All across America and around the world, this is Veterans Radio.
And now your host for today's program, Dale Throneberry.
And welcome to Veterans Radio.
My name is Dale Throneberry, CW2-type helicopter pilot in Vietnam.
According to our program, we are going to be going way back in time, I guess you could
say.
We're going to go to the Veterans Radio archives and pull out a program that I think that you're
really going to enjoy.
It's going to be most informative.
This program was originally recorded on October 20, 2007.
And so the idea behind the program is it's the ethics, mortality, and war.
And we talked with the author, Shannon French, and she's the author of a book titled Code
of the Warrior, Exploring Warrior Values Past and Present.
What are ethics?
What is morality?
How can one behave in a moral manner?
These are among the most difficult, most interesting questions that people face at any age.
What defines a warrior today?
So as I mentioned, we're going to explore these questions with our guest, Shannon French.
She's the associate professor, associate chair of the Department of Leadership, Ethics, and
Law at the United States Naval Academy and the author of the Code of the Warrior, Exploring
Warrior Values Past and Present.
I really want you to listen to this program.
I think it's very valuable, even though we recorded in 2007 the information that we talk
about during the program, it's universal.
It's timeless.
So stick around and make sure that you do listen to that.
Before we get to that, we have to make sure that we thank our sponsors.
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of America Chapter 310, both of Ann Arbor, Michigan.
So as I mentioned, we're going to be talking with Dr. French.
So sit back and enjoy this interview with Dr. Shannon French from the United States Naval
Academy.
Here we go.
I want to welcome you back to our program today.
We're going to be talking about ethics, morality, and war.
Why do we have to have a code of conduct?
What's the point?
I mean, if we're in a war, we're in a war.
Our guest today is Professor Dr. Shannon French.
She is an associate professor at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, where she
serves as the associate chair of the Department of Leadership Ethics and Law.
Dr. French received her BA from Trinity University in Texas and her PhD from Brown University
in Philosophy, and she joined the Naval Academy in 1997.
Her book, which I thought was really interesting, is The Code of the Warrior, Exploring Warrior
Values Past and Present.
And she has taught classes in moral reasoning for the naval leader, teaches philosophy electives
such as military ethics, the code of the warrior, advanced warrior ethics, and philosophy of
religion, sacrifice, and responsibility, and knowing your enemy.
Dr. French, welcome to Veterans Radio.
Oh, thank you for having me.
I'm honored to be here.
I think it's a very timely topic.
We have talked about this on our program in the past about the code of conduct and why
we have that.
And I was wondering if you could kind of give us a little historical background on that.
Oh, absolutely.
First of all, I have to do a little disclaimer.
The views I will express are my own and not necessarily those of the Naval Academy or the
Department of Defense.
And nor that of Veterans Radio.
There you go.
Have to do that.
But now to your question, the history of the conduct of war, usually people look at it
and they think of the kinds of agreements that are made between nations.
And that is very important.
I mean, we do have the laws of war, the laws of armed conflict as we see them today, that
have a history of nations coming together and saying, if we're going to fight one another,
let's set certain parameters so that this war is not a completely total war, that there
is some limit to the scope.
The problem with that is that those kinds of agreements, first of all, they are between
nations.
So, in modern warfare, where you have us fighting as we are now in many places, non-state actors,
we don't have the sense that those old systems apply.
The other problem is that those kinds of conduct of war agreements depend on reciprocity.
In other words, if the other side is going to violate these codes of conduct, then you
may say, well, it was a contract.
You violated your end.
Now we can violate our end.
The actual code of the warrior, which is what I write about and what I study, is to my mind
much more profound.
And it doesn't come from lawyers or politicians.
It comes from the warriors themselves.
And it has more to do with what is honorable and what is dishonorable conduct in the eyes
of those very warriors.
And it has to do with protecting the warriors themselves as they go into these incredibly
difficult situations where they have to make split-second decisions and give them some
guidance so that they don't judge, again, judge themselves to have crossed over critical
lines and become murderers or monsters.
I think that's a really important distinction to make because we all, all of us, I think
that went through the military at one point or another, we had to study the code of conduct.
