Eastern University

*I was the October 19, 2018, keynote presenter at Eastern University’s “Windows on the World” speaker series.

Introduction — Shane Claiborne

Our partner in bringing the Windows on the World presentations is Red Letter Christians, and it's my pleasure to introduce our speaker this morning.

Well, thanks for showing up to an important conversation. The Red Letter Christians movement is about asking the question: what if Jesus really meant the stuff he said? We've got a t-shirt I brought for Logan — this isn't for you, this is for Logan — it's got the whole Sermon on the Mount on the back. I did bring something for one of you, though: Logan's first book, Reborn on the Fourth of July. It's an incredible book about his own story, which will give you glimpses of today. Is there a veteran or current service member in the house who'd like this book first?

[Book given away]

This is being recorded, so if you know folks who'd benefit from this conversation and aren't able to make it this morning, know that it's coming.

We're thrilled to bring in some of the voices we think are so important in the world right now. Logan, who I've known for over ten — fifteen years or so — has been one of my teachers and consistent guides in this, because he speaks out of his own personal experience. He's incredibly innovative about the way he talks about his passion, and I think he's exposed some of the ways that people who care about peace and nonviolence have talked about it in a way that continues to shame soldiers and exacerbate wounds and moral injuries that are already there. One of his other books is called For God and Country (in That Order) — he puts together things we've often bifurcated: a love for the people of our own country is a good thing, but our love is also bigger than just our borders. Join me in welcoming Logan Isaac this morning.

[Applause]

The Talk — Logan Isaac

Opening

Well, thank you, Shane and Red Letter Christians, Eastern University. I'm going to get right into it myself and leave as much time for Q&A as possible.

Before I forget — tomorrow I'm giving a free workshop on GI Justice at the Simple Way. Lunch will be provided; we'll be there from about 10:00 to 1:00. Shane and I are going to spend some time talking specifically about how Christians and the church can think about social justice in terms of soldiers and veterans, so I hope you'll join us. I'll be sticking around — I'm driving back to Baltimore after that, so I've got plenty of time. More information is at gijustice.com [/tour — exact path unclear in the source audio, verify]. I hope you'll take an interest and join us tomorrow.

So why should you trust me? [laughs] I keep looking over my shoulder because all I see is my screen. Today I'm drawing from my dissertation — my master's dissertation at St Andrews — but I've been where a lot of you have been. I did my undergrad, then two master's degrees: first a Master of Theological Studies in Christian ethics at Duke University, under Stanley Hauerwas. Then, the year after I got married and took the name Isaac, I went to the University of St Andrews in Scotland and studied systematic and historical theology with N.T. Wright. Christians and academics don't always count that as intellectual formation, so we can set it aside for now — I also spent six years as a light infantryman in the Army, including a deployment to Iraq in 2004 [and into 2005 — exact phrasing "2004 and/or" unclear in source, verify].

I'm also on social media at @iamloganmi if you want to talk about some of this. I'm mostly on Twitter, I lurk a little on Instagram, and if you friend me on Facebook I probably won't accept it — that's usually for people I know relatively personally. You can learn more at PewPewHQ; there's some stuff for sale in the back that I hope you'll check out.

I'm assuming everybody read my abstract, since I spent time in academia and I think everybody reads abstracts and then doesn't actually read anything else. If you did, you'll know I start with a problem, and that problem goes by the name of the civilian-military divide, or gap. It's been getting some news — it's in the headlines lately. Simply put, this names the imbalance between those who serve in the armed forces — the military — and those who don't, the civilians.

The Civilian-Military Divide

The numbers are startling, but they're helpful for understanding how things shake out. In this pie chart, in a tiny sliver of gray, you'll see 1.2 million active-duty service members. On the other side, a tiny sliver of yellow represents 800,000 reserve service members. In green are 18.5 million veterans. Put together, that's the whole military-connected American population — which leaves about 305 million civilians. So 94% of the American populace is civilian; about 6% is our military, past or present. This doesn't include family members — the DoD and the VA don't track family members — and that's estimated to bring the connected population up to roughly 9%.

These numbers are a problem because the military is becoming more and more demographically concentrated, creating a feedback loop and increasing the social distance between military and civilian. This first graphic — which I now realize no one's going to be able to read — shows that people serving in the military are more likely than civilians to have another family member who has served. It's becoming a kind of demographic self-selection, where the pool gets shallower and shallower as fewer and fewer families take on the responsibility of military service.

