A Beguiling Military Virtue: Honor

Abstract

In this paper, I reflect on various forms of military honor at play within the West's military traditions. I seek the true form. Employing a Humean framework, I clarify the beliefs and their origins grounding five of our highly disparate forms of military honor: (1) Southern Honor (Robert E. Lee at Gettysburg); (2) Regimental Honor (British Lieutenant John Rouse Merriot Chard, 5^th Company Royal Engineers, and Acting Assistant Commissary James Dalton at Rorke's Drift, Zulu Wars, January 22–23, 1879); (3) National Honor (French Marshall Ferdinand Foch at the Marne, World War I, 8 September 1914); (4) Officer Honor (Israeli Nahum Arieli in Israel's War for Independence, 1948); and (5) Warrior ‘Honor’ (the unknown French and Algerian warriors at Chipyong-ni, South Korea, Korean War, 13–15 February 1951). I employ in my analysis four Humean insights derived from a close study of A Treatise of Human Nature and a little known essay by Hume, ‘An Historical Essay on Chivalry and Modern Honour’. They are the Fundamental, the Temporal, the Level of Abstraction, and the Ultimate Insights. The conclusions suggest the following as a characterization of true military honor, a virtue best exemplified in practice by Robert E. Lee: ‘Reliant on esteem for its past, warrior honor is a certain constancy, harmony and refinement of the natural virtues of greatness of mind and extended benevolence. Both virtues for the warrior are deeply rooted in and expressive of a common life for which he is prepared to die’.

Keywords:

• virtue
• honor
• greatness of mind
• benevolence
• justice

Notes

^*The views expressed in this paper are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.

¹See the opening line of Donald Livingston's ‘Dismantling Leviathan’ for the inspiration for this line and this paper's underlying thesis.

²Consistent with Hume's argument, however, is my suggestion that benevolence towards the enemy can only achieve proper, true form in the honorable warrior provided it assumes the form of negative duties (‘I should not do X,’ e.g., ‘I should not kill prisoners,’ or ‘I should not intentionally harm innocents’), rather than positive ones (I should do X,’ e.g., ‘I should extend courtesy to my enemy,’ or ‘I should leave my enemy defeated yet alive to fight again’). At most, benevolence can only take the least positive form of seeking to minimize innocent loss of life, even if in so doing the warrior incurs risk to himself.

³Warriors, it seems, have always related mystically to dirt, whether the dirt of their defended home or the dirt of far-off battlefields. Before the battle of Agincourt, for example, Henry V and his men ‘dropped to their knees and kissed the earth three times’. Every English soldier also put a ‘piece of soil in his mouth before the battle’ (Contamine 1986: 299).

⁴‘Tenseless time’ is where objects are so disposed as ‘merely before and after each other and not related as past, present, and future’ (Livingston, 1984: 115).

⁵The powerful effect of regimental honor is alive and well in the U.S. Army today, especially within U.S. Army airborne regimental units like the 504^th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 325^th Airborne Infantry Regiment, and 505^th Parachute Infantry Regiment (all of the 82d Airborne Division); and the 75^th Ranger Regiment. Thirty-five rangers from the 1^st Battalion, 75^th Ranger Regiment received silver stars (eight) or bronze stars (twenty-seven) for valor for their heroic actions during the Battle of Takur Ghar, Afghanistan, in March 2002 (Operation ANACONDA). Seven Americans were killed in the seventeen-hour firefight. One platoon led by Lieutenant Nate Self was awarded more silver stars (the America's third highest decoration for valor) than perhaps any American platoon in recent memory.

⁶The essence of one controversial sub-plot to Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War (Bowden 1997), Mogadishu, Somalia, October 3--4, 1993.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ted Westhusing*

*The views expressed in this paper are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.