And then when you get into a war-type situation, it kind of goes out the window sometimes.
You have to rely on your own moral base to decide whether you're going to cross that
line or not.
And I think that that's one of the reasons that we have so many people out there suffering
from psychological problems when they get back because, unfortunately, maybe they cross
that line.
And they're trying to figure out how to deal with that.
Do you agree?
Well, I absolutely agree.
And the trouble is that post-traumatic stress and its various versions, which are so damaging
and can actually give lifelong problems for some folks, those can occur whether it's a
case of intentional crossing over the line.
By that I mean where you basically reach a point and you decide to throw the rules out
the window and you intentionally say, I'm not going to try to sort out who's a combatant
or non-combatant, I'm just going to use the expression, I'm going to kill them all and
let God sort them out.
But it also happens for the vast majority of cases of civilian deaths where it isn't
that kind of an intentional thing.
But it's a mistake.
It's a tragic accident.
It's a case where you did everything you were supposed to do to determine whether your target
was legitimate or not.
And for whatever reason, and sometimes through the actual intentional choices and actions
of the enemy, you killed civilians.
You were tricked into it or you had no way to judge who was at the other end of the bullet
that you were sending.
That kind of case, those cause severe trauma as well.
So I guess my point there is it's hard enough and can be traumatic enough when you have
a code to follow.
It becomes just worse and unbearable when you don't even try.
I think what's interesting and I was reading your bio and some of the information on your
text is that you, this is your first book I believe, the Code of the Warrior.
And I know you've got another one which we can talk about in a little bit.
But you go back and you talk about the history of these codes of conducts all the way back
to the Greeks and even the Vikings and the Romans and things.
And I was wondering if you could kind of talk a little bit about the derivation of that
and where that came from.
When we decided to fight by the rules.
Oh, absolutely.
And what I find very fascinating and the reason I've enjoyed my research so much is that
there is quite a lot of commonality among these different warrior cultures no matter
how far back you go in history or where you look anywhere around the globe.
And I think that is because the experience of war, even though technologies change, the
raw experience of war is itself pretty common, pretty similar again in any century.
So you can look back at the Greeks and you find them wrestling with some of the same
issues that our troops are wrestling with today.
And the example that I like to give is that when you have someone who is asked to fight
to defend their community, their tribe, their clan, whatever, they are being given a special
status.
They are allowed to do things that if they did in the ordinary life that they led before,
they would be thrown out of that society.
You are allowed to kill.
You are allowed to use certain weapons, etc.
So once you give someone that special status, you place this unique burden on them.
You say, okay, we are going to let you do these things.
But because we all know these things are normally beyond the pale in our society, it's up to
you to draw the line so that you don't become someone who can never fit back into the society
that you defended.
And so if you go back again any far distance into the past that you want to, you find warriors
wrestling with, how do I do what I need to do to defend my community and not become someone
who after it's all over, it's basically a danger to that same community.
Someone who can't enjoy what I defended and someone who might even be dangerous to my
family, the people closest to me.
If you look at the wonderful ancient war epic, The Iliad, which I write about in my book,
we have the character of Hector who loves his family, loves his wife and child.
And yet when he's on the battlefield, he's as vicious and effective a killer as any of
the other warriors.
So he has to find a way to be a warrior one moment and yet not sacrifice so much of his
humanity that he can't go back and hug his baby son and love his wife.
I think that's an issue that many, many veterans deal with.
We're talking with Dr. Shannon French for the United States Naval Academy where she
teaches courses in ethics and war and how you make those determinations of what is right
and what is wrong in our own lives.
Dr. French, I was wondering if I was thinking of some of the people that we've had on our
program in the past and we've talked to them about the issues of coming back to civilian
life and the difficulties that they have had assimilating back into that because especially
maybe it's got to be the same for every war.
But I was thinking of the Vietnam War where we would leave Vietnam and we would be home
in our own house within 24 hours.
And some of the problems that would come about when you're on a knee jerk reaction overseas
and then you're home and people might say something and people would react to that.
Well, I actually think the older cultures seem to have had a better handle in some cases
on the importance of the warrior's transition.
