christian faith. This they agree to do, and he kills the dragon.

Later, of course, the dragon came to represent the embodiment of evil and hatred rather than an animal, but the moral remained. The heroism and faith of St. George became the bulwarks to all warriors.

The stories both speak to the unquestionable military ethic of doing the right thing in the face of adversity. The protagonist, the one whose spirit is to be emulated, in both stories is executed for defying the Emperor he was supposed to serve (Maurice was killed by Emperor Maximan and Nestor of Cappadocia was killed by Emperor Diocletian). But he remains the hero nonetheless, because what he did was right.

For someone who has no time for organized religion, I have noticed over the course of my military career an unusual amount of admiration on my part for both Army chaplains, as well as for men of the cloth who took a principled stance on military matters. When Pope Francis declared that self-defense in the face of aggression is “not only lawful but an expression of love of country”, he was adroitly summarizing the entire basis of combatant immunity in the law of land warfare. When Ukrainian monks took up arms to defend their monasteries from Russian invaders, some shrugged off the exclusion from church ceremonies for three years for each life he might take as the price necessary to defend what they hold dear (“I gave up the possibility of having a wife and a family to be a monk, I’m prepared to give up much more in order to protect my church.”).

These stories crystalized what religion had to offer the profession of arms: an example of an unbending morality in the face of personal peril. The patron saints of our own Army branches provided an example of how that unbending morality has translated into warrior culture across the West for more than 1500 years. I have written about the Army philosophy elsewhere, using examples from current doctrine. But these older examples gave me so much more hope because they demonstrated how much deeper the military ethic of honour and service runs in our tradition. Although I have some familiarity with Sun Tzu and other Eastern philosophies, searching from an Eastern expression of this same value I was immediately drawn to the American film The Last Samurai (in my defense, it is based on a true story). The part of a Christian god demanding that his adherents follow his moral precepts in the face of conflicting orders from a Roman Emperor is in the film replaced by a god-like Japanese Emperor who could not be opposed, so that both the government and the rebellion against it must be fought in his name.

In the United States, the part of the Christian god or the Japanese emperor is, of course, filled by our Constitution (in the Commonwealth, I suppose, by allegiance to King and Country as opposed to the government of the day). Our duty to protect and defend it is the center of professional obligation. While we have certain duties to generally subordinate the military power to the civilian authorities (our Congress and the President each having been given specific authorities with respect to the military by the Constitution) and to avoid avoid contemptuous language with respect to certain designated officials, our oath is clearly to the Constitution.

This is useful as it appears that the current National Command Authority had adopted some problematic views. The President appears to have drawn incorrect conclusions about the nature of military service and the ethos of the military from his brief exposure to it as a military cadet in high school. The Secretary of Defense, when he was still in the private sector, had a troubling relationship with the law of land warfare, arguing that American soldiers were hampered by excessive constraints and (successfully) arguing for pardons for Americans convicted of war crimes in Mr. Trump’s first term. Current guidance reflects these challenges.

The good news is that, even though not every person necessarily embodies the values that make us warriors, these values are so strongly baked into who we are as service members that you would have to obliterate over a thousand years of history to change who we are. Each living service member can point to examples of leaders who have shaped them individually by taking pains to inculcate these values into them. Protect the defenseless. Serve selflessly. Serve with integrity. Speak up when you see something wrong.

Many Army websites have gone dark over the last few weeks. One of them, at least, is still up: https://www.army.mil/values/. Check it out and rejoice in your fidelity to your duty. My new motto for these troubling times: WWSMD (what would Saint Maurice do?).