We’re All Soldiers Now

Coward. Cowardly. Cowardice: Shamefully excessive fear of danger, difficulty or suffering.

In a war where civilians are combatants, we all are learning what it feels like to sit in the cockpit of an F-14 Tomcat and cross into enemy airspace. Or to hunker down in a foxhole and hear the distant cough of a mortar, now bound in our general direction.

The big gulp.

Your diaphragm tightens and it feels like something deep inside has tied itself in a slippery knot, squeezing off your breath.

Soldiers know it. And cops and firefighters--all the folks with badges.

Now, we’re feeling it. The difference is that most of us have had no training for this, no practice for our role in combat. Our leaders have no experience in what to say to a civilian population placed in the battlefield: Go back to work. Watch out. Go shopping. Expect another attack. Government stands ready. Don’t open your mail.

Oh dear.

What they should say is that we’re all soldiers now. And soldiers learn this: Before they discover their fate, they will discover that the only choice they have in the chaos of events is the choice between cowardice and courage.

We’re going to find out, each of us, and all of us collectively as a nation, a little more about our strengths. Nothing will soon untie the knot in our gut or return our easy breathing. Certainly not statistics. If they would, we could get on with our lives by just reminding ourselves that 40,000 of us will die in car crashes in the next 12 months, 32,000 will perish from gunshots, 17,000 of us will fall to our deaths. These things don’t send us into a collective depression, so figure the odds. Whew.

Carl von Clausewitz wrote the book on war. It’s called, “On War.” For almost 200 years, soldiers have read it to prepare themselves for the ordeal of the battlefield.

“War is the province of danger,” Clausewitz observed, “and therefore courage above all things is the first quality of a warrior.”

Courage is the feeling of one’s own power when summoned to duty. Courage comes not from facing the everyday but from standing fast against what Clausewitz called “the clouds of great uncertainty” that characterize war.

Courage, I think, is not inherited and not a matter of biological chance. Courage is the fatalism to trust that we have it. And to know that it never comes easy. Because, Webster’s notwithstanding, courage is not fearlessness.

Rather, as Gen. George Patton put it, “Courage is fear holding on a minute longer.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson described it this way: “A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer.”

In my half-century of life, Americans have not been called upon as a nation to show courage. We’ve entrusted our military to display it many times. We expect our police to have it. We admire it in our citizens. But it has not fallen on the shoulders of the country at large, until now.

That’s why, of course, our enemies are watching our reactions. As we are watching ourselves. Our enemies doubt us. And, yes, we feel doubt too.

If it is any comfort, so did the men who landed on Normandy, or those who fought at Khe Sanh or in the southern desert of Iraq. Just ask them. Fear lives on all battlefields.

For the last month and with evermore finality, we are accepting that we no longer have control over events engulfing us--except in how we meet them. Sept. 11 was our boot camp. Today, we find ourselves on the battlefield. If we feel ourselves being tested, we have joined ranks with every other American who has gone off to war. If we remember what they did, we’ll know what to do.