Soldiers and ghosts

When an American soldier is killed in hostile territory in Afghanistan or Iraq, it is not unusual for others to risk their own lives to retrieve the body of their fallen comrade. Hardly a model of ruthlessly efficient war-making, such risky insistence on recovery of the dead places us in the company of a people with whom we might be surprised to find ourselves — the ancient Greeks of Homer’s Iliad.

This characteristic feature of the American and Homeric way of war — a feature well known to enemies who sometimes lie in wait — is a type of fighting that is not just about winning. It is also highly ritualized, or dictated by certain social beliefs, in this case the sanctity of the body, according to associate professor of history J.E. Lendon, the author of a new history of battle in classical antiquity.

In “Soldiers and Ghosts” (Yale University Press), which has won wide praise for its original interpretations of ancient warfare, Lendon argues that the most successful armies were those that made effective use, not of the newest military techniques, but of cultural tradition, looking backwards to the past for inspiration.

In a period of little technological innovation, classical Greek soldiers were victorious in battle by remembering the deeds of the heroes of Homer. And the later Romans conquered the world by remembering and emulating the Greeks and their own heroic past. Living soldiers fought alongside “ghosts.”

We live in a different age, with rapid technological advance. But the modern American military, just as much as the Greeks, Romans, and warlike tribes of Papua New Guinea, also fights in ways that are highly ritualized, according to Lendon, an award-winning teacher.

Some of the ritualized and “less than purely efficient” practices of many modern armies include a reluctance to use unconventional weapons such as poison gas, as well as the practice of preserving the lives of prisoners of war, according to Lendon. Such restraints stem from the Golden Rule’s hope that one will be treated likewise and “the shared belief that war has rules, however fragile.”

“However primitive or sleekly modern the machinery of war, the idiosyncratic beliefs of the men of every time and place play their role in how the war is fought,” Lendon writes in “Soldiers and Ghosts.”

Lendon emphasizes that we are very different from ancient peoples. But we are like them in that our own cultural beliefs strongly affect our fighting methods.

The controversies over American treatment of prisoners taken in Iraq and Afghanistan, for example, stem from the cultural fact that we have rules, not that we have given them up,” he says. “There is outrage when we break the rules.”

And our outrage at such methods as terrorist attacks and beheadings “says we think warfare should follow a recognized pattern with rules. But many historical peoples would not have been surprised at unconventional or ‘unfair’ methods used by an enemy.”

Americans’ complete unwillingness to “write off” soldiers in danger, instanced by the recent loss of a helicopter full of searchers for missing Navy Seals in Afghanistan, is unusual by historical standards and, however admirable we see it, is “ritualized” battle behavior, says Lendon. Our ritualized ways and cultural beliefs, like those of the Romans, “show tremendous national confidence. We apply rules to ourselves regardless of the Golden Rule: when they capture our people, they chop their heads off. But nobody suggests that when we capture them we should chop their heads off.”

Ritualized beliefs, fighting under the spell of the past, made ancient armies strong. In the end, though, an exaggerated form of it did the Romans in when they actually tried to “re-create” the past, Lendon says.

Some of our own idiosyncratic beliefs are getting stronger today too, he says. The high emphasis on the value of the individual soldier is one, as is increasing reliance on a “managerial” style of war. One of our strongest cultural beliefs — that advanced technology and technical solutions should be used to prevent casualties — is “profoundly different” from previous times, he says, even from U.S. military history before Vietnam.

A main characteristic of ancient habits of mind was innovating by emulating what has gone before — “going forward by looking backward,” in literature just as in warfare.

“Warfare, although it has a melody of its own, is part of the wider symphony of the society,” Lendon writes in “Soldiers and Ghosts.” Perhaps part of our symphony today is the belief that technology will save us.