In the 550-some pages of his memoir, Crusade in Europe, Dwight D. Eisenhower uses the word warrior once—in describing Winston Churchill. Ulysses S. Grant managed to write an equally long memoir without ever putting the word to use. I wonder why. Did the two victorious generals, each commanding a huge conscript army, believe it would be tone-deaf to recall the blood baths they’d emerged from in the imagery of Homer?
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In Jarhead, a memoir of the gulf war, Anthony Swafford refined the term. “The warrior celebrates the fact of having survived, not of killing Japs or Krauts or gooks or Russkies or ragheads. That large and complex emotional mess called national victory holds no sway for the warrior. It is necessary to remind civilians of this fact, to make them hear the voice of the warrior.”
Meanwhile, Hollywood kept it simple. Warrior in the title promised menace and mayhem, with maybe a pinch of some harsh code of conduct in the mix. For example, there was the 1979 film The Warriors, which Roger Ebert described as “a movie about street gang warfare, written and directed as an exercise in mannerism.” And 1981’s The Road Warrior, which suggested to the Reader‘s Dave Kehr “the work of a western punk trucker de Sade.” And 1999’s The 13th Warrior, a tenth-century tale of the ancient Norse that the New York Times‘s Stephen Holden said was “saturated in purgative gore.”
Obama, in his address to the nation, made mention of “our wounded warriors” (a la the Wounded Warrior Project, organized privately in 2003). The National Review‘s Peter Kirsanow then dumped on Obama for failing to properly “engender pride in the good and remarkable accomplishments of our warriors.” House minority leader John Boehner told the American Legion in Milwaukee that “today, as thousands of our warriors come home seeking to provide for their families and realize the American Dream they have volunteered to defend, they confront an economy that affords neither opportunities nor jobs.” And about a week before Obama’s speech Joe Biden told the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Indianapolis that “drawing down our troops does not mean we are disengaging from Iraq. In fact, quite the opposite is true. While our warriors that remain there are as capable as any in our armed services—they know how to fight if they have to—their mission has changed.”
These are the GIs Morgan called “true warriors” and defined as the small number of people who “seem to be born with the ability to ‘make war’ on the enemy, while protecting their fellow soldiers.” It was Morgan who gave me a heads up about On Killing, where Grossman dwells on the type. “Whether called sociopaths, sheepdogs, warriors, or heroes,” Grossman writes, “they are there, they are a distinct minority, and in times of danger a nation needs them desperately.”