When this happens, we create a military caste system. The second graphic shows how that insularity has shaped the feedback loop: the self-selecting community has become even more insular. Members of the military and their families say people don't understand the military at higher rates than civilians say the same. Military communities are more likely to say the U.S. is the greatest country in the world, and more likely to say the military is more patriotic than civilians. Frankly, we're also lacking a certain critical distance and becoming self-congratulatory — and slightly more xenophobic. In a 2011 study, military members were more likely to have been disappointed in President Obama's performance as commander-in-chief. But this happens on both sides of the divide — the military can live in a bubble just as much as civilians can.

In the absence of a draft, this bubble is created passively and unconsciously by Americans who lack any incentive to join the military. They don't want what the military sells, and if it's not family tradition, it's often college money — and that was my story. My family — I grew up in Orange County, California, where the housing bubble began. My parents went bankrupt, foreclosed on their home, and I thought I was supposed to go to college. The Army was able to pay for that, and that's why I joined. Statistically, that's actually an insignificant path in, compared to family tradition.

Finally, the nature of the military: I want to talk a little about what we mean by "soldier" or "veteran." The nature of the military has always been about four enlisted personnel to every officer, so the average soldier — lowercase s — is enlisted. They take orders and execute them rather than give them. Since the end of the draft in 1974, most enlisted personnel have been poor rather than affluent, and less educated rather than more — that's why the military advertises education and social mobility. Recent trends show minorities enlisting at greater rates than whites. So the civilian-military divide isn't just a function of class — it's an outgrowth of it, and it also reinforces systems of poverty.

Is this how you imagined the military — made up mostly of poor, less-educated, white people? Does it surprise you that recruitment is far greater in the South, where there are more military bases, than in the North? Does this matter to how we perceive the military — should it?

What does this have to do with a bunch of students and faculty at a Christian college? About 70% of all Americans identify as Christian, despite steadily decreasing numbers. If you drill down to the military community, that number jumps to over 90%. That means Christians are entering the military at higher rates than non-Christians — the military community is about 20% more likely to identify as Christian than the civilian population. Remember: poor, less-educated, white, Christian is a fair sketch of who we should be thinking of when we think of "the military."

Rethinking Augustine and Just War

So think about this in theological terms. Let's turn to Christian soldiers and veterans and the problem of the church-military divide. What are you taught, or what have you been taught, in Christian institutions — churches or colleges? Think about that for a second. It's likely you've heard the term "just war," and its counterpart, pacifism. It's less likely, but still very possible, that you've heard that Augustine of Hippo was the first to use the term "just war," in the century following Christianity's legalization by Constantine. That's technically true, but I think this idea is dangerously misleading.

In the first part of my talk I want to discuss why we should put theology in our crosshairs — because bad theology needs to die before I get to the good theology it corrupted. It's true that Augustine, in City of God, this big long book he wrote in the 420s — not that 420, the fifth century — was the first to use the phrase "just war." But he doesn't use it the way modern scholars typically do. Without surrounding context, a line like this from Book 19, Chapter 7 can easily be used to preemptively justify war: "the wise, they say, will wage just wars." Read alone, that might sound like a ringing endorsement. But that's not what Augustine is doing at all. He's using an ancient Greek political tradition, appropriated by the Roman jurist Cicero, to say that at best a war might be justifiable — even then, only as an imperfect good, waged by pagans inhabiting the City of Man, which is doomed to defeat. It's for the City of Man, not the City of God — in fact, the full title is The City of God Against the Pagans.

Apologists for modern just war theory may remind you that we shouldn't look to City of God, but to his Letter Against Faustus the Manichaean. Sure enough, Augustine does use the phrase there too — but somewhat dismissively, saying (in English translation) that there's no need to enter into a long discussion of just and unjust wars. [If you look this up online on CCEL — the Christian Classics Ethereal Library — there's actually a typo where it reads "Justin unjust ways" instead of "just and unjust wars." Not sure who's proofreading over there, but they haven't done a great job.]

If you've taken a literature course, you may have learned that form and genre should inform interpretation. A book published for a large audience is more likely to contain a writer's polished, public stance. Epistles, on the other hand, are more dependent on particulars — audience, motivation, context. We know Paul crafted unique messages for the different churches he wrote to. To use a contemporary example: if you add me on social media, that's a message directed at me specifically — you don't send an open letter to a stranger; that's not how it works.