I mean if you think about it, we understand, we clearly do in all of our branches of the
military, that you have to get someone geared up and prepared before you send them to war.
We have, whether it's basic training or whatever type of training that we give, different people
in the different branches, we have a clear understanding that you can't just grab someone
off the street and throw them in the midst of war.
And yet we don't seem to understand that the same thing works in reverse.
You can't just grab someone out of war and throw them back into their ordinary civilian
life and expect that transition to work.
Now I think that some cultures had rituals that were linked to their religions that were
very helpful.
They had, for example, the Native Americans and some of the Plains tribes had purification
rituals involving sweat lodges and other rites that gave the warrior a time to reflect
on what he had done in war and a chance to symbolically feel cleansed of the ugliness
of war before returning to his family and being gentle again.
And that's not unique.
You find that in the Romans.
They had purification rituals.
And interestingly, some medieval knights, when they returned from combat, had special
forms of penance that they did that were not seen as punishment, but they were seen as
a chance to delay a little bit, that return to their family and do something positive acts
of atonement that would make them feel more, well, more fit to be with their family because
regardless of how noble their service may have been, they could still feel tainted in
some way.
And what matters is their feelings, not something we impose from them externally.
So I think we've kind of lost the understanding of that.
And I hope now we're starting to see some people realize that and bring back some warrior
transition programs.
The best example is the Marine Corps, which now has a program actually called that, called
the Warrior Transition Program.
Oh, okay, well, that's good to know because we were, I know that sometimes when the troops
are coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan, now they're usually a week or two before they
actually get home.
And I'm sure probably trying to get them to come down a little bit from that emotional
pie or experience that they had and try to come back into a real life and not react quite
as quickly as they would in a war type situation.
And a lot of it is awareness.
I had the opportunity to work with the Navy and Marine Corps chaplains, both in 2004 and
2006, and I learned so much from them.
And one of the things that we talked a lot about is that just letting our troops know,
giving them a chance to look at the experience of other warriors.
You mentioned in the earlier segment, veterans helping veterans.
This is a case where that could be so profoundly useful.
If they can talk to other veterans about that transition, if they can just talk to other
warriors who've seen what they've seen, then they realize that what they're feeling is
normal, that to come back and to still feel like your head's on a swivel and can't drive
straight down a highway because you think you have to zigzag because you did in Iraq
or you can't look at trash on the side of the road and not think that could be an IED,
that those feelings are completely normal and they will fade with time, that can actually
be essential knowledge without the understanding that it's normal to feel this way.
Their feelings that are hard to deal with as they are get compounded with a kind of panic.
They think, am I freaking out?
Is this something that I should be worried about?
I totally agree with that idea because the thing is that if you do sit down, if you get
the opportunity to sit down and talk with other veterans, you do find out that you're
more normal than you think that you are.
And unfortunately it seems like the military kind of puts a little stigma on that.
If you did want to go to some sort of group meeting and just shoot the breeze and come
out of there, usually you'll feel a little bit better.
And I find that it's helpful in my classes when my students read about these ancient
cultures that understood that the warriors needed a little psychological and also spiritual
help coming back from war.
When they read about that, it adjusts their thinking and they think, wow, that's not a
wimpy or non-masculine thing to be concerned with.
It's something we sort of forgot.
But these cultures that you associate with ferocious warriors understood that the warriors
had to make this transition and that they can't be expected to just flick some kind
of switch and suddenly they're civilians again.
Well, in your class, when you're dealing with a younger generation in this case, what kind
of issues do you have with them regarding ethics?
Well, I would say that the most pervasive problem is a kind of moral relativism or situational
ethics.
It's very troubling to me because you get folks at the academy who have already got a
lot of their moral development behind them.
A lot of that happens when you're kids, of course.
And by the time we get them, much of their character is formed.
And don't misunderstand me, these are wonderful men and women and I'm honored to be teaching
them and to be working with them.
But nevertheless, I do see, and even in the 11 years I've been, I've even seen a bit of
a shift, more of them having a reluctance to pass any kind of moral judgment, whether
on themselves or others.
