Virtues of War

by Steven Pressfield

  I close this document with an anecdote of India. On the river Hyphasis, when the army refused to go on, Alexander erected twelve great altars to mark for the ages the farthest limit of his conquests. I attended among numerous officers at the dedication of these monuments. The day was bright and windy, as it often is in that country in intervals between torrential downpours. As the party turned back toward camp, Telamon, the Arcadian mercenary, presented himself before the king. Apparently he and Alexander had an understanding of many years—that of all the army, Telamon alone might claim his discharge at any time, any place. This he now did.

  Alexander reacted first with surprise and regret, at the prospect of being deprived of his friend’s much-loved company, yet he at once recovered, offering to load the man down with treasure. What did Telamon wish? Money, women, an escort-at-arms? With a smile, the Arcadian declared that he bore on his person all he required. This, one could see, was nothing but a staff, some utensils, and a modest pack. Alexander, struck by this, asked the mercenary where he intended to go.

  Telamon indicated the high road east, upon which a number of Indian pilgrims then trekked. “These fellows interest me.” He wished, he said, to make himself their student.

  “To learn what?” Alexander inquired.

  “What comes after being a soldier.”

  Alexander smiled and extended his right hand.

  Telamon clasped it. “Come with me,” he said.

  I stood directly to Alexander’s left, as close to him as a man is to his own arm. It seemed to me that for a moment the king truly considered this. Then he laughed. Of course he could not go. Already aides and chancellors were calling him apart to other business. The grooms brought the party’s horses. Something made me remain at Telamon’s side. As Alexander prepared to mount, a sad, sweet piping caught his ear. He turned toward the sound. There, where the Royal Lancers had made their temporary camp, a brace of cavalry sarissas stood upright, at the ready. The wind passing across their serried shafts produced the melancholy chord.

  “The sarissas are singing, Telamon,” said Alexander. “Tell me, will you miss their song?”

  The king and the mercenary exchanged a valedictory glance; then one of Alexander’s Pages boosted him onto Corona’s back.

  I half-recalled the tale of the sarissas’ song, but could not bring back the full story. What was it? I asked the Arcadian. Telamon was about to answer, when Alexander, overhearing, turned back, in the saddle, and responded himself.

  The sarissa’s song is a sad song.

  He pipes it soft and low.

  I would ply a gentler trade, says he,

  But war is all I know.

  The wind rose in that moment, lifting the corner of Alexander’s cloak. I saw his heel tap Corona’s flank. He reined about and started for the camp, surrounded by his officers.

  IN GRATITUDE

  Of course to the ancient writers, Arrian, Curtius, Diodorus, Justin, Plutarch, Polybius, and others, but thanks also to the many brilliant contemporary scholars whose concepts, insights, and reimaginings of Alexander’s battles I have looted shamelessly: A. B. Bosworth, P. A. Brunt, Peter Connolly, A. M. Devine, Theodore Dodge, Donald Engels, Robin Lane Fox, J. F. C. Fuller, Peter Green, G. T. Griffith, George Grote, J. R. Hamilton, N. G. L. Hammond, Victor Davis Hanson, B. H. Liddell Hart, Waldemar Heckel, D. G. Hogarth, E. W. Marsden, R. D. Milns, Sir Aurel Stein, John Warry, Benjamin Wheeler, and Ulrich Wilcken. I am indebted also to the memoirs and maxims of Caesar, Vegetius, Napoleon, Marshal Saxe, Frederick the Great, and particularly Baron de Marbot, for his swashbuckling tales of cavalry warfare. I’d also like to thank the translators and editors of the Loeb Classical Library Series; their notes and indices, interweaving all works in the series, and particularly the appendices, are tremendously helpful to any researcher, and the texts are impeccable. To my outstanding editor, Bill Thomas, for the original idea, to my in-the-trenches editor, Katie Hall, whose contributions to this manuscript have been innumerable and invaluable. To my secret weapon, author-editor Printer Bowler, and to Gene Kraay, who first sent me an article on the battle of Gaugamela and said, “This might be of interest to you.” Big thanks to Erica Poseley for her expertise on equestrian matters, and to Dr. Linda Rydgig and Dr. Brad Dygert for their equine and veterinary wisdom. To Steffen White for his indefatigable creativity in supporting and promoting this project. And to Dr. Hip Kantzios, as always, for being my guru in all things Greek.