I bring this up because Augustine says a lot more about war and soldiering in his letters than in his books, and that should be at least as informative about any "real" just war tradition as one animated letter to an adversary. If we want to use Augustine's letter to Faustus to pin "just war" on him, we should also weigh his correspondence with actual soldiers. As it turns out, Augustine wrote — and received — a lot of letters from soldiers, not unlike Shane. Two of them, Marcellinus and Boniface, help illustrate how we can recover the good theology from the bad.

Marcellinus and Boniface: Augustine's Actual Correspondents

Marcellinus of Carthage was a tribune and secretary [Latin title garbled in the recording — possibly tribunus et notarius, "tribune and notary/secretary" — verify] for the emperor. Dr. Wynn will dispute whether he counts as a "soldier" because of that title, but a tribune is a military rank — it's like saying "secretary of state" without any clean line between soldiering and civilian administration. Rome didn't draw that line the way we do. He was a soldier, even if in military jargon today we might call him a POG — personnel other than grunt, a desk jockey, an armchair ranger, all the things soldiers call each other.

In 412, Marcellinus writes to Augustine asking the same kinds of questions that still get raised between patriots and pacifists: what's up with Jesus telling Christians to return no evil for evil, to turn the other cheek, to go the second mile? Doesn't that go against the duties of citizenship? Marcellinus even asks whether Christianity would have Rome just let the barbarians take over — which I heard countless times in the Army, except about terrorists instead of barbarians.

Augustine's answers here are familiar to anyone who follows these debates, and honestly he comes off as fairly patriotic. He cites John the Baptist not condemning the soldiers who came to him for baptism; he leans on Paul's letter to the Romans about punishing evildoers. But unlike earlier pacifist writers like Tertullian and Origen, Augustine doesn't conflate military service with war itself — he doesn't think all soldiers are war criminals. He's careful to say that military service is problematic only in some cases. Not all violence is created equal, and not all military service is violent. That's a key point we have to sit with.

Boniface is also a tribune, and a different story. Augustine's initial reply to him — several years later, in 418 — is mostly a long treatise condemning Donatism that seems to ignore Boniface's actual concerns, and Augustine stops writing for a time. Nine years later we get another letter, and we learn that in the meantime Boniface, now governor over all of North Africa, had contemplated monastic life after his wife's death — which would have meant leaving military service. That same year, 427, Boniface disobeys a lawful order to report to the western capital at Ravenna. Augustine, in his letters, clearly does not treat abandoning military service as equivalent to Christian service — but he doesn't discourage it either.

These two examples challenge the selective use of Augustine's work to generically justify war or condemn soldiers. They also give us an example of "just war" thinking outside a systematic framework — one that's contextual, responsive, and ultimately pastoral. Augustine tailors his message to the person in front of him rather than applying one answer to everyone's experience. There's a joke about the difference between systematic and pastoral theologians: the systematic one will explain municipal crosswalk codes at length before the little kid crosses the street; the pastoral one grabs the kid by the collar when he sees a car coming. Who do you want next to you?

It's only been in the last hundred years or so that some Christians have used Augustine to preemptively justify martial violence — ignoring the whole argument of City of God, and the more nuanced, complex theology in his letters. Notably, his most pro-military rhetoric came toward the end of his life, as he watched Vandals repeatedly sack Roman provinces for the first time. His more "patriotic" theology, for lack of a better word, was a response to what he saw as a direct, unprecedented danger to civilization as he knew it.

From Augustine to Modern "Just War": A Historical Shift

Likewise, "just war" as we use the term now really only took shape about a hundred years ago, in the run-up to World War I. The American Civil War — the first large-scale conflict after the Industrial Revolution — forced Christians to reckon with a new reality: weapons at a scale never before seen, automatic and armored, capable of destruction at previously unimaginable rates. Some have argued it was Confederate church propaganda that paved the way for using Christian scripture and theology to justify modern war.

