The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,161

imperative to minimize flag-draped coffins returning to Dover Air Force Base) reminded even the more hawkish presidents that the country would not tolerate casualty-intensive military adventures. By the 1990s the only politically acceptable American wars were surgical routs achieved with remote-control technology. They could no longer be wars of attrition that ground up soldiers by the tens of thousands, nor aerial holocausts visited on foreign civilians as in Dresden, Hiroshima, and North Vietnam.

The change is palpable within the American military itself. Military leaders at all levels have become aware that gratuitous killing is a public-relations disaster at home and counterproductive abroad, alienating allies and emboldening enemies.178 The Marine Corps has instituted a martial-arts program in which leathernecks are indoctrinated in a new code of honor, the Ethical Marine Warrior.179 The catechism is “The Ethical Warrior is a protector of life. Whose life? Self and others. Which others? All others.” The code is instilled with empathy-expanding allegories such as “The Hunting Story,” recounted by Robert Humphrey, a retired officer whose martial bona fides were impeccable, having commanded a rifle platoon on Iwo Jima in World War II.180 In this story, an American military unit is serving in a poor Asian country, and one day members of the unit go boar hunting as a diversion:They took a truck from the motor pool and headed out to the boondocks, stopping at a village to hire some local men to beat the brush and act as guides.

This village was very poor. The huts were made of mud and there was no electricity or running water. The streets were unpaved dirt and the whole village smelled. Flies abounded. The men looked surly and wore dirty clothes. The women covered their faces, and the children had runny noses and were dressed in rags.

It wasn’t long before one American in the truck said, “This place stinks.” Another said, “These people live just like animals.” Finally, a young air force man said, “Yeah, they got nothin’ to live for; they may as well be dead.”

What could you say? It seemed true enough.

But just then, an old sergeant in the truck spoke up. He was the quiet type who never said much. In fact, except for his uniform, he kind of reminded you of one of the tough men in the village. He looked at the young airman and said, “You think they got nothin’ to live for, do you? Well, if you are so sure, why don’t you just take my knife, jump down off the back of this truck, and go try to kill one of them?”

There was dead silence in the truck....

The sergeant went on to say, “I don’t know either why they value their lives so much. Maybe it’s those snotty nosed kids, or the women in the pantaloons. But whatever it is, they care about their lives and the lives of their loved ones, same as we Americans do. And if we don’t stop talking bad about them, they will kick us out of this country!”

[A soldier] asked him what we Americans, with all our wealth, could do to prove our respect for the peasants’ human equality despite their destitution. The sergeant answered easily, “You got to be brave enough to jump off the back of this truck, knee deep in the mud and sheep dung. You got to have the courage to walk through this village with a smile on your face. And when you see the smelliest, scariest looking peasant, you got to be able to look him in the face and let him know, just with your eyes, that you know he is a man who hurts like you do, and hopes like you do, and wants for his kids just like we all do. It is that way or we lose.”

The code of the Ethical Warrior, even as an aspiration, shows that the American armed forces have come a long way from a time when its soldiers referred to Vietnamese peasants as gooks, slopes, and slants and when the military was slow to investigate atrocities against civilians such as the massacre at My Lai. As former Marine captain Jack Hoban, who helped to implement the Ethical Warrior program, wrote to me, “When I first joined the Marines in the 1970s it was ‘Kill, kill, kill.’ The probability that there would have been an honor code that trained marines to be ‘protectors of all others—including the enemy, if possible’ would have been 0 percent.”

To be sure, the American-led wars in Afghanistan