Philip Berrigan Confronts the Ancient Young Warrior

by Philip Berrigan

Excerpted from A Ministry of Risk: The Collected Writings of Philip Berrigan, edited by Brad Wolf. Fordham University Press, 2024. More information at philipberrigan.com.

Written in 1996 for his autobiography “Fighting the Lamb’s War,” Phil reflects on his military service as a combat soldier during World War II.

Before I left for basic training, my brother invited me to visit the Jesuit Novitiate at Poughkeepsie. Daniel wanted me to think a little harder about going to war, and he arranged for me to take a four-day retreat at Saint Andrews. The rector provided me the exercises of Saint Ignatius, and I walked alone, praying for guidance, trying to decide what to do. Should I ask for a deferment for military service? Should I agree to enter the seminary, and begin to study for the priesthood? What did God have in mind for me? I didn’t really want to be a priest, and I longed to join my older brothers at the battlefront. I wanted to join the hunt for Adolf Hitler, to hack him into pieces, and to count the demons as they flew out of his wounds. I wanted to charge pillboxes, blow up machine gun nests, and fight hand to hand with my country’s enemies. I was 19 years old. Willing, and most able, to be a warrior.

I hugged Dan goodbye, thanked the Jesuit fathers for their kindness, and saw my parents one more time before boarding a train for Camp Gordon. There were no bands or cheering crowds. No rousing speeches or rhetorical binges. Our parting was quiet, loving, gracious, and altogether devoid of drama. As young men had been doing for centuries, I rode off to slay the enemy. A tough and rather cocky kid, striding toward the valley of death. Never imagining, for one moment, that I might come home like the soldier in Dalton Trumbo’s novel, Johnny Got His Gun. A limbless torso. Blind, unable to speak, yet fully alive. Capable of feeling love and loneliness and despair. Abandoned to a miserable hospital bed, knowing that the nurses and doctors considered me little more than a cooked carrot.

War is a necessary rite of passage for turning boys into warriors. Someday, if we listened closely, trained hard, and got real smart, we too might become real men. Before that happened, we could play at being soldiers, killing the enemy during war games. I became an expert marksman with a .37-millimeter antitank gun, an obsolete weapon, but the best we had for our training. We fired at our targets from a three or four-hundred yards range and I was very good, knocking enemy tanks off like clay pigeons, parboiling Nazi soldiers inside their steel ovens. I received a promotion to corporal for being the best at headquarters battery with this weapon.

I went to infantry OCS—Officer Candidate School—at Fontainebleau. Then I was assigned to the 8th Infantry Division, a hardcore combat unit that had already fought its way across northern France and on into Germany, stopping close to the Danish border.

When I graduated from OCS, I was a skilled killer, trained in the use of all small arms, clever with a bayonet, good with a submachine gun and the Browning automatic rifle. That is exactly what I was: a highly skilled young killer.

I saw the results of blanket bombing in Munster, a German city completely leveled, utterly destroyed, by allied planes. Our bulldozers scraped roads through the ruins, shoving rubble and rotting civilians into great, putrid-smelling heaps. Miraculously, a Catholic hospital was still standing, and one afternoon I happened to be talking to an officer who claimed that something strange was going on in the cellar of the building. He said that the place was stacked floor to ceiling with bodies and, even stranger, that German doctors were conducting experiments on these corpses.

So down we went into this frightful charnel house where forty or fifty civilians were bobbing up and down in huge vats of formaldehyde. Some were decapitated. Others appeared to be untouched. A teenage boy floated in one vat. His head was missing, but the rest of his body was perfect. Not a mark on that poor boy. The captain had been right. In the middle of all that carnage, those doctors were conducting research, trying to learn better ways to save the lives of people who were ripped to pieces in bombing raids or blown apart in artillery strikes. Preparing for the next war, even though this one was still a long way from being over.

I was blasé and cynical about the dead. The Germans had been terrorizing Europe for years, and now it was payback time. I didn’t really regard the civilians in those vats as innocent bystanders. They were the enemy. Just part of the rubble of the Third Reich. I felt neither pride in what we had done, nor remorse for the victims of our bombing. I did what soldiers must do in order to justify their actions. I demonized the German people.