Pacifists aren't innocent in this either — look at John Brown, a violent abolitionist whose raid on Harpers Ferry helped set the Civil War in motion. Unsurprisingly, use of the term "just war" increased dramatically in public discourse — a betrayal of Augustine's own use of it. Christians began calling themselves "realists," using Augustine's writing to advance the cause of war in Europe and to delegitimize pacifist claims. Until the Civil War, pacifism had been a relatively obscure phenomenon, born out of the Radical Reformation among so-called Anabaptists, who thought Luther hadn't gone far enough in breaking from the Catholic Church. Christian pacifism gained popular attention in direct correlation to the rise of Christian "realism," and the two have been locked in an endless argument ever since — pacifists mostly reacting to realist claims, trying to win arguments instead of hearts, resorting to the same cherry-picking to defend a predetermined conclusion. To each their own bubble, I suppose.

Developing a Martial Hermeneutic

How do I know all this? Because I tried, in vain, for years to believe what I was told by both pacifists and patriots after I got back from Iraq. [This is me on my 22nd birthday.] I won't dwell on myself, because that goes against my formation as a soldier — probably why I'm bad at plugging my own book, and why I need people like Shane to do it for me. But partisan theologians had all kinds of rationale to help me ignore the nuance and complexity of my own service. Pacifists thought I should feel shame; realists thought I should feel pride. Partisanship has no place in Christian theology, and it took years to realize that pacifism is no closer to discipleship than patriotism. I had to develop my own set of beliefs from scratch, so I got to work reading my Bible through a martial lens — I had to develop a martial hermeneutic. When we allow ourselves to receive scripture as gift and guide, rather than wield it as a weapon in some ideological fight, God can start to surprise us.

[This is the first Bible I bought — it's a little blurry.] It's a keyword Greek-and-Hebrew study Bible I found in a mom-and-pop shop in Hawaii, right after I got back from Iraq, when I was starting a New Testament history class. I don't love Christian bookstores or Christian coffee shops — if you need a captive customer base, your product probably isn't very good. [I like Christians, I just don't love a lot of Christian stuff.] Anyway, the woman behind the counter offered gold engraving — people usually put their name, in case they lose it. I thought: why would I do that, it doesn't belong to me — but I didn't say that. I thought and thought, and finally had engraved in gold: "Lord, grant me wonder, and may wisdom follow." I hope it reminds me to stay humble and receptive to other beliefs. I found out later that my favorite theologian, Abraham Joshua Heschel, had gotten there before me — his own line was something like "I did not ask for success, I asked for wonder." I'm humbled to share even that much in common with him.

When I set out to read and think for myself — itself an exercise I had to learn outside the military — I found I read the Bible differently than my friends on either side of the aisle. I noticed things they didn't, valued things they didn't. I was captivated by soldiers in the Bible; I identified with them. Reading Luke 3, where John the Baptist talks to Roman soldiers — the passage Augustine leans on — I didn't receive it the way he, or most interpreters, do. I wanted to know where those soldiers came from — guarding the Temple, protecting tax collectors. More importantly, having watched soldiers get baptized in the Tigris and Euphrates myself, I know you go to the water to repent and be washed of your sins. Knowing John was a pragmatist, I figured he wouldn't have wasted time stating the obvious ("stop killing"). What strikes me is that the Baptizer doesn't dismiss the soldiers out of hand — they see him as a legitimate authority, they ask a real question, and he doesn't condemn them. He says: stop exploiting people, stop extorting money. In Iraq, that would not have been the reaction of soldiers watching a local shaman baptize people in their area of operations. [If you want more, I have an essay on Luke 3 on my Medium profile.]

In Acts 10, a soldier gives Peter the answer to a question the apostles had been wrestling with: how open should membership in the body of Christ be? Not only does Cornelius the centurion provide the key to interpreting Peter's vision about clean and unclean food, he becomes the first Gentile baptized into the church without the expectation of circumcision. [Small caveat: the Ethiopian eunuch, being a eunuch, wouldn't have been eligible for circumcision regardless — so technically he might be the first Gentile in a narrower sense, but Cornelius is the first one for whom the circumcision question is actually live.] No textual tradition suggests Cornelius ever left military service, and the wealth he shared with his neighbors would have come straight out of Rome's coffers. Two things can be true at once: he's praised by Jews in the city, and to some he legitimately represents an oppressive, violent occupation.

