The tenth year of the Trojan war had taken a terrible turn against the Greeks or Achaeans as Homer calls them. Achilles, the ferocious warrior, is sitting it out after a spat over a war trophy woman with the chief commander Agamemnon. The Trojans led by their noble and brave leader Hector, son of King Priam, are closing in toward the Greeks’ camp, poised to throw them to the sea. At that moment of desperation for the Greeks, Achilles’s dear friend Patroclus, clad in Achilles’s armor, steps into the fray. Unfortunately, the comeback of the Greeks is short-lived as Patroclus falls under Hector’s spear.
Achilles mourns his friend’s demise and to avenge his grave loss decides to return to the battle. He eventually kills Hector, and then in an infamous gesture of inhumane treatment of a fallen enemy, Achilles drags Hector’s body in front of the walls of Troy before retrieving it to his camp. Up to that point, the epic of Iliad is a story of brutal fighting, horrible deaths and deceitful acts by the gods as they take turns and cavalierly intervene in favor of the Greeks or the Trojans. But at the closing chapters of the Iliad, Homer’s epic turns into a story of human drama. It becomes a teaching lesson about the capacity of humans to feel contrition for their acts and empathy for their foes.
In the darkness of the night, and helped by Hermes, Priam slips through the Greek camp and reaches Achilles’s tent. There the white-hair old King implores Achilles to release Hector’s corpse so that he bury his son as is proper for any man. Priam reminds Achilles of what his father would deserve if he, Achilles, had fallen in battle. At that moment, the proud, arrogant, and vengeful Achilles breaks down and starts crying as visions of his father pass through his mind. He realizes the banality of his act and overcoming his lust for revenge and his sorrow for having lost Patroclus recaptures his sense of humanity. Above all, he connects with the grief of the old man. He grants Priam his request and Hector finally receives the honorable funeral he deserves.
Three thousand years later, in another war, an American Navy SEAL officer leans over the scraggly teenage body of a wounded ISIS fighter, pulls a knife and stabs the sedated captive in the neck. Although that is not the cause of death, a military tribunal finds the SEAL officer guilty for posing in a photograph holding the dead captive up by the hair. The officer is sentenced to confinement, demotion and possible expulsion. But by that time, this officer has become a hero to conservative crowds and media. The President orders that the officer be restored to his rank and maintain his Navy SEAL status. The rallying cry of the officer’s supporters is that to be merciful to the enemy is political correctness gone too far; to conform to military rules is weakness, a fool’s errand, when the enemy is a member of a band of ruthless fighters of a stateless and terrorist entity. On the other side, military commanders and civic organizations protest that voiding military disciplinary action undermines the rules that should apply in the conduct of war and treatment of combatants.
What lessons about human conduct, rage and magnanimity can we learn from these two acts of war? How can we as outsiders pass judgment on such events?
We first realize that several thousand years of human history have not changed human nature much when it comes to war. No matter whether a war is just or not, it has a way of dehumanizing the individual. Warriors engage in battle with the same rage and ferocity as ever against their opponents. They often cannot resist to subject their foes to what Achilles and officer Gallagher committed against their fallen enemies. But by dehumanizing the enemy in the process we dehumanize ourselves because we eventually discover we have violated the other person’s – no matter how much vilified in our eyes – dignity and the right to mercy. Those same rights we wish our enemies grant us.
In the times before and for many centuries after the Trojan war, a warrior had only his personal sense of morality, magnanimity and compassion to guide him how he fought and treated the enemy. But often, as with Achilles, none of these personal restraints mattered. Achilles’s reckoning of his disrespect and brutality comes only when Priam pleas to him as a devastated father. I have no way to tell whether officer Gallagher had a similar personal reckoning.
There is, though, something that has changed since the days of the Trojan war. We finally realized that someone has to step in between the warrior’s rage and lust for revenge and the defeated enemy. Someone has to prevent the individual from descending down to the dark chambers of one’s soul where lurks the urge to deprive the enemy of his humanity. Someone has to save the warrior from losing his own dignity and thus being dehumanized himself. Thus, from the establishment of the Red Cross (Crescent) in the middle nineteenth century to the Geneva Convention and the International Criminal Court nations have come together to check and harness the aggressive instincts of human nature and punish the violators of the accepted norms.
Equally important, national armies have adopted their own military rules of conduct to control behavior that dehumanizes combatants on both sides of the lines of conflict. International treaties and military codes of conduct are our only defenses against allowing the suffering of wars to extend into the annihilation of the human spirit.
I think it is in the context of the need for rules that protect against dehumanization of those we send to war that we ought to reflect and judge the events surrounding officer Gallagher’s action, the President’s reversal of the military tribunal’s decision, and the outcry against it.
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