Stoic Warriors

“The biceps I left in Iraq”

In the current wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, soldiers survive their wounds in a way that was simply impossible in previous wars. But that survival, due to high tech body armor and helmets, can still be survival with a new body identity – as an amputee, as a person without vision or hearing, as a burn victim. And while there may be prosthetics for amputees and plastic surgery for burn victims, there are no prosthetic eyes for the blinded (just as there are no prosthetic repairs of sexual identity for the millions of noncombatant women who become victims of wars’ genocidal rape). These losses are brute reminders that technology goes only so far, and that leaving a war zone with missing limbs or disabled and violated body parts is still a catastrophic loss. A soldier may joke that he has left his biceps behind in Iraq, but if it means not just that his hope of being Mr America is dashed, but his hope of still being able to hug, or drive, or open the refrigerator door in the usual way, then more than just biceps have been lost.

Much can be said intuitively about the injury to bodily identity caused by different kinds of physical losses. In an obvious way, there are aesthetic injuries that come with disfigurement and deformity. But just as fundamental are identity shifts having to do with restrictions of capabilities and functions that define a good life, in general, and a given individual’s good life, in particular.

“Baptized in Fire and Blood”

Army captain David Rozelle went into battle in Iraq wearing a belt buckle with the inscription: “Brave rifles! Veterans! You have been baptised in fire and blood and have come out steel.” The words are from General Winfield Scott’s 1847 address to cavalrymen during the Mexican-American War. Two months after deployment in Iraq, a mine blew off Rozelle’s right foot, and he became duly baptised in blood and steel. With the help of technology and a relentless will, Rozelle returned to combat service as commander of an armoured cavalry unit, just days from the anniversary of losing his foot. His artificial leg and foot fit into a standard-issue combat boot. Rozelle was and still is an athlete/warrior. His recovery was a matter of gruelling workouts – four hours a day of physical therapy, swimming, weight lifting, mountain biking, skiing. Some six months after his injury, he went skiing in the Rockies, using a prosthetic ski boot. Even without a foot, he passes other swimmers in a pool. Rozelle is tough, but he is also honest about his loss. “There are times I definitely feel disabled.” “At least once a day,” he says, “I miss my foot.” He is in regular email contact with other amputees and has visited hospital units to encourage amputees to pull through: “I sat in rooms with guys and cried with them,” he says. “I think I’ve made a difference with a few.” He is committed to “plain talk” about life as an amputee, something he never got when he first lost his limb.

Now, in some sense, we can view Rozelle as coming to regard his body as an indifferent. For if that means that he is not overly invested in having his foot, and that he can carry on in its absence, then, in a sense, he exhibits Stoic sensibilities. And yet, we should not idealise this dispassionate stance. He is no detached sage – he acknowledges his loss, he “misses” his foot, and he spends a fair portion of his time helping others to acknowledge their loss. In this sense, he may believe that having a functioning, flesh and blood foot is not at the core of his happiness, but it still affects his happiness, and had he no prosthetic, his adjustment might have been far different. What is also striking about Rozelle as a kind of Stoic warrior is his combination of steely will and empathetic compassion. He is all about brawn and will, but also about humanity and the anguish of suffering war’s indignities: “These guys with no arms who have to go home and learn to live again? Shoot, I’ve got it easy.” In Rozelle, there is an optimism and “can do” spirit we associate with Stoicism in its various stripes, but there is also a willingness to accept vulnerability, all too often obscured by the austere lines of orthodox Stoicism.

“Unscathed”

Major Phil Ashby offers another subtle mix of tough and gentle Stoicism. His story is the subject of his gripping memoir, Unscathed. Ashby served as a rugged commando of the British Royal Marines, and later as a marines mountain leader, arguably the longest and toughest special force training in the British military. Though trained in the Arctic and Scotland and Norway to lead warfare efforts in extreme cold weather conditions (and out of uniform, a rugged, Scottish, mountaineering/Outward Bound type), he experienced his most perilous trial in tropical terrain, in Sierra Leone. There, on 6 May, 2000, while serving as an unarmed UN observer helping to implement disarmament, he and three others were taken hostage as civil war erupted. Three days into the siege with increasing worries that they would be beheaded, Ashby, in command, made the decision for the four to attempt an escape. (He estimated his survival chances at 20%).

Ashby, like the Stoics, finds room to exercise strength and a robust will in the most constricted and adverse circumstances. His escape is, as he puts it, a way of trying to survive rather than “simply do[ing] nothing and waiting for the worst to happen.” But there is a further point. Ashby, the invincible mountaineer and “extreme” military athlete, does not, in the end, escape from Sierra Leone physically unscathed. He returns to the UK with “a tiny part of Sierra Leone” having broken through his “defences”. More precisely, a tropical virus attacks his spine, leaving him with significant neurological damage and physical and mental impairment. Ashby is under no under illusions about how this is likely to affect his future: “It sounds big-headed, but I was used to being one of the best at whatever I set out to do and the thought of not being able to work hard and play hard is a pretty desperate prospect.”

Ashby’s worry is that the “contest” of life that he knows best and that has defined good living for him – namely a life of extreme physical challenge and risk – is no longer one in which he can ably compete. No doubt there will be other challenges, other competitions in life, Epictetus will say, against which to test one’s excellences and agency. And some of these will themselves be physical challenges.

Still, Ashby’s voice ought not to be silenced. For him, like so many military men and women, “being able to work hard and play hard” is precisely a matter of having an exemplary body that can be routinely tested in grueling ways. To be deprived of that contest is no small change in the terms of one’s happiness and conception of self.