Paul, Philippi, and the Language of Soldiers

Similar details show up in Paul's letters — details that seem integral to interpreting them properly, but that interpreters, including Professor Wright, tend to brush past. Philippi, for example, was no ordinary town. A generation or two before Paul visited, it was the site where Julius Caesar's assassins — the "et tu, Brute" conspirators — were defeated in 42 BC. Several legions were retired and resettled near the battlefield, and the city became a popular destination for veterans, with Octavian retiring his own elite guard there twelve years later. When Paul writes to the Philippians, it's the only place in the entire Bible — Old or New Testament — where "the imperial guard" is mentioned by name. Paul knows his audience: he takes time to praise the virtues military service instilled in that community, without shying away from naming the vices it also produced, and gently works in an encouragement to flip the military pecking order — "consider others better than yourselves." [More on this on my Medium profile, under an essay on Paul's letter to veterans.]

Cain as Archetype, Not Exception

A martial hermeneutic doesn't only affect how we read the New Testament. Cain is the prototypical murderer. Even if you think war is murder, war is an act, whereas soldiers are people — guilt attaches to an act performed by a person; it pricks the conscience and can motivate change. Shame, by contrast, attaches to a person, for a long time. That's what I think Cain's mark is about: not a badge of the deed for everyone to see and avenge, but protection — scripture is explicit that the mark is so that none may kill Cain. Cain is not reducible to his one worst act, any more than the rest of us are. God doesn't shame Cain, even if others might. Shame undermines the dignity we're all born with — it says "you are not like us, not a full person," and it's easily internalized as "I am not like the rest, I am not worth what others are worth." Shame insists these "less-than" people are problems to be solved, monsters to be slain. Nobody killed Cain, because God made clear to everyone — even murderers — that they were still human. Cain didn't kill himself, because the mark was a constant reminder of that too.

This matters because the way prominent Christians talk about war and military service is largely nonsensical. Both pacifists and realists speak in broad, sweeping ways that assume the only morally relevant distinction is soldier versus civilian — as if a cook or a medic is the same as a sniper or a bomber pilot. That logic fails to differentiate between war and soldiers, because it never gets more specific than high-level abstraction, divorced from the lived reality of service. Any soldier will tell you that's nonsense — but most Americans would rather listen to talking heads than boots on the ground. The closer you get to the ground truth, the less black-and-white it looks, and the more shades of gray. Soldiers and veterans already know the difference between themselves and civilians — and, more importantly, many of them are literally dying over the difference between, say, a sniper and a spotter. This is not hyperbole: every day, roughly twenty people like me take their own lives. Given that over 90% of the military identifies as Christian, that means something like eighteen of those daily suicides are among people who identify as Christian. Let that sink in.

I can't escape or change my past. My membership in the martial fraternity is with me forever — these are my people. Are they yours? The theological recklessness practiced by so many Christians is like trying to fix a problem with a bludgeon when you need a scalpel. Put simply: if Christians can't tell the difference between war and the military, then anti-war pacifists can't escape being called anti-military, pro-military patriots will keep justifiably being called pro-war, and veterans will keep getting caught in the crossfire. The best — maybe the only — way forward I can see is to put bad theology in the crosshairs and move toward a martial hermeneutic. Thank you.

[Applause]

Q&A

On Cain and Abel

The question was about the story of Cain and Abel, and how far that helps soldiers, veterans, or civilians think about this. Good question. On whether Genesis is historical — six days, whatever — I take Genesis as myth in the proper sense: a story we're meant to use to shape meaning in our lives, the way the Israelites deliberately made meaning of their own history, distinct from how Roman historians worked. The modern instinct to ask "did this literally happen" is, frankly, boring, and it assumes things about truth that our spiritual forebears weren't asking. They were saying: we're meant to see God in that story, right now, not just "back there."

Cain is clearly a murderer — he doesn't hide it — and the curse God gives him lasts about three verses: he'll be a wanderer, God gives him a mark, and then he immediately goes and settles in the land of Nod. That should tell us God is forgiving, and that curses aren't forever — that human beings, made in the image of God, aren't static, morally or otherwise.

I know, internally, and I've shared with people I love and with therapists — there are things I'm guilty of, and a lot more things in combat that were just boring. I beat Halo 3 something like seventeen times, because that's how bored you get in combat. But the way our culture shapes us through myth — the movies I hate, the Pearl Harbor-style, Randall Wallace-style war movies — to be profitable, they have to elicit emotional catharsis in a shallow way. Greek theater was actually meant to be cathartic in a deeper sense — Jonathan Shay has written on this. A cast of veterans would reenact what they'd done, in front of the women, children, elders, and men who hadn't fought, and the community actually absorbed some of that moral responsibility in the replaying. Now we pay our twenty dollars and think, "I don't really understand what's going on with Thanos, but that Captain America scene was great." We've lost the significance of story.