And that's what I mean by kind of relativism.
They want to say, well, in that situation, it's okay or, well, if you felt that way about
it or who am I to judge.
And I guess I'd like to see a little more of the moral absolutes coming through here
and there.
It's interesting.
We've been following a case of submarines that I believe it was in Haditha that were
involved in a confrontation and ended up killing some Iraqi civilians.
And everybody so far, except for one, has been released, I guess, but one of their commanders,
Lieutenant Colonel Chisani, is still on trial for supposedly covering up what had occurred.
And it seems like nobody's stepping to the front and saying, listen, here is the moral
dilemma, here is the solution instead of trying to find some scapegoat out there to blame
on it.
Well, I agree, and I think in cases like Haditha and other instances where we think possibly
our some of our troops may have done the wrong thing, one of the problems I believe, I could
be wrong about this, but I believe that people forget that you can condemn an action and
still offer redemption to the individual.
It doesn't make you some vicious person, some heartless person if you draw the line and
say that action was absolutely wrong.
You can then move from there to now what do we do to these individuals?
Do we look at whether we put them in a situation where they were very likely to do something
wrong?
Did we not give them the training they needed?
Did we not give them the support in this context that they needed?
You can look at those mitigating questions after the fact, but it's very important to
draw the lines clearly.
The reason for that is, to my mind, you're making it harder for the next group if you
make the lines blurry because they have to make these difficult decisions.
If you said, well, it depends and oh, I don't know, then they don't have the kind of guidance
that they ought to be able to count on.
You know that there are at least stories that we have heard of people hesitating when you
get it.
You're in a situation where somebody shoots at you and you hesitate before you shoot back
and end up getting killed or wounded or something along those lines.
I think that you just touched on that of where is that line?
Where do we make that decision?
We're coming up on the bottom of the hour and I'm going to ask you to hold on as we
come around.
I want to remind everybody out there that we're talking to Dr. Shannon French, who is
a professor at the Naval Academy in ethics, and we're trying to figure out exactly, just
have a discussion on do ethics play a part in war, really?
Should they or should they not?
You're listening to Veterans Radio.
We'll be right back after these messages.
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We're back on Veterans' Radio.
We're talking with Dr. Shannon French, a professor at the United States Naval Academy, where
she works in the Department of Leadership, Ethics, and Law.
I'll bet most of you civilians out there didn't know that the military studied leadership,
ethics, and law.
Dr. French, I was reading the article that got me all interested in talking to you from
the Chronicle of Higher Education.
In there, you mentioned what we've, my fear is that we're encouraging young warriors to
study warrior traditions of the past that will lead them to become Rambo-like or to
embrace outrageous bigotries and out-of-date ideals.
The reason that line stuck with me is I can remember when I was going through basic training
and they taught us hand-to-hand combat.
The first thing that they taught us was how to rip a guy's face off.
I thought, wait a minute, this is not John Wayne.
I had this image of what I was supposed to be doing.
I was wondering, how do you feel that the media may have affected our newer military
personnel?
Well, of course, now today, in addition to films and TV presentations of war, they also
have these video games.
So they are getting, I guess what worries me the most is with the video games, they
have the sensation of shooting and killing people without any of the psychological or
emotional realities attached.
It can promote a kind of moral numbing, if you will, that they just don't associate death
and killing as they should with the end of individual human lives.
But they also still have movies that glorify war and skip over some of the hardships that
we've been talking about, which don't prepare them and don't get them to be thinking about
how they will handle their own transitions and how they will help their troops.
One of the things that is unique about where I teach is they're all going to be young officers.
So they're going to have subordinates who are looking to them for guidance as well.
So I have to think about that as we talk about these topics.
I think that when they look at the cultures of the past, interestingly, what they pick
out is not so much what I referred to in the article, the sort of Rambo-like kill, kill,
kill, but they do pick out the fact that these ancient warriors talked a lot about honor
and did seem to believe that there was a way to cross a line and no longer be a warrior.
I find it very fascinating that my midshipmen who have certain rules and regulations there
at the academy, they look at these ancient cultures and they feel like their current
culture doesn't restrict them enough.
