In Search of the Warrior Spirit

You're probably familiar with the late 70s military interest in the Human Potential movement as written up by Jon Ronson in The Men Who Stare At Goats and adapted into a movie. The basic gist is that a few renegade officers envisioned a unit of tuned in Warrior-Monks, who would dominate the battlefield with ESP. The whole thing got funded with the DoD equivalent of spare change, and went nowhere because it was mostly nonsense.

One of those efforts which actually went through in 1985 was a six month school to teach 25 Green Berets the basics of Aikido and Zen meditation. Strozzi-Heckler was one of the instructors in the Trojan Warrior Program (logo: a trojan horse over crossed lightsabers, with the motto "May the Force be with you" in show more Latin.) This book is structured as a journal of the school, and Strozzi-Heckler's own thoughts on the relationship between his warrior tradition, the profession of arms as practiced by his students, and Reagan's America.

Strozzi-Heckler is evangelical about Aikido, and the benefits of its "way of harmonious spirit." Rather than opposing strength on strength, Aikido is about entering and blending with the attack, an using its energy against the aggressor. Martial arts are a relatively easy sell to the Green Berets, but Zen and meditation are much harder. Strozzi-Heckler and his fellow teachers endure mockery and deception as they try and get their soldiers to become comfortable with their feelings, with sitting quietly, and with emptiness. And even though he's in good shape, Special Forces training is hard, and Strozzi-Heckler is injured several times in the dojo and in ruck marches. Maritime training along the Atlantic Coast seems very dangerous.

The description of the course is interspersed with essays on warrior culture, machismo, the potential of honor in the atomic age, and the ethics of teaching New Age techniques to men who will likely be deployed to a dirty war in Latin America. These essays can get repetitive, but Strozzi-Heckler circles around to two basic core ideas: Warriors are authentic in thought, word, and deed; and warriors strive for self-knowledge and self-improvement in a holistic sense. The students know the value of the warrior ideal, and it pains them to fall short, to be caught up in machismo posturing and military careerism. Yet those transcendent moments of physical excellent, of measuring oneself against the Ultimate in battle, make up for lousy pay and a chance of death. Strozzi-Heckler learned a lot from this book, and his students did too, although not enough to make aikido and meditation part of Army Basic, or even Special Forces training.

My edition is the 1992 paperback, with an afterwards about the Gulf War. I'm interested to see what's changed in light of the Long War on Terror. show less