Cain isn't the archetype — I said "prototypical," and "proto" just means first. The archetype is really Seth, or Abel. If you read on in Genesis, it's an amazing structure: Seth replaces Abel, and we get lines of names — people who love God, walk in God's path, honor God. Cain's line, even though God has clearly been lenient with Cain, is described as abhorring God, walking against God — and his line gets wiped out. We're supposed to remember we've inherited Seth's line — that we're capable of being good people.

On Murder vs. Killing

The question was about the distinction between murder and killing, and other violent acts, and how I define it. Part of the debate turns on the sixth commandment — depending on your Protestant, Catholic, or Jewish tradition, one of the middle ones is roughly "you shall not kill." Biblical Hebrew is an old language with fewer words, so each word carries more weight. Some argue the commandment really means "do not murder," and that killing without that specific sense is permitted — murder implying intent. Our legal system reflects that distinction too: assault and battery are treated differently when intent is present, but we also have crimes without clear intent — manslaughter, second- and third-degree murder.

Honestly, I don't have a tidy definition, and it doesn't interest me much. Ending another human life, with or without intent, is a morally culpable act — that's what I think. I was an artilleryman, not infantry — there's a lot of backstory there. A lot of infantry guys carry numbers, faces, names in their heads. I don't have any of that. I did my job — I called for fire a lot. I don't have a number, I don't have a face. Is it likely I killed people? Very likely. I'm not a statistician, but I'm pretty sure. And that's enough for me to say I'm morally culpable — whether or not I "personally" killed anyone, I don't know, and I have no way of knowing.

I think the scholarly insistence on drawing a hard line between "killing" and "murder" is itself part of the problem — if at the end of the day we want to say it's okay to kill but not to murder, we're still trying to get away from the fact that we've sinned. As an artilleryman, I have sinned, and I go to my priest, my pastor, whoever, and share that. It gets absorbed by my community — different traditions do this differently — I've done something wrong, and that's not the end of the story. It's not okay, but over a lifetime, I'm going to do a lot more stupid stuff, and maybe some decent stuff too, and I think that should be taken as a whole.

I'm not that old — [I'm 36 or so; exact self-reported age/phrase unclear in the source recording] — an old millennial, maybe the oldest millennial. A lot of veterans talk about their service years as "the best days of our lives." That's a problem, and civilians reinforce it by fixating on those moments and forgetting the rest. That's part of what "matters" gets distorted into.

I am a veteran, I am a soldier — but I'm also a dad. If you want to know who I am, don't go to the VA. The VA makes a lot of veterans angry — if you see me there, you're not really seeing me, you're seeing a reasonable person reacting to unreasonable circumstances. If you want to see me, come to my house and eat dinner with me and my daughter. I'm going to do stupid stuff, and what matters is not holding so tightly to my own rightness that I have to insist it was actually fine. Nigel Biggar, a UK ethicist at Oxford, wrote a book defending war — a Christian ethicist defending war, which I guess exists, but I don't fully get it. I give long answers to short questions — I want to open it up and see if there's other feedback.

We live in a hyperpartisan culture, and it's been getting that way since 9/11 — which is why it's both unfair and reflective to talk about "patriots" and "pacifists" or "realists" at all. We build our own bubbles. There was a white supremacist rally on the National Mall in D.C. recently, and a Black Lives Matter group showed up; the organizers gave them five minutes to speak. I cried watching that — I'm not exaggerating — because we're losing the ability to cross that kind of threshold; we just lob things over a wall instead of actually encountering the other person.

In light of that: patriots typically say, "You're a hero, you should feel proud, let's clap." Veterans Day is coming up — please don't do that. Don't have veterans stand up for applause. Military service is morally complicated, and standing up to take applause reduces it. Ask me why later if you want. On the other hand, pacifists and progressives fill their own bubble: "the military is bad, you just need to get out," or, once you're out, "don't you feel bad?" — without acknowledging that both things can be true.

To illustrate — and this might disturb some people, it's PG-13 and up — my proudest moment in Iraq: I watched my platoon in Mosul during the January 2005 elections. We were enforcing curfew — the only light infantry unit that had been there on foot in two years, in this ancient city with tiny alleyways. One night, someone was out past curfew. My platoon — bored, probably some toxic masculinity in the mix — started yelling at the guy. He may not have spoken the language, may not have known about the curfew — no way to know — and they started roughing him up. Most of what soldiers, or police officers, learn is "I'm in charge, and if you're not, that's your problem."