They say that, look, here's a case where if a Roman soldier fell asleep when he was supposed
to be on watch, his fellow legionnaires stoned him to death.
It didn't take some outside force.
You have violated the sacred duty of looking after us while we sleep and we don't trust
you anymore.
So we're going to eliminate you ourselves.
And they start talking about how these old cultures actually had very high standards.
And of course, you always find people flouting those standards in any tradition.
But the fact that they had them and in some cases did enforce them inspires them to think
in terms of, well, who do I want by my side?
Who do I want watching my back?
And maybe rather than just thinking in terms of kill, kill, kill, I need to think in terms
of who do I trust and what kind of character produces that trust.
If I could share one thing, my course would not work if I were not able to do one essential
thing and that's bring in people who have seen combat.
And I do that as often as possible.
And what I find is that they reinforce, held any prompting from me, they reinforce the
idea that you have to actually have some respect for your enemy.
You can't just be some kind of sadist who enjoys killing and that those kind of people
who do enjoy killing for its own sake don't belong in the military.
Shannon, I got a question for you.
You mentioned about the children and the games that they play now, the killing and without
repercussions.
How does that play out with the young people that you're teaching today?
Do you see any symptoms of that?
I'm afraid I do.
And I think the best example I can give is actually another person that I bring in to
speak to my, or he had brought in to speak to my classes who had seen combat.
He was a fighter pilot who had flown in the beginning of enduring freedom over in Afghanistan.
And I brought him to speak to my troops basically about that point because it was something
that he had worried about in having commanded pilots.
What he did was he brought a video that showed a lot of, well, need explosions.
And he played it.
And initially it was like a video game.
So the students sitting there in class are watching this, what turned out to be actual
footage of him hitting and bombing places.
And they would cheer every time there was an explosion just as you would in a game or
movie.
And he played along with this for a while and let them have that natural reaction.
Just, you know, wow, cool.
You know, that's awesome.
Look at us blow stuff up.
And then he slowed down one segment.
And he, it was in infrared.
And he pointed to some of the smaller objects in the infrared.
And he said, what are these smaller objects here?
And eventually one of the students would say, oh, people?
Yeah, that's right, he would say.
And then he'd point out that one of them was giving a much hotter signature than the others
and was moving around the screen very erratically.
He said, well, why is that one so much hotter than the others?
And eventually after a little pause, one of the students would say, because they're on
fire?
And then he would just fix them with this incredible look and just say, that's right.
You've been cheering.
I lived this.
That is a human being writhing in agony in flames.
And I caused that.
And I have to live with that.
And he would go from there and talk to them about consequences.
And his point was not that we shouldn't fight, that we shouldn't do some of these things
that must be done, but that you have to look it in the face and you can't pretend that
these are just blips on the screen.
That's a very powerful story.
I'm talking with Dr. Shannon French of the United States Naval Academy who teaches ethics
and leadership there.
I thought one of your other assignments that I was reading about was very interesting when
you asked your students to write a paper on what their moral values were and what the
ethics of war were and so forth.
And many of them came back that was wrong to kill innocent people and so forth.
But then you turned them around and said, okay, now you are the other guys, the bad
guys in this case.
What are your moral values here?
Where do you stand on these issues?
And I wish you could talk about that a little bit.
Well, you mentioned that I've taught a course called Know Your Enemy and I think that it
really is essential and all of the folks who study the psychology of those who fight come
to the same point that it really is important to understand as best you can of the people
that you are fighting.
First of all, you have to understand that they are not animals or monsters, but that
they are humans.
And acknowledge that, acknowledge that you are taking human life because someday you
will realize it and better to acknowledge it sooner rather than later.
But it's also very helpful to pause and consider why they might be acting the way they are,
what their motivations are and have that in mind as you judge your own or moderate your
own reactions.
And I find it very useful to do this exercise where I ask them to kind of creepy, but I
ask them to kind of get in the mind of a terrorist and imagine what would motivate them.
And one of the things that we recognize in that exercise is that you can imagine someone
having been convinced that if they feel some kind of revulsion or horror at what they are
about to do, that that's just a form of weakness and that their duty requires them to overcome
that weakness and do what's been asked of them.