  Epigraph reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of the Loeb Classical Library from XENOPHON: CYROPAEDIA, VOLUMES V and VI, Loeb Classical Library ® Volumes 51 and 52, translated by Walter Miller, pp. 9, 19, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1914. The Loeb Classical Library ® is a registered trademark of the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

  ALSO BY STEVEN PRESSFIELD

  FICTION

  Last of the Amazons

  Tides of War

  Gates of Fire

  The Legend of Bagger Vance

  NONFICTION

  The War of Art

  Visit StevenPressfield.com, Facebook.com/StevePressfield, and Twitter.com/SPressfield for book updates and to share your thoughts.

  Go to the next page to read an excerpt from

  The Profession

  1

  A BROTHER

  MY MOST ANCIENT MEMORY is of a battlefield. I don’t know where. Asia maybe. North Africa. A plain between the hills and the sea.

  The hour was dusk; the fight, which had gone on all day, was over. I was alive. I was looking for my brother. Already I knew he was dead. If he were among the living, he would have found me. I would not have had to look for him.

  Across the field, which stretched for thousands of yards in every direction, you could see the elevations of ground where clashes had concentrated. Men stood and lay upon these. The dying and the dead sprawled across the lower ground, the depressions and the sunken traces. Carrion birds were coming down with the night—crows and ravens from the hills, gulls from the sea.

  I found my brother’s body, broken beneath the wheels of a battle wagon. Three stone columns stood above it on an eminence—a shrine or gate of some kind. The vehicle’s frame had been hacked through by axes and beaten apart by the blows of clubs; the traces were still on fire. All that remained aboveground of my brother was his left arm and hand, which still clutched the battle-axe by which I recognized him. Two village women approached, seeking plunder. “Touch this man,” I told them, “and I will cut your hearts out.”

  I stripped my cloak and wrapped my brother’s body in it. The dames helped me settle him in the earth. As I scraped black dirt over my brother’s bones, the eldest caught my arm. “Pray first,” she said.

  We did. I stood at the foot of my brother’s open grave. I don’t know what I expected to feel: grief maybe, despair. Instead what ascended from that aperture to hell were such waves of love as I have never known in this life or any other. Do not tell me death is real. It is not. I have sustained my heart for ages with the love my brother passed on to me, dead as he was.

  While I prayed, a commander passed on horseback. “Soldier,” he asked, “whom do you bury?” I told him. He reined in, he and his lieutenants, and bared his head. Who was he? Did I know him? When the last spadeful of earth had been mounded atop my brother’s grave, the general’s eyes met mine. He said nothing, yet I knew he had felt what I had, and it had moved him.

  I am a warrior. What I narrate in these pages is between me and other warriors. I will say things that only they will credit and only they understand.

  A warrior, once he reckons his calling and endures its initiation, seeks three things.

  First, a field of conflict. This sphere must be worthy. It must own honor. It must merit the blood he will donate to it.

  Second, a warrior seeks comrades. Brothers-in-arms, with whom he willingly undergoes the trial of death. Such men he recognizes at once and infallibly, by signs others cannot know.

  Last, a warrior
seeks a leader. A leader defines the cause for which the warrior offers sacrifice. Nor is this dumb obedience, as of a beast or a slave, but the knowing heart’s pursuit of vision and significance. The greatest commanders never issue orders. Rather, they compel by their own acts and virtue the emulation of those they command. The great champions throw leadership back on you. They make you answer: Who am I? What do I seek? What is the meaning of my existence in this life?

  I fight for money. Why? Because gold purges vanity and self-importance from the fight. Shall we lay down our lives, you and I, for a flag, a tribe, a notion of the Almighty? I did, once. No more. My gods now are Ares and Eris. Strife. I fight for the fight itself. Pay me. Pay my brother.

  I served once beneath a great commander who asked in council one night, of me and my comrades, if we believed our calling to be a species of penance—a hell or purgatory through which we must pass, again and again, in expurgation of some crime committed eons gone.

  “I do,” he said. He offered us as recompense for this passage “an unmarked grave on a hill with no name, for a cause we cannot understand, in the service of those who hate us.”

  Not one of us hesitated to embrace this.

