One of the classics of the Hindu world (which includes a large proportion of the world's population and many areas of sensitive interest to current U.S. politics) is that portion of the Sanscrit epic Mahabarata that is called the Bhagavad Gita. Its central portion is a conversation between the Kshatriya (warrior caste) Arjuna -- in classic Hinduism warriordom is a calling and a caste, the second of four castes where Brahmin is the top -- and his charioteer, who turns out to be the god Krishna. Arjuna is engaged in a dynastic strife that pits him against some of his own family. He asks Krishna whether or not he should fight them. The central conflict the Gita is thus between family ties and personal allegiance on one hand, and duty on the other. Krishna tells him duty wins out.

This conflict is a relevant one for today's military as well. I've touched in an earlier piece on whether the military is well advised to see itself as “warriors” at all, people who make war, rather than peace-keepers, people who try to avoid war. Here's a related question: Can the individual soldier, or indeed anyone short of the commander, ever have a sense of the big picture? If not, is this bad? Or should we merely put our heads down and plough ahead, not worry about it?

Most people in the military know they can be individually heroic yet engaged in a losing, or even negative, cause. It's not fun to think about this fact, but that's why we should, at least before getting back to work. But if we don't think about it at all, we condemn ourselves to passivity: we do what we do, but we don't concern ourselves with the bigger picture. That kind of thinking doesn't play as well in the West as it might elsewhere, with our Enlightenment “reason first” heritage, its emphasis on the value of the individual. If you die, somebody ought to understand why.

Historians aren't like that; they can conclude that whole wars were complete wastes. In The March of Folly, Barbara Tuchman considers a series of disastrous military engagements ranging from the Peloponnesian War to the U.S. involvement in Vietnam to ask a question for which she has no answer: Why would governments be so stupid as to do the wrong thing, over and over throughout history? When -- in the words of the 60s song, she seems to ask -- will they ever learn? Unfortunately, the answer seems to be, never.

Let's pause a moment on this notion. It's so clear to Tuchman that, say, the Peloponnesian War was a bad idea for Athens (it never regained its supremacy in Greece) that from this distance we just don't see how they could have done it. I think her surprise is understandable -- you can almost see her shaking her head -- but is based on a false assumption. Namely, that wars are rational acts. I don't think they are. In this they're like most human undertakings.

Such as romance. Think of the final scene in Billy Wilder's classic movie Some Like it Hot (where Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon play guys playing girls, and Marilyn Monroe plays whatever it was she played over and over). Sugar Kowalski, Monroe's character, has repeated bad luck with romance -- she always gets, as she puts it, the “sticky end of the lollipop.” Her weakness is for saxophonists (all the characters are playing in an “all-girl” band; the boys are running from the Mob). Yet at the end of the movie, with Tony Curtis revealed as a man, she runs down the dock in her ridiculous but sublime high heels to join him in a motor boat knowing full well that a) it's a bad idea and b) she's likely to get the sticky end of the lollipop again. She can't help herself, she explains; saxophonists are her weakness. It's hardly rational, but it's understandable, and it's what we want to see her do.

Wars are sometimes just as emotional as romance. They're relatively easy to start (think of the assassination of the heir to the Austrian throne that set in motion World War I) and usually very hard to end. Typically they begin with issues of honor or territory, revenge or the vision of someone in power -- none of which have much to do with rationality or the big picture, or the point of those who carry out the war. Then wars develop in ways people never expected. You don't get a sum-up balance sheet beforehand that tells you how many men and women you're going to lose, how much territory, how much international goodwill, so that you can decide rationally based on that. If the European powers had known before the stalemate of trench warfare in 1915, would they have said that these few yards of scorched earth, endlessly retaken by each side, were worth the cost in human lives?

Indeed the most fundamental thing about wars, as many theorists including Clausewitz have pointed out, is that they rarely go the way you think they're going to. All war is about your enemy trying precisely to nullify and reverse everything you do. Sure, you may start out with a balance sheet of your own: we're willing to take X losses for Y gain. But who says the losses won't be 10 X, the gain 1/10 Y? What do you do then?

The guys and gals actually coming to terms with the alteration from X to 10 X and from Y to 1/10 Y are the ones who have to assess the altered circumstances and ask, what do we do now? It's quite a different situation than the distanced perspective of the historian, who may well conclude after the fact that this war was a folly, as Tuchman does. How does that help the people on the field right here, right now? Whether or not you believe this, you're not going to act any differently.

If perspective of the working soldier or sailor is alien to that of the historian, it's equally far from the perspective of the politician. The position of the guys and gals who actually have to get (say) the Jeep out of the hole once it's in is quite different from that of the rabble-rouser back home who posited the Jeep already entering the capital city. Here it is in the mud, and somebody has to deal with that. It's not going to be the politicians.

Krishna tells Arjuna to keep his head down and not to worry about it. Yet the power of the Gita, and the fact that it's central to world literature, comes from the fact that he does worry. And so should we.