Jesse Glenn Gray’s book The Warriors, Reflections on Men in Battle is his personal attempt to consider what war means, how war changes those who fight in it and how it affects them once the fighting is ended. His book may be summoned up by this quote:
“But the soldier who has yielded himself to the fortunes of war, has sought to kill and to escape being killed, or who has even lived long enough in the disordered landscape of battle, is no longer what he was. He becomes in some sense a fighter, whether he wills it or not – at least most men do. His moods and disposition are affected by the presence of others and the encompassing environment of threat and fear”.[1]
Glenn Gray was conscripted into the US Army on 8 May 1941, on the same day he received his PhD in Philosophy from Columbia University. He served as a private before being commissioned as a second lieutenant. He served as a counter intelligence officer in Italy, France and Germany.[2] After the war, he returned to the United States he began his career as a professor.
The Warriors was published 14 years after the Second World War. Glenn Gray wrote that ‘war reveals dimensions of human nature both above and below the acceptable standards for humanity’.[3]
He argued that battle has an enduring appeal. ‘War can be . . . most excruciatingly boring’ but is also had a magnetic quality.[4] He said that the ‘secret attractions of war…[were] the delight in seeing, the delight in comradeship, the delight in destruction’.[5] He believed for some people ‘the war years are what Dixon Weeter has well called “the one great lyric passage in their lives”’.[6]
He believed that there was a major difference between friendship and comradeship in war. Serving with other men in combat was another ‘appeal of war, the communal experience we called comradeship,…the one genuine advantage of battle that peace can never offer’.[7] Friendship on the other hand was one of the greatest joys of life. He wrote that ‘when a person finds a friend to whom he can open his heart, when a woman finds a man she can love and to whom she can bear children, when any of us find a community we can love and serve, our little lives take on a significance we had not dreamed of.”[8]
For Glenn Gray, the difference between friendship and comradeship was:
‘a heightened awareness of the self in friendship and the suppression of self-awareness in comradeship. Friends do not seek to lose their identity, as comrades…do. On the contrary, friends find themselves in each other and thereby gain greater self-knowledge and self-possession…joy and understanding…Our concern…if for the friend. While comradeship wants to break down the walls of self, friendship seeks to expand these walls and keep them intact. The one relationship is ecstatic, the other is wholly individual’.[9]
He also believed that war brought the combatant and death into a new relationship. Soldiers could not ‘ignore death, for it is all to prevalent’.[10] Being in action and losing people that meant people ‘understand how much more precious life gets when you realize what a finite thing it is’.[11] It was not ‘the frequency of death but the manner of dying makes a qualitative difference’.[12]
Glenn Gray’s book is a personal philosophical meditation on what warfare did to him and what he saw its impact was in others. It is not the work of the average soldier but the views of highly literate educated intellectual. His style and prose are academic, introspective and ethereal. It is not an easy read but his observations are worth considering.
[1] Jesse Glenn Gray, The Warriors, Reflections on Men in Battle (NY, USA: Harper & Row, 1967), p.27.
[2] Ibid., pp.xxxii-xxxiii.
[3] Ibid., p.242.
[4] Ibid., p.12.
[5] Ibid., pp.28-29.
[6] Ibid., p.28.
[7] Ibid., p.39.
[8] Ibid., p.239.
[9] Ibid., p.90.
[10] Ibid., p.101.
[11] John Nagl, ‘Our Lives Marked By War: Reflections on J. Glenn Gray’s The Warriors’, 5 September 2013. https://www.bing.com/ck/a?!&&p=cff2acf17c061589f71c758cfffa08fd8ac68e4b12e5c750c5f7bfaebb6e5bd6JmltdHM9MTY1MzM5NzkxNSZpZ3VpZD0wYjUyOTY0ZC1jNmYwLTRkZWEtOGM0ZS0yZTZiNzNmNDJhZTkmaW5zaWQ9NTE2MA&ptn=3&fclid=15a6e4b7-db63-11ec-9038-ba94b7d43479&u=a1aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuanVuaWF0YS5lZHUvb2ZmaWNlcy9qdW5pYXRhLXZvaWNlcy9wYXN0LXZlcnNpb24vbWVkaWEvbmFnbC1vdXItbGl2ZXMucGRm&ntb=1 Accessed 24.5.22.
[12] Jesse Glenn Gray, The Warriors, Reflections on Men in Battle (NY, USA: Harper & Row, 1967), p.100.