So rather than being completely heartless and inhuman, they've been persuaded to ignore
part of their humanity for the purpose of their duty.
Now I don't do that exercise to make them sympathize per se with the terrorists or think
that that's okay, but for them to realize that what's going on in the mind of your
enemy is more complicated than you might have previously thought and to respect that allows
you to still do your job and kill them, but to do it without an overriding hate that can
actually damage you.
I mean, they're the ones I care about.
I don't care about the terrorists.
I care about my students.
And I don't want them going into a war thinking, I hate and I'm killing monsters because, boy,
there is so much evidence that that is damaging, that if you come out of a war feeling that
you weren't fighting humans, that you were fighting subhuman vermin or something, somehow
that strips it of some of the sense of honor.
It removes, if you can say it this way, it removes some of the humanity from war itself.
War is inhuman, but it does have that struggle of man against man aspect to it and you want
to retain that.
And the ones who have the best recovery from post-traumatic stress are the warriors who
are able to on some level still respect their enemy.
It's a very fundamental level.
You still say what they're doing is absolutely wrong, but you can still see them as human
and perhaps understand how they came to do the wrong thing.
Right.
We're going to need to take another break and we've got a caller on the line that we'll
get to as soon as we get back from this next commercial.
After listening to Veterans Radio, we'll be right back in just a moment.
We're back on Veterans Radio.
We're talking to Dr. Shannon French, professor of ethics and leadership at the United States
Naval Academy and we've got a call from James in Fort Lauderdale.
James, welcome to Veterans Radio.
You had a question?
Good morning.
Thank you for having my call.
I thought the conversation was very interesting.
I did want to pass up the opportunity without some sort of comment.
Yes.
I'm a Marine and I was in the first Persian Gulf War.
I noticed that the doctor was talking about transition programs and that sparked my interest.
I just wanted to comment that a transition program is very important because of the fact
that you're just near violence all the time.
If I were to use an analogy of negative and positive feeling just to make my argument
that there's so much negative feeling that goes on that it has to be compensated positive
feeling.
I think the way to do that when you return is to... The doctor mentioned this a little
bit concerning the Romans in their history, concerning some sort of purification or what
Catholics call his penance.
I don't mean that in a bad way.
I mean that more in a way of regenerating your life by offering your services to others
in terms of volunteer acts or acts of kindness toward others over a long period of time,
which helps.
These things readjust psychology in the body, the mind, and the health.
It helps in terms of thinking about what you've been through and how you serve your country,
puts it all back in perspective again, and that's what... That requires time.
That's what I wanted to say.
Thank you very much, James.
Thank you.
Well, yes, thank you.
In fact, just to really echo your excellent points there, I would say that I think it's
a shame sometimes people are loath to recommend some kind of purification or spiritual renewal
or any such transition for warriors because they're afraid that it might sound like it's
some kind of punishment.
It would seem like, well, here you've already given so much.
Now come to a service project and it just seems... On some level, you can say, well,
that's crazy.
How could they serve any more than they have?
What you're pointing out and what I've had many veterans tell me is that it isn't a punishment.
It's a gift.
It's an opportunity for them to, as you put it so well, to embrace some of the positive
side, the positive feelings that are also in them and turn away from the more negative
feelings that they had to be around and the negative experiences they had to go through.
You're giving them that chance.
You're giving them that opportunity to really remind themselves of the full range that they
are capable of and that, yes, they may be capable of taking lives, but, wow, they're
also capable of saving them and they're capable of improving lives.
By the end, they come full circle and they realize that even in the process of taking
lives, they were doing that for what they perceived as an end that would improve lives
so that it all in the end came from something positive in them, a spirit of service.
Shannon, how has the ethics of war changed from, say, World War II to the present?
Well, of course, the technologies have changed and in one sense, it's cut towards more precision.
When you look at World War II, even though in most of our language, we tend to think
of it as the good war or a more morally less ambiguous war, there was a lot of carpet bombing
and use of weapons, well, even, of course, a nuclear weapon that were very indiscriminate
and killed a lot of civilians.
