This conclusion does not just apply to the military. Edward Shils and Morris Janowitz, for instance, emphasize that the Wehrmacht’s ability to do battle was based not on National Socialist fervor, but on the need to satisfy personal needs within the context of group relationships.881 Moreover, this aspect of the Wehrmacht’s organization was supported by modern management and personnel techniques.882 A soldier’s immediate social environment decides how he perceives and interprets war, and the parameters by which he targets and evaluates his own actions. Every member of a group sees himself as he believes others see him. That, as Erving Goffman has shown in his “stigma” study, provides the most powerful motivation for people to conform to the norms of the group. 883 In war, for an indeterminate length of time and under the most extreme conditions, the soldier is part of a group he can neither leave nor seek out according to his own personal preference. That is completely different from civilian life, in which people select their own groups. The lack of alternatives to the group a soldier is part of and helps comprise makes it an all-decisive normative and practical entity, especially as battle is a life-or-death situation. To paraphrase a sentiment often expressed in American combat briefings in Vietnam: I don’t know why I’m here, and you don’t know why you’re here, but let’s try our best to do a good job and stay alive.884
Such sentiments underscore the importance of one’s comrades for everything that happens and is thought or decided during war. This far outweighs the significance of any worldviews, convictions, or historical inevitabilities, which might have provided the external conditions leading to the war itself. The internal reality of war, as it presents itself to soldiers, is the group. That is how war appeared to Vietnam veteran Michael Bernhardt, who refused to participate in the My Lai massacre and was subsequently ostracized. The only thing that counted, Bernhardt later recalled, was how people thought of you in the here and now, how people in your immediate surroundings regarded you. Bernhardt’s unit was his entire world. What they thought was right,
The German soldier Willy Peter Reese would have agreed with Bernhardt:
Just like winter clothing covers up almost all of you except for your eyes, the fact of being a soldier only allowed space for tiny bits of individuality. We were in uniform. Not only were we unwashed, unshaven, full of lice and sickness. We were corrupted in our souls, little more than the sum of our blood, guts and bones. Our camaraderie arose from our forced dependency on one another and from living together in the closest of confines. Our humor was cruel toward others, black, satiric, obscene, biting, angry. It was a game played with casualties, brains blown out, lice, pus and excrement. A nothingness of the soul…. We had no belief to carry us, and any philosophy only existed to help us see the world in somewhat lighter terms. The fact that we were soldiers was enough to justify any crimes and corruption and was sufficient basis for an existence in hell…. We were of no significance, and neither were starvation, frostbite, typhus, dysentery, people freezing to death or being crippled and killed, destroyed villages, plundered cities, freedom and peace. Individuals were least important of all. We could die without a care.886
Willy Peter Reese was killed shortly after he wrote these words. His words resonate with another universal truth of war:
