Run to the Fire

“If you could be born at any other time in history,” the interviewer asked, “when would it be?”

The SEAL’s response: “Vietnam—so I could run boat operations as a frogman.”

The SEAL, Jocko Willink, wasn’t speaking as a wet-eared boy dazzled with the fantasies of war. He served for decades in the special forces, leading his team with distinction through multiple deployments in Iraq, including in the 2006 Battle of Ramadi. During his tenure, he lost many friends on that and other deployments.

The Vietnam War was, likewise, no stranger. Jocko drank deep from the well of  Vietnam War memoirs and reports. He trained under, partied with, and served alongside Vietnam vets. He had spent hundreds of hours interviewing Huey pilots, Green Berets, and Marine grunts who had survived that hell.

He knew exactly what he was getting into when he said he wanted to wade neck-deep in estuaries and ambush Charlie.  Leeches.  Shrapnel in the ass. The threat of being captured, tortured, and executed or—worse—taken back to the Hanoi Hilton for years of beatings and interrogations.

And still, he wanted a piece of the action.Jocko’s instinct was to run to the fire rather than away.

The warrior instinct.

Few men are warriors.

Courage has always been in short supply. Greek fragments celebrate the hoplite who flees and lives to fight another day. Conscripts snuck home during the Civil War. And, though apocryphal, only 20% of riflemen on the front fired their rifles throughout WWII.

The Spartans, at their peak, did not suffer from wont of valor. They won many battles through the sheer terror that their presence provoked. Marching silently and in formation, many rival city-states threw down their arms or submitted rather than face the Lacedaemonian phalanxes.

Their five-century hegemony wasn’t accidental; it was earned. Earned through rigorous eugenics and training programs that produced an elite corpse of disciplined, steel-willed hoplites.

The common Athenian hoplite was no pushover. Raised in the absence of air-conditioning, delivery-service apps, food additives, and streaming services, they would have been more inured to pain and emboldened by their hardship than the slump-backed, obese, urban bugman of today.

Modernity has eroded that sliver of courage that early ages endeavored to preserve.What I hear spewing from the mouths of bugmen online and off is a similar litany of excuses and grievances.

“I can’t succeed because of [racism, capitalism, communism, Kali Yuga, my mom, poverty, etc.].”

“There’s no point in trying because…”

“Women are cooked. No one’s going to talk to me.”

“The job market is designed to demoralize and denigrate us. I can’t get ahead.”

“We live in GHEY and DEGENERATE times. All that’s left is for me to retire to my cottage and make artisanal brie.”

What a bunch of spineless whining.

Jocko took a hard look at a PTF boat getting lit up by a NVA platoon, and he decided he wanted a piece of that.

Frogman life was hellish. Many of the first-generation operators that arrived in Vietnam were welcomed with bare-bone shelters, few supplies, and plenty of mortar shells. The food was bad. The girls, non-existent. The only company they could entertain, besides themselves, was flies, the sun, and the fungus reddening their balls.

All this to grab a chance to lodge a piece of lead into a gook’s lungs, protect the man by your side, and achieve martial glory.

Very, very few were up to the task then, but Jocko saw all this and said, “Come get some!”

What a far cry from the professional excuse-makers and complainers who always seem to be or want to be somewhere else.

Martial valor and the adventures of war are, for most of us, at a distance, but the darkness and depravity that so many rail against give us ample opportunity to prove our worth and serve our values with distinction.

Our struggles are not against pimple-ridden, emaciated guerrillas. They are against mediocrity, distraction, and the oppressive schoolmarms that have infiltrated nearly every facet of society.

The men who moan and despair today would not be the one’s infiltrating behind enemy lines to stifle Communism’s spread in Southeast Asia. They would not have numbered Sterling’s commandos in the deserts of North Africa. They would not have been among the captains of Alexander’s Royal Guard, marching stoically across Iran.

They would have been defecating themselves in the back of the formation, faking an illness on the verge of a big operation, or grumbling back in South Carolina, all the while reassuring themselves that they are the really brave ones.

They would not run to the fire. They would run from it—all the while running their mouth and congratulating themselves on their cleverness and valor. They are cowards.

Run to the fire.

We do not have a Vietnam or a Normandy. Our battles are less flashy and kinetic (as of now).

We have the invasion of migrants, the degradation of standards, the pollution of the oceans, the finger-wagging of Pharisees, the celebration of obesity, illness, and ugliness, the relishing of ignorance, torpor, and avarice, the rapid disruptions brought on by accelerated technological progress.

The issues we face are endless—and it is into this bloated inferno that we must run.This is our fire.

This is the hour of our testing.

This is the struggle of our life.

This is our ‘Nam.

The man of courage does not endlessly whinge and furtively hope that he could have been born in an age of TRUE men and TRUE freedom.

A time when things were easier, adventure was more within reach, and martial exploits a path to glory.

The man of courage thanks the gods for this accursed epoch and the struggle it has lain at his feet.

He does not seek respite or quarter.

He seeks a hotter fire.

He seeks an impossible burden that will crush and will immortalize him.

He runs to the fire.