The War Inside
Winning and being true to oneself
The only book my father ever gave me was written by his hero Vince Lombardi, the legendary coach of the NFL’s Green Bay Packers. I was seven or eight at the time and loved reading. But to the men in my family, writing, like painting, music, or the other arts, was not a manly pastime. Unless it concerned football.
The Lombardi maxim my father quoted most often was, “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing,” and the question he asked me almost weekly was, “Are you going to play on the field or in the band?” These remarks shaped my burgeoning view of the world. Life and competition blended together. It fell to me to figure out a way to win. Never mind that I had no idea what winning looked or felt like.
As a teenager, I learned my stepfather had confronted more dangerous competition when he was drafted to fight in the Vietnam War. With life or death the price of this kind of engagement, he had no time to decipher the reasons for traveling across the world to fight strangers. The Army told him they were the enemy and posed a threat to him and his country. Winning meant killing them and not being killed. Other calculations fall away once this elemental math roots itself. On an instinctual level, what could be simpler?
Of course, the passage of time has pushed other realities into higher relief: the regional spread of communism did not hang in the balance on the frontier of Southeast Asia; the French had already failed in a war against Vietnam; the true reasons for U.S. engagement had little to do with the publicly stated ones, which proclaimed the urgent necessity of protecting national security.
But when winning is the only thing, nothing else matters. If you believe others want to kill you, no other reason is necessary to be convinced to kill them. Could war just be normal male competition, a game, but with the ultimate stakes at play? I used to believe so.
Our reverence for war veterans sources from the ultimate sacrifice they prepared to make, the willingness to risk their lives for a greater cause. But this sacrifice does not express the masculinity we have traditionally applied to it. It’s neither independent, individualistic, nor self-governing. In many cases, it means the surrender of one’s will to serve the will of another—of one’s superior directly, and indirectly, to the greater cause or country.
As man’s greatest conflict, war would seem to be his ultimate competition. But how can following the orders of another be confused with the self-determination grounded in our traditional stereotype of manhood? Countries win or lose wars. Men become winners or losers though the measure of one-on-one competition.
If a man is raised to compete and win for himself, to assert his will over his competitor’s, then the warrior role, it turns out, doesn’t offer many such opportunities because of the risks they pose to the mission at large. This scenario is borne out repeatedly in war movies when a character decides to go his own way and endangers the safety of his fellow soldiers.
In war, then, a man doesn’t really get to be his own, well, man. He takes a full menu of orders from a handful of other men, surrendering his will to his masters’ control. This act contradicts everything men are told about competing to win against other men and being a leader.
Even in the arena of team sports where Lombardi excelled, the win-at-all-costs competitive advice doesn’t always hold up. Though his players battled their opponents individually according to their positions, Lombardi knew that their teamwork and actions together as a whole were what led to victories. The coordinated group effort that he coached transcended the achievements of individual players. Only winning mattered—players’ individual accomplishments meant little to him if the team lost.
As men, we are taught that competing against each other is the measure of our value—it rates our successes and shapes our identities. Competition is so ingrained in our traditional definitions of masculinity that we can overlook or mistake the examples when it is better understood as collaboration.
In war, whose man are we, and how can surrendering our will be masculine? Perhaps we’ve conceded our right to compete in a way that is authentic to our true selves. But without competition, there is only one question to answer: Who are we fighting for?