  BOOK

  ONE

  EUPHRATES

  2

  ESPRESSO STREET

  NINETY MILES SOUTH OF Nazirabad, we sight a convoy of six vehicles speeding west and flying the black-and-yellow death’s-head pennant of CounterArmor. The date is 15 August 2032. In that country, when you run into other Americans, you don’t ask who they’re working for, where they’re from, or what they’re up to. You help them.

  We brake beside the CounterArmor vehicles in the lee of a thirty-foot sand berm. The team is pipeline security Their chief is a black dude, about forty, with a Chicago accent. “The whole goddam city’s gone over!”

  “Over to who?” I ask. A gale is shrieking, the last shreds of a sandstorm that has knocked out satellite and VHF comms for the past two and a half hours.

  “Whoever the hell wants it!”

  The CounterArmor commander’s vehicle is a desert-tan Chevy Simoom with a reinforced-steel X-frame and a .50-caliber mounted topside. My own team is six men in three vehicles—two Lada Neva up-armors and one RT-7, an Iraq-era 7-ton truck configured for air defense. The outfit is part of Force Insertion, the largest private military force in the world and the one to whom all of western Iran has been contracted. I’m in command of the group, which is a standard MRT, Mobile Response Team. The overall contract is with ExxonMobil and BP.

  The CounterArmor trucks are fleeing west for the Iraq border. The Turks have invaded, the chief is telling us. Or maybe it’s the Russians. Tactical nukes have been used, near Qom and Kashan in the No-Go Zone; or maybe that’s false too. “Get in behind us,” he shouts. “We’re gonna need every gun we can get.”

  I tell him our team has orders to enter the city. Five American engineers, civilian contractors, are trapped there, along with the TCN—Third Country Nationals—security detail assigned to protect them. Our instructions are to get them out, along with a technical brief they have prepared for the commanding general’s eyes only.

  “You can’t go back there,” the chief says.

  “Watch us.”

  Nazirabad is a Shiite city of about three hundred thousand. They’re all Shiite cities in Iran. You can tell a Shiite city by the billboards and the vehicles, which are plastered with pix of their saints, Ali and Hussein. A Shiite truck or bus is festooned with religious amulets and geegaws. Reflectorized pinwheels dangle from the rearview and outboard mirrors; framed portraits adorn the dash; every square inch is crazy quilted with talismans and mandalas, good luck charms and magic gimcracks.

  Anyway, that’s what we’re seeing now—forty minutes after leaving the CounterArmor convoy—as Iranian civilian cars, trucks, and buses flood past on the highway, fleeing. Comms are still out, whether from the nukes, the storm, or man-made jamtech, we can’t tell. Our orders are to rescue the engineers. Beyond that, we know nothing. We don’t know what we’re riding into or what our chances are of getting out. This is the bitch of modern warfare. Every technological breakthrough spawns its dedicated countermeasure, with each generation getting cheaper and more accessible. X knocks out Y; before you know it, you’re back to deadfalls and punji stakes.

  So we’re relieved, forty miles south of the city, when two Little Bird choppers—the kind used by the Legion, one of Force Insertion’s subcontractors—show up topside and communicate to us by line-of-sight that other friendlies are up ahead. Twenty minutes later we pick up radio traffic from Legion vehicles heading our way and, half an hour after that, two black bulletproofs—GMC Kodiaks with cork tires and gun-slit windows—roll up and brake, coated with gray dust. An operator springs down, wearing a tuxedo jacket and white linen shirt over cargo pants and boots. We can see, in the distance, the three-level overpass south of the city. The merc comes up, grinning in his black tie. My #2, Chutes Savarese, hails him.

  “Where’s the party?”

  “We brought it, babies.”

  The merc introduces himself as Chris Candelaria and shakes my hand and the others’. His ring says SEAL Team Six. He wears another that I don’t see, under the Nomex glove on his left hand: the Wharton School. The team he’s leading is from DSF, Dienstleister Schwarze Flagge, the crack German-South African outfit that evolved in the twenties out of the Zimbabwean Selous Scouts. He just got out of Isfahan five hours ago, he says. Dried blood paints both his hands and arms; the shoulder of his jacket has been charred through; he’s got a dust-caked battle dressing on his neck, above an ear whose bottom third is scorched black and slathered with green combat antiseptic. But he’s grinning. Like me, he wears a beard. His hair is long and falls in a cascade of black ringlets.