Now we have the technology to be more precise, certainly not perfect, a lot of collateral
damage, but nothing like we saw in World War II.
I think the difference of having an all volunteer force versus a mix of volunteers and draftees
is a change.
I'm not sure the full ramifications of that, but someone ought to study that.
That's not something I've studied.
And I think also, you do have this difference I mentioned before of we're fighting non-state
actors, which does make it much more complicated because you don't have that reciprocity piece.
You can't trust that if we treat them this way, they'll treat our prisoners that way.
In fact, you pretty much have to count on the opposite that no matter how well we hold
by our code, they will not hold by a similar code and they try to use ours against us.
A question that goes a little bit along with that is that during World War II, of course,
we heard the stories and things about the atrocities of the Japanese placed on our prisoners of
war versus vice versa the way we treated their prisoners of war.
You think that you're fighting with civilized people, but it gets out of hand and the question
of ethics and morality always seems to come into play, don't you think?
Of course it does.
I think that the most profound lesson that I try to get my students to recognize and
that they hear from, again, these combat veterans that I bring in to speak to them,
is that you can't put your morality in the hands of your enemy.
What I mean by that is you can't control what they're going to do.
You can't control what their values are.
It should never be that they set your compass.
If you are fighting terrorists, you know that they're going to do things that we consider
very far over the line, but that doesn't justify us going over the line because the point of
our rules is to be true to our values and we don't want to say to them, hey, you set
the level and we'll lower ourselves to your level.
We can't do that for our own sake because it's far too important and it's not fair
to our troops to ask them to become terrorists for us.
You made an interesting point right there where we would lower our standards to meet
theirs.
I think that's probably an ongoing issue with all of our soldiers and everybody overseas
right now.
I think we like to hold ourselves to a different, our view of what we think the world should
be.
When we run up against those issues where they don't necessarily fight the same way
we do or they're more barbaric than we think they should be, that causes a lot of problems,
I would think.
It's incredibly difficult and that's again something you see historically whenever a
culture that has more rules, it fights one that has fewer or any kind of asymmetric conflict
where you have guerrilla type fighting, the temptation is incredibly strong to say, well
then let's say all bets are off, no rules.
They're not fighting with rules so we're not going to fight with rules.
But historically and certainly it's true now too, that doesn't pay off and the reason
it doesn't pay off is you're betraying your own values.
Again, in the end it doesn't matter what the enemy is doing.
You have to make sure that when it's back to the transition point, you have to make
sure that when you're done fighting, you fit back into the society that you left and that
it's the society that you were fighting for.
You haven't damaged it too much by the actions that you were forced to take.
So I think that what we look at in places like Iraq is our troops really having to put
themselves at greater risk in many cases and they do it willingly in order to preserve
our for example combat and noncombatant distinction.
They will fire warning shots.
They will do their best to try to determine whether this is a legitimate target.
Do they make mistakes?
Of course.
They're human and the enemy is trying to make them make mistakes, so of course they
will.
But that's a thousand million times better than just saying we're not going to try.
Right.
I agree and the other thing is that the civilians that are caught in the middle of these conflicts
sometimes, who are you more afraid of?
I can't take that.
I don't know for sure.
We may threaten them and all those other things but the other bad guys may just shoot
them to make a point.
I think that you do see when we have reporters go in there and talk to the people, whatever
their views are on feeling that it's an occupation and wanting the troops out, there is a sense
of respect in most cases and you even see that in the recent controversy of the Black
Water.
Right, the contractors.
Yeah, the contractors who some have accused of behaving more like mercenaries and not
having the same rules, that contrast only comes forward because they're used to seeing
the Americans use restraint.
Otherwise, they would just say, well, obviously that's how Americans act but they're not
saying that.
They're saying these guys are different.
Now, I don't know.
We don't have all the facts in.
I don't know how that's going to turn out to be judged but the point is that to even
say that we expect, these are folks who are in the horror of this daily threat in Baghdad
and other parts of Iraq who are still saying we've come to expect something else from America.
Right.
That's good.
It is good.
