Choosing to Be Whole

Editor's Note: This essay, written in 1983, is reprinted without change. It retains its contemporary relevance. For additional essays on war, go to the Essays on War section of A Further Flight on this site.

Like a great and terrible fish, the submarine slips through the water. Its passage is silent, its location virtually undetectable. In all the world, only the submarine's crew and one office in the Pentagon know where it is. In its belly lies death.

The submarine is the predator of naval warfare, striking suddenly and without warning from below the water. In two world wars it sent surface vessels to the bottom, making navigation difficult or next to impossible for civilian ships and creating havoc among the surface fleets of battleships and aircraft carriers.

Submarines hunt the enemy's fleet even now. But that is not the job of this submarine. Its quarry is cities. It carries twelve missile launchers. Each of its missiles carries eight warheads. Each warhead has the explosive power of one hundred thousand tons of TNT. Each can destroy a city-over one hundred fifty cities in all.

The submarine passes in silence, almost as if it belongs to the sea it inhabits. But it does not. It is one of the great killing machines of history.

Jason-not his real name-joined the Navy seeking a job, adventure, a new skill, service to his country. He did well in training, advancing in his profession until he was assigned to one of the elite jobs-a technician on a nuclear submarine. He had become a living part of an engine of death.

He thought little of this at first. The work was interesting, and he did not mind being submerged for three or four months on end. The daily routine kept him from being bored. Double shifts, practice exercises, challenging work maintaining the submarine's systems. It was enough.

So it went through his first year of submarine duty. If he wondered at times what it all meant, he kept such thought to himself and from himself. He never even saw the missiles which were the submarine's whole reason for being.

All this changed suddenly and unexpectedly one morning when the submarine was in its home port for routine maintenance. Jason was watching as the missiles were being unloaded. He counted them-one, two, three, a dozen-and he reflected, as if for the first time, on the meaning of each missile, on its eight warheads, on what each of those warheads could do.

He thought of his home town, the shriek of the incoming warhead, the mushroom cloud, and the twisted rubble that would remain. Pictures of melted flesh and heaps of ash where there had once been people came to him unbidden.

It was more than he could bear. He turned on his heel and walked away.

As it happens, shortly after he decided to leave the Navy, Jason met a man who was a conscientious objector. He learned that he was not alone, not helpless, not forced to choose between prison and his conscience. But this essay is not solely, or even primarily, about Jason or nuclear submarines. It is about all of us.

Jason faced the same choice that all of us do. It came in a particularly clear yet particularly difficult form. He knew, when he thought about it, that he was part of an engine of mass destruction. He thought about it very seldom, for he saw no alternative. Far better to go from day to day, letting the routine fill in for thought.

On the day he left the Navy, there was no routine. He could see clearly what the routine meant. He made no strategic calculation, developed no rationale, wrote no carefully-crafted claim. All this would come later. That morning, all that mattered was ceasing to be part of the evil. Suddenly, for him, there was no alternative to leaving.

He had asked himself the crucial question: Why must we do evil in the service of good? And he had answered: We cannot erase all evil from our lives, but this evil I, at least, cannot do. I cannot change the world, at least not at once, but I can change myself. I can reject this one overwhelming evil, even if I can never become perfect.

The conventional wisdom holds that the warheads on Jason's submarine are not wholly evil. They are weapons of peace, designed to deter but not to be used. All the major authorities agree, and there is much talk of strategy, and retaliation, and balance of forces, and survivability. It all sounds very reasonable.

So with other weapons of war. They are to be used to defend our cities and our children. They are designed not to kill but to protect. All the best thinkers agree, or so it seems.

It is never easy to say that the best thinkers are wrong. This is particularly so in matters of right and wrong, where reasonable people can and do disagree. My stand of conscience is your coward's way out. Your reasonable argument is, for me, a moral contradiction in terms. Sometimes we can barely talk about these matters without rancor, name-calling, and accusations.

Very little of this occurred to Jason as he left his submarine. He knew he had to leave, and he did not care at that point what anyone else thought or what arguments they might marshall against him. As he reflected later, he wondered at times whether there was something wrong with him rather than the system he had rejected. Then he found support and discovered that he was not mad after all.

Jason's actions were personal. He made no public stand, and he did not invite others to join him. He did what he had to do, as others do who, though they do not reject all war, find that they cannot follow certain orders or implement certain policies. All of these people, however differently, had drawn lines which they could not cross. They were thinking not of others but of their own integrity. To remain whole, they had to refuse to participate in the evil that was in their power to refuse.

Yet Jason's act of conscience, like all acts of conscience, was also, and inescapably, universal. I have changed, his actions said. Reflect on me and follow my example. Learn to be whole. Reject those evils which you can reject.

It is this which makes conscientious objection in all its forms both rare and precious. Few will stand against the accumulated wisdom of the best thinkers. Even fewer will hold to that stand when all about them call them traitor or coward. Yet in the long run, it is only by seeing the evils of the world clearly and refusing to countenance them that we will be saved.

Jason stopped no missiles. He did not bring down the Navy or block his submarine from leaving port. No one person could do that. What he and others like him did was to show that there is hope. He changed; all of us can change. We invented the systems that threatened to destroy us; we can change them.

We need not know the shape of that change to know that it can and must take place. That is what Jason and others like him have said by their example. Things need not be as they have been. They can be better. By becoming whole I have in my small way made them better. Join with me in hope.

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