Military Review English Edition March-April 2015 | Page 136
REVIEW ESSAY—KILLING
pollution). To the Greeks, killing always polluted the killer,
regardless of intentions or the act’s perceived justice. This
pollution required ritual cleansing, what Christians would
later call “absolution,” and cleansing required suffering,
read “penance.” Great suffering even transmogrified polluted heroes such as Oedipus and Hercules into “heroes,”
or even gods.
Turning to early Christianity, Meagher argues that
Jesus’ life and words clearly promoted pacifism, and
such was long the predominant understanding among
Christians. This understanding shifted with the conversion of the Roman emperor Constantine and Rome’s
adoption of Christianity as the state religion. Quickly,
the “Lamb of God” was redesigned as the “Lord of Hosts.”
Ambrose of Milan and his more influential protégé,
Augustine of Hippo, forged a new interpretation of the
gospels—one focused on the “spirit” rather than the “letter” of their meaning—to legitimize Christians’ serving
in the empire’s wars. Their concept of “just war” was
much more restrictive than it would eventually become,
however. Ambrose and Augustine, for example, strongly
condemned killing in self-defense.
During the Middle Ages, the church grew more
powerful than the state. Meagher describes how this led to
the concept of just war becoming more elastic. Medieval
scholastics such as Thomas Aquinas justified defensive
and other wars through the principle of double effect. This
dangerous principle can justify just about anything as long
as one’s intentions are “pure.” Such dogma enabled the crusades, where a warrior’s every sin found pardon, and JWT
went, as Meagher vividly puts it, “stark raving mad.”
Meagher then examines the evolution of JWT from
the medieval period to “Early Modern Europe.” He
discusses the “Peace of God” and the “Truce of God,”
early versions of JWT that narrowly (and unsuccessfully) focused on limiting Christian-on-Christian violence.
There is the great humanist scholar Francisco de Victoria,
who both condemned and unintentionally helped justify
the Spanish conquest of the New World. There is Grotius,
one of the founders of international law, who “understood
war in judicial terms” and who “was no doubt personally
troubled and saddened by the low standards of conduct
that legal war condones.”
Meagher ultimately concludes that JWT has served
only to legitimize and inspire war. Also, insidiously, this
concept has kept veterans afflicted with moral injury from
getting the help they need. After all, a nation asks, how
can its veterans suffer from moral trauma when the cause
for which they fought was just?
The answer to these problems is not to revise JWT or
improve its implementation, Meagher says. The theory is
inherently flawed. Any view of war as sometimes virtuous
is essentially untruthful. War is more accurately referred to,
at best, as “necessary” rather than “just.” He views combat
veterans as an important resource for moving nations beyond JWT, for they know best “the moral cost of any war”
and are far less likely “to concede that a war of necessity is
by definition a just war.”
In the wake of two foreign wars of dubious value but
of unquestionably high physical, psychological, and moral
costs, Meagher’s voice is well worth listening to. After all,
the self-righteous rhetoric that accompanies American soldiers to war has not always been all that far removed from
the language of jihad. Chaplains often pray for victory,
and leaders regularly tell soldiers that they are the greatest
warriors of the greatest army of the greatest nation in the
history of the world. Perhaps Meagher is right. Perhaps our
nation should choose its wars much more carefully. And
perhaps, to achieve the best possible outcomes from a truly
necessary conflict, we American soldiers must understand
ourselves not as self-exalting holy warriors but more fully
and rationally, better accounting for who we are, what we
do, and what we do to ourselves when we wage war.
Even if readers do not agree completely with Meagher,
his words are a salutary corrective to many overweening
myths. One of the most alluring and enduring of these
myths is that we can kill without being killed ourselves.
War, as Meagher makes clear, kills not only those it buries
in the ground. It just as surely kills the souls of warriors
who, having marched off to war and moral injury, return
home, heads held high while the music plays and their
loved ones cheer, yet feeling inside they are forever lost.
Lt. Col. Douglas A. Pryer, U.S. Army, currently serves as