It is good that we think about it.
Actually, we have a thought that says, wait a minute, let's think about this for that
mini-second.
We've gone through another hour already and it just is fascinating.
Dr. French, I want to thank you so very much for being on Veterans Radio and the opportunity.
Is there any final comment that you would like to make?
I would only say that one of the great speakers that I had come in was a Medal of Honor winner,
Sergeant Sammy Davis.
I'll never forget that he told my students that as officers, their number one responsibility
was to safeguard the humanity of the troops under them.
Absolutely.
On a good note.
We've been talking with Dr. Shannon French, who is a professor at the United States Naval
Academy in Ethics and Leadership.
One book I know of is the Code of the Warrior, Exploring Warrior Values Past and Present,
and you've got a new one that's called...
Well, I'm still working on that one, but it's going to be on Sacrifice, and the title
may be Sacrifice in Society.
Okay.
Well, that's great.
Thank you very much, Dr. French.
Well, thank you, and may I just say broadly, thanks to all the Veterans and all those who
are serving.
Thank you very much.
We'll be talking to you again, I promise.
Okay.
Thank you.
Bye-bye.
Wow.
Ken, that was...
That's fascinating information, and I would strongly encourage any of you out there listening
to Veteran or active duty right now to go and find the book on the Code of the Warrior.
Just punch her name in.
It's Shannon French, S-H-A-N-N-O-N French into Google, and her articles will come up,
and I think you'll find it very helpful just to you.
And I know it was helpful to me, too.
I think the warriors today are really in a dilemma when they get into these situations,
but they don't know who the enemy is.
I mean, World War II, it was pretty cut and dried.
The guy on the other side was an enemy, and you shot him.
But now, you don't know who your enemy is.
It's similar to Vietnam, where even little kids would have bombs trapped to them as
sacrifices.
That's very true, and unfortunately, yeah, we didn't know who the bad guys were, and
you made mistakes.
And welcome back.
See, I told you.
I thought I think you had to really enjoy that interview.
I hope so.
I struck a lot of really important points about what it is like to be in the military, and
those ethical decisions that we all have to make when we were there or those of you
that are going to be going into the service sometime soon, you never know when you're
going to have to make these decisions.
And I think we like to think that we are them, you know, we're the moral guys.
We play by the rules, and in today's world, most of our enemies do not play by those
rules.
So, I encourage you to, you know, read this book, The Code of the Warrior, Exploring Warrior
of Values Past and Present, and she's also got an updated version of it.
And again, it's called The Code of the Warrior.
It's the second edition.
Both of these books are available on Amazon.
I think they're just important for all of us to read it at some point in our careers
and in our lives.
So I hope, again, I hope you enjoy that program.
And so this is Dale Throneberry.
We are going to go out.
Oh, I forgot.
We're going to go out listening to a song from Michael J. Martin and Tim Holloway.
It's called The Last Warrior, which I thought was rather appropriate.
So I'm hoping that you will enjoy that tune.
Until then, actually, until next week, this is Dale Throneberry for all of us here at
Veterans Radio.
I hope that you have a safe and peaceful 4th of July.
If you don't like fireworks, don't go out and listen to them.
Okay?
Okay.
So again, Dale Throneberry, all of us here at Veterans Radio.
Until next week, you are dismissed.
Thank you for watching.
Who's gonna fend in the face of the flight?
Who's gonna write all the wrong?
Who's gonna fight the fight?
When the last warrior is gone?
Who's gonna hang tough?
When it's down to the skin and the bones?
And who's gonna call their blood?
Who's gonna take them all on?
And when the world is rolled over with ecstalia
There ain't nothing to compromise on
Who's gonna say enough is enough
When the last warrior is gone?
Who's gonna cross the line?
When the last line is finally drawn?
And who's gonna keep on trying?
When they're claiming they've already won?
And when there ain't no more freedom
And there ain't no more rights?
And it's down to defending our own
Who's gonna lay down his life?
Doing what has to be done
Who's gonna live out his life?
Doing what has to be done
Who's gonna fight the fight?
When the last warrior is gone?
Who's gonna fight the fight?