In Catholic Church and parochial schools, I had learned that God created human beings in His own image and that all human beings carry the divine within us. In order to kill other men and women, I needed to make them less human. I needed to become anesthetized; more, I had to believe that I would never become one of those mutilated things. I’m not like them, God was on my side. Unlike them, I was blessed, surrounded with the armor of pure goodness.

My brother Tom was a First Lieutenant in the 29th infantry, and he began noticing our unit’s trucks, so he ordered his driver to catch up with one, found out where we were located, and drove into our camp one day. I hadn’t seen him in two and a half years, but I knew he had been through hell, fighting all the way from the beaches of Normandy into Belgium. We shook hands and hugged, nearly in tears, trying to catch up on all the news, knowing that this might be the last time we would see one another alive.

I went with him to the front where American troops were dug in on a very wide arc, fully expecting to be overrun because they didn’t have enough men. Two regiments were spread over a 20-mile front; they were very sparse. It wouldn’t have taken much for the Germans to breakthrough those lines, and then come for us. Our unit had been under mortar fire. We lived through bombing attacks and were pounded by the Germans’ terrifying 88-millimeter antitank gun, an excellent, highly accurate weapon. We took some casualties, but I was still a reckless kid who thought he could stroll, unscathed, through the valley of death. I had come to Europe to do a job that, I thought, would involve great danger. The more death I faced, the better off the world would be. I needed to keep proving that I wasn’t just an ordinary soldier. I was Philip the Bold, son of Thomas the Brave, toughest Irish American kid on the block. More ignorant, I know now, than brave.

I helped free the world from Hitler’s reign of terror. I served my country in war time because I thought that’s what patriots do. God may tell us not to kill, but when the state calls, we must obey. We must become skilled, remorseless killers, willing to use any means to defeat the enemy.

Years after my return from the killing fields, I looked into the mirror of my own violence. What I saw there forced me to rethink and redefine the meaning of sanity. I realized that while I considered Adolph Eichmann a war criminal and despised him for participating in the Holocaust, we actually had a few things in common. Like him, I had only been following orders. Like him, I was sane enough to do my duty, and do it well. Like him, I believed that wars are fought for noble reasons. We were both true believers, one a mass murderer, the other a killer on a smaller scale.

When I first started to think about these things, my heart turned to stone, my head swam with clouds of confusion. Examining my own responsibility for the death of 70 million people in World War II, it occurred to me that the United States government, and I as a soldier, had adopted some of the worst aspects of Nazism. The Luftwaffe bombed London, so we had the right to firebomb Dresden. The Germans murdered civilians en masse, so we were entitled to slaughter their women and children. Our actions were not crimes against humanity, they were retaliating for their crimes. Their actions were barbaric, our reactions were just. I vacillated between feeling betrayed, in the sense that I was betraying some sacred trust, some sacrosanct ideal.

My world began to shift, rather slowly at first, more dramatically as I read and thought and prayed, seeking for answers in a nation that condemned its warriors to the silence of agreement. Seventy million dead. Hundreds of billions of dollars in damage. Physical and psychological and spiritual wounds that would never heal. And after the war, my country helping high ranking Nazis find safe-haven from justice, protecting the very people against whom I and my brothers fought.

No, such things were not compatible with reason or sanity.

Then what, I wondered, did it all mean? Eventually, but not until the early 60s, I would conclude that war is the big lie, subordinated to, and entrenched by, lots of little lies.

For many years I clung to my own set of lies, hiding within the shell of collective agreement. In time, that shell began to crack. Light streamed in, forcing me to reexamine killing, making me take a hard, non-rhetorical, look at war. I saw a boy standing on the field of battle, bristling with weapons, preparing to shed his blood, and spill the blood of his enemies, for his king, his emperor, his state, some grand, everlasting, ideal. An ancient figure, stooped with the knowledge that the killing had gone on for centuries, and could well continue until the end of time.

The boy took off his helmet, and I could see the pain in his eyes, see that he wanted to lay down his sword and shield, but that he feared the consequences. It was one thing to die on the field of battle, quite another to be banished to the realm of cowards. I reached out to him, and found myself. We walked together, this ancient young warrior and I, knowing that the road we were taking would be lonely, even more dangerous than the battlefield had been. No one would recognize us when we returned home. There would be no welcome for traitors who break their swords into pieces, leaving their armor and their weapons “down by the riverside.”