  “You guys going in there?” he asks. From our rise south of the highway, we can see Dragonfly drones in swarms over the city Every punk-ass gang and militia is flying these little fuckers, some the size of kites, others no bigger than pie plates. The streaks of their rockets—high-explosive and flechette—blow away in the wind. “Want some help?”

  The merc and I do a quick map orientation, marking the in-city locations and the routes, order, and sequence we’ll use to approach them. What about supporting fires, I ask. Our team has zero; has he got Close Air Support, drones, anything?

  The cupboard is bare, the merc says. “It’s just you and me, partner. We are officially OOO”—On Our Own—”and SOL.” Shit Outa Luck.

  The contractor has a case of Jack Daniel’s in the lead Kodiak. Standing at the rear doors, he passes us two bottles for each vehicle. He’s got cups but no ice. He introduces the rest of his team, who are more comm guys than trigger pullers. I note two DSFers packing Heckler & Koch 416s, German superguns, with 40 mm grenade launchers underslung. On the truck’s roof squats a donut satlink receiver in a fiberglass cover; inside the vehicle I note a bank of tech gear, including a Xenor encryption box.

  “What kind of team are you leading?” I ask.

  “We’re a financial unit. I’m specking oil and gas contracts. Haven’t had a rifle in my hands for seven years!”

  I’m laughing now. So is Chutes. “Thanks for the help, bro.”

  “I’m coming from an embassy ball,” says Chris, indicating his tux. He nods toward the trucks and guns. “We grabbed this shit and ran.”

  He tells us Isfahan is burning. Tehran too. Mobs are storming the U.S. embassy—and the embassies of the Russians and the Chinese. He doesn’t know who’s attacking whom. He has caught snatches on al-Alam, the Iranian satellite channel, about a rising in Saudi Arabia; the fear in the West, says the report, is of a Shiite sweep across southern Iraq and into the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia. Or maybe it’s all bullshit. The one thing the merc can tell us for sure is the nearest safety is across two hundred miles of hell. “Salter’s at Kirkuk with two armatures, moving toward the Iranian border. If we can get to him, we’re home free.”

  He means our Forc
e Insertion commander, Gen. James Salter. An armature is the equivalent of the old conventional-army airmobile division. The word comes from Latin, meaning equipment or armor. Force Insertion has, along the Iraq-Iran border, four armatures with all supporting arms including artillery (105- and 177 mm howitzers), drone and truckborne antiarmor, and air defense in the form of mobile Chinese I-SAM rocket trucks. Salter’s air assault complement, we know, is at near full strength, meaning each armature has three battalions of extended-range Black Hawk and up-gunned War Hawk choppers, a battalion of heavy Chinooks, plus seventy-two owner-operated AH-64 Apache attack helicopters, all outfitted with the latest aftermarket Chinese, Czech, and Israeli missile technology, American and Indian avionics and satcomms, and flown by American, Russian, South African, Australian, Polish, and British mercs, most of whom have in the old days been majors, lieutenant colonels, and colonels in their respective conventional air forces. Our new friend eyes our ragged-ass gear, which looks like it came from Operation Iraqi Freedom, and the faces of our guys—Chutes Savarese, Junk Olsen, Adrian “Q” Quinones, Marcus Aurelius “Mac” Jones, and Tony Singh, our six-foot-four Hindu from Sri Lanka. He indicates the city.

  “Gentlemen, as Sarpedon said to Glaucus, ‘Let us go forth and win glory—or cede it to others.’ “

  Chutes is grinning. “What’s your name again, man?”

  “Chris Candelaria.”

  “Chris, you’re my kinda dude.”

  They bump elbows. In we go.

  Nazirabad is situated at the juncture of two highways—8, which runs north-south, and 41, east-west. The three-level interchange and its security station, Checkpoint 290, is the funnel through which all motorized entry and egress is channeled. There’s an industrial slum to the north called Ali City, from which most of the bad actors come—tribal militias, criminal gangs, Mahdi revivalists, cabals of displaced army officers, as well as Jaish al-Sha’b, “Army of the People,” which has replaced AQP—al-Qaeda in Persia—plus every imaginable hue of nationalist, separatist, and irredentist forces, including foreign fighters—Turks, Chechens, Syrians, Saudis, Uzbeks, Tajiks, Uighurs, as well as Shiite Kurds, Afghan Hazaras, and Lebanese.