I mentioned this because my platoon sergeant — I drove for him, so we spent a lot of time together — went out there, and I wasn't okay with beating up a guy for being out past curfew. I tried to get him back to the vehicle, faked a radio call to get things moving. He didn't come. After a few minutes it finally settled, and he got in next to me. I put my M4 on the dashboard and told him: if you ever do that again, I will [do something to stop it] — and I moved the selector switch from safe to semi, and made sure he saw it. I was telling him I'd shoot him if it happened again. I'm proud of that. It's complicated — I don't feel good about it, exactly, but I don't doubt it was the right thing to do in that moment.

On Heroes, Villains, and the Myth of Heracles

The question of venerating versus vilifying assumes a moral binary — good or bad, nothing in between. I've been thinking a lot about myth lately; I think it matters. There's a book, [title heard as "Herakles Gone Mad" — the author's name in the recording sounded like "Robert Marr," but this is likely Robert Emmet Meagher, who wrote a book by that title reinterpreting the Heracles myth through a veteran's lens; worth confirming before citing], which reinterprets an old Greek tragedy about Heracles through the lens of military service, since ancient Greek theater was largely staged by and for veterans.

[Note: Logan describes the source play as by "Sophocles" — the surviving tragedy where Heracles, in a fit of madness, kills his wife and children is generally attributed to Euripides (Heracles), not Sophocles. This may be worth double-checking against what was actually said, since it affects the citation.]

Heracles — most of us know him as Hercules — was a war veteran. He goes to Hell, and his battle buddy Theseus drags him back out. He returns changed, and in a blind rage kills his wife and children. His friend Theseus, and his adoptive human father, respond with something like "you're not fully human" — because Heracles, the product of Zeus's assault on his mother, was neither wholly human nor a god. The gods rejected him too. That's what we do to our service members: some veterans want to be seen as simply civilian again; some want to be seen as demigods. Neither is quite right.

Society wants to put veterans in a box either way. In terms of social justice, we get caught up thinking of veterans as a marginalized population — but "thank you for your service" mostly makes the person saying it feel better, whether or not they served, whether or not service was compulsory for them. That framing makes someone into a demigod — Zeus is your father — while to others, especially some progressives, it makes you suspect: "you did some stuff over there." Mostly what I did was play a lot of Halo. My accumulated combat experience is hours and hours of tedious boredom, punctuated by moments of sheer terror. That's it. The veneration is just as dehumanizing as the vilification — it's easy to call someone a monster and think that's clearly wrong, but our heroes get pushed back on just as hard. I have real objections to treating "hero" as synonymous with "military." Don't do that.

Closing

Thank you all for coming out and listening to me for fifty-two minutes — attention is a premium now, and I'm grateful. I hope you'll visit the table in the back; I have some things for sale, and I give a lot away too. Stick around for lunch with Shane and me if you can. I know folks have class, but it feels important to close in prayer, and I know for some of you that's exactly what these Windows on the World talks are meant to be — a chance to see the world through somebody else's eyes. If something here was uncomfortable, well — I've been having uncomfortable conversations for fifteen years. Come talk more at lunch, come to the Simple Way tomorrow, or just say hi afterward. But with twenty lives a day being lost, this urgency shouldn't just wash over us — and many of us as Christians have contributed to some of that shame Logan talked about. He's going to close us in prayer.

For the time you've given us, to sharpen ourselves against one another, to listen and be heard — give us the strength to have these difficult conversations: civilians with civilians, civilians with soldiers and veterans, for families that have lost loved ones in war and after war, for communities forgetting how valuable we all are in your sight — murderers, criminals, and everyone in between. Give us the patience, the clarity, and the humility to continually ask how we can better ourselves and our communities, for those men and women opening their arms and opening their wrists in the dark hope that this world has nothing left for them. We pray you'll show us how to make our communities and our families places where these difficult, painful, and grotesque conversations can happen — that you'll lift the burden off the shoulders of the few, so it can be shared among many. We pray we look more and more like you, in our words and our deeds. Forgiveness for the things we haven't said, the things we haven't done, the things we have done and have said. Give us grace, give us mercy, show us justice, and show us love. In your Son's name we pray. Amen.