Mike Tucker

"Self-pity is a sad word, found somewhere between scab and syphillis."

--Mike Tucker, a commenter at the NYT

War and The Moral Logic

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Whole comment is below:

"Start by telling them them that survival is victory. The first law of war is survival and I have no guilt about having survived all the combat I endured, in various places, from 1981 to 2009. Nor do I blame myself for the deaths of those who died near me, no more than I blame myself for the Karen villagers murdered by a Burmese Army slave labor patrol on December 13th, 1992. And I have no regrets for getting payback on that slave labor patrol and taking down the Burmese soldiers who perpetrated that horror. The writer of this article, like every military psychiatrist I encountered when on active duty in Marine infantry and like every military psychiatrist I encountered at the end of combat tours when I was attached as an author to US military in Iraq and Afghanistan, never addresses the real lesson for anyone who has seen action: Gratitude. If you've picked up a rifle, knife, pistol, machine gun or any other weapon and killed a man at war, and come away alive and in one piece, and you don't feel grateful for being alive yourself--then you've got problems. The vast majority of the men I was underfire with in Spain, Burma, Iraq, Kurdistan and Afghanistan came away from combat knowing damn well that our survival was sometimes nothing but chance. And we were, and are, grateful to be alive. But the Marine Corps did not train me to value self-pity, thank God. Self-pity is a sad word, found somewhere between scab and syphillis. The Marines did not train me to fail at war and I thank God and the Marine Corps that I survived. SEMPER FI. But I also know that the doctors never ask any veteran returning from a war zone, "Do you feel grateful for being alive?" The truth is that if the answer to that is yes, then that veteran is rock-solid, mentally. But if the answer is no, there's a helluva' lot of work to do to help him, and ultimately, only a vet listening to other vets is going to come to acceptance--acceptance of his own survival."