Courage - part 2

Recently, I came across The Anatomy of Courage by Lord Moran. Moran was a physician with a British infantry regiment that saw extensive action in the trench warfare of WWI. He then became Churchill’s physician during WWII, for which he received a peerage. The three sections of his book speak to the discovery of fear, the consumption of courage, and the care and management of courage.

Moran constructs a taxonomy of courage that stretches through four stages from the person who is unaware of fear to the person immobilized by fear. Persons move down through the levels of courage as they spend their courage. He rightly contends that one responsibility of military leaders is to identify when a soldier has consumed her or his supply of courage. For example, after he reported to his regiment that was stationed in France manning trenches during WWI, he faults himself for not identifying one of the first soldiers to consult him as a soldier who had exhausted his supply of courage. Having returned the soldier to duty, the soldier committed suicide that night by shooting himself. Moran forthrightly cites other examples of the ignorance and mistakes that pushed him to better understand courage.

I know of no comparable work that speaks to the need for courage in the face of the unrelenting threat and stress that characterizes what many troops experience in Iraq and Afghanistan. I wonder to what extent post-traumatic stress is the twenty-first century analogue to the battle fatigue of previous generations. If so, then updating Moran’s book on courage may offer one constructive step forward in preventing post-traumatic stress instead of reactively attempting to treat the problem, a problem of growing magnitude.

I also wonder about the possibility of research that addresses ways in which military personnel (and others) might cultivate their supply of courage, perhaps even finding ways to restock their supply of courage after expending much of it. An Episcopal priest, still on active duty as a Navy chaplain, CDR Steve Pike, tells of a Marine who found a way to replenish his supply of courage:

It was small white piece of paper. I didn't think anything of it the first couple to times I saw it, but every time I visited, he had it in his hand. I asked him one time about the piece of paper. He showed it to me. It was a picture of his grandfather taken at the Battle of the Chosin Reservoir when he was a young Marine during the Korean War. The young man told me about his grandfather. His eyes welled with tears as he told me how much he loved him. He said that had always looked up to his grandfather, that along with everything else that grandfathers are to their grandsons, that his grandfather was an example of bravery and courage for him. (Stephen P. Pike, CDR, CHC, USN writing in “The Bishop's Notebook,” 23 July 2004, accessed at http://www.ecusa-chaplain.org/bishword.html.)

Religious faith can similarly function as the source of courage. For Christians, Jesus accepting death on the cross rather than engaging in armed rebellion against Rome provides a moral example of courage. Carefully meditating on Jesus’ death, as forms part of the Good Friday observances in many Christian traditions and an element of more frequent devotions in other Christian traditions, can help to increase the individual Christian’s personal supply of courage.

Another obvious example, too often ridiculed by secular westerners, is the deep belief that most Islamicist suicide bombers hold, that when they die fighting infidels they will immediately go to a wonderful, everlasting life in paradise. However, Moran’s analysis of courage and its link to fear suggests that blind belief in the reality of an unseen, unknowable afterlife either attracts the mentally immature and unstable (a conclusion that some research supports as being true for at least some suicide bombers) or the temporarily persuaded (a conclusion that Saudi success with reeducating Islamicist radicals supports). In sum, suicide bombings will only occur in relatively small numbers and counterterrorism efforts designed to prevent suicide bombings should focus on the mentally immature/unstable and on communicating that suicide, even suicide attacks, violates a basic Muslim ethic and, from a Muslim perspective, will send the bomber to hell rather than to paradise.