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A Manifesto for Waging Peace

As fire does not extinguish fire, so evil cannot extinguish evil. Only goodness, meeting evil and not infected by it, conquers evil. That this is so is in man’s spiritual world an immutable law comparable to the law of Galileo.

—Leo Tolstoy ¹

The Soldier above all other people prays for peace, for he must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war.

—General Douglas MacArthur ²

Since my earliest memories, I have been obsessed with war. My father served in the Korean and Vietnam wars, and when I was young I saw how war can ruin families. I grew up as an only child in Alabama, and I have fond memories of being three years old and watching my father tend to his garden, feed the birds in our backyard, and chase away a spider that almost frightened me to death. But when I was four years old, everything changed.

I was sleeping peacefully late one night when I felt someone grab my leg and drag me from my bed onto the floor. This person pulled my leg so hard that I heard my pajama pants rip down the middle. Looking up and seeing my father, I began to panic as he pulled my hair and told me he was going to kill me. His cursing and my screaming woke my mother, who ran into the room and bear-hugged him until he finally calmed down.

When I was four years old, something else occurred that I could not understand at the time, but that I would later attribute to my father’s experiences during war. One evening, I heard my father screaming at my mother as he threatened to shoot himself with his pistol. This was the first time I heard him threaten to commit suicide, but it would not be the last. Throughout my childhood, I watched my father lose his grip on reality, and his frightening behavior caused me to struggle with my own sanity. Rage overshadowed his once peaceful nature, and when I heard him complain about violent nightmares, I realized that something called war had taken my gentle father from me.

During these years, I internalized my father’s despair and longed for an escape from his violent behavior. When I was five, this trauma led to my lifelong obsession with suffering and war—when I had a vivid dream that I killed myself. I still remember the dream clearly: I walked through the front door of my house, where I saw both my parents lying dead in coffins. Without thinking, I went to the bathroom cabinet with the intent of stabbing myself in the heart. I opened a drawer and saw a large pair of scissors, but their menacing size frightened me. Next to them, I saw a smaller pair of scissors that my mother used to clip my fingernails. I picked them up, stabbed myself in the chest, and watched as blood covered my hands. Then I walked to my mother’s coffin and laid in it with her, where I waited to die so that my anguish would finally end.

Ever since I woke up from that dream, I have been obsessed with learning if and how war could ever end. Seeing how war had affected my parents fueled this obsession throughout my childhood. Growing up during the Great Depression in Virginia, my father was half white and half black, and he joined the army when it was still segregated. My father was a career soldier who spent thirty years in the military, was decorated for valor during combat, and retired at the highest enlisted rank. My mother was not a stranger to war either. Born in Japan, she experienced war as a small girl during World War II. Her family later moved to Korea, where she lived during the Korean War.

When I was a teenager, I wanted to know if war will ever end. But I realized that I could never know the answer to this question unless I also asked and answered some fundamental questions about human nature. Are human beings naturally violent? Throughout world history, why does war seem like the norm and why does peace seem like the anomaly? Is war an inescapable part of human nature?

When I was in eighth grade I asked one of my teachers, “Where does war come from?”

“Human beings are naturally violent and warlike,” she told me. “War is a part of human nature, because people are evil. It is human nature to be greedy, hateful, and selfish.”

As I pondered her response to my question, I realized that her answer did not make sense. If human beings are naturally violent and warlike, why does war drive so many people like my father insane?

From that point onward, I was determined to study war the way a doctor studies an illness. Only then could I understand if world peace would ever become more than a cliché. By studying war, I hoped to learn if General Douglas MacArthur was correct when he said, “Only the dead have seen the end of war.”³ I also hoped to learn if war is truly an inescapable part of human nature or if it is even possible to define human nature. I did not know where these questions would take me, but I did know that if war and violence were truly a part of human nature, it would be naïve to assume war would ever end. As I explored the causes and cure for war, however, I began to find strong evidence which showed that people are not naturally violent.

When I attended West Point in 1998 as a freshman, I read a book called On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. This book was written by Dave Grossman, a lieutenant colonel in the army and a former West Point psychology professor. In On Killing Grossman said, “War is an environment that will psychologically debilitate 98 percent of all who participate in it for any length of time. And the 2 percent who are not driven insane by war appear to have already been insane—aggressive psychopaths—before coming to the battlefield.”⁴ These words conveyed a fact about war I already knew from witnessing my father’s agony, but Grossman expressed other profound ideas that changed how I saw war, along with the potential for peace.

In On Killing Grossman said that human beings have an innate resistance to killing other human beings. A country is only capable of waging war, he explained, if propaganda is used to dehumanize the enemy. Sometimes this dehumanization process consists of calling the enemy derogatory names such as “Krauts,” “Japs,” or “Gooks.” In other instances it consists of stereotyping the enemy as the epitome of everything evil in the world while believing that one’s own country is the source of everything good, moral, or holy.

The only way to kill human beings and not experience guilt or remorse is to imagine they are not human beings. This involves viewing people as subhuman—so we can rationalize the act of killing—or seeing people as evil monsters so we can perceive the act of killing as a necessary purging of evil from the world. Grossman also explains that the most traumatic experiences in war occur when someone kills a human being, not when someone is in physical danger. According to Grossman’s extensive research, the survivors of the London bombings during World War II did not suffer as much psychological trauma as the soldiers in Vietnam who killed men, women, and children at close range, where they could see the faces of their victims.