Interview with George Leonard sensei

The Warrior

The Warrior by George Leonard

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This article first appeared in Esquire magazine in July 1986 and has been reproduced with the kind permission of the author.

America has discovered a new hero, the latest in a lineage that goes back to Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone, to the Lone Ranger and the western marshal with the fast draw. This new hero, like his predecessors, is always on the side of Right, but not necessarily on the side of the Establishment. Unlike the World War II team player, he is a lone fighter, a common man who through strenuous self-discipline and rigorous training has developed extraordinary skills, which he puts to use with devastating results. He is an elite-forces man with the muscles of a Western body builder and the mind-set of an Eastern martial artist. He is Chuck Norris in Missing in Action and The Delta Force, Arnold Schwarzenegger in Commando, and Fred Ward in Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins. Above all, he is Sylvester Stallone in Rambo: First Blood Part II.

This is the new American warrior, a man who, lacking the gritty camaraderie of a John Wayne or the true urbane wit of a James Bond, slaughters commies and other enemies of the state by the score, cutting through bureaucratic inertia with a stream of machine gun bullets. This is the warrior as an American revenge fantasy, a vivid dream image of a single-minded, unrestrained action that would somehow erase the frustrations of Vietnam, Iran and Lebanon, and set things right in one miraculous catharsis of blood and gore.

The picture of Rambo running bare-chested through the Vietnamese jungle wielding a huge knife and shooting explosive arrows is a lurid exaggeration, an example of the Freudian notion that whatever is repressed (as we repressed all sympathy for the fighting man during the Vietnam era) is likely to return to consciousness, perhaps in a grotesque form. But it is more than that. For it challenges us with a fundamental question, one that is particularly difficult in a free and democratic society:

If not Rambo, who?

It is a question that tends to paralyze our mental processes. For many of us who are dedicated to peace, the very idea of the "good" warrior seems a contradiction. We are haunted by images of armed soldiers in a city square, of innocent people kidnapped, tortured, or made to "disappear". The word "military" can conjure up the word "dictatorship." The word "police" joins all too easily with "state."

Still, in this violent and dangerous world, only the most fevered idealist would dispense with soldiers and policemen. So the question remains: If not Rambo, who? If we're going to have people whom we give the job of risking their own lives and, if necessary, taking the lives of others, how are we to deal with them? How are we to think about them? And, beyond that, is there some way that the warrior spirit at its best and highest can contribute to a lasting peace and to the quality of our individual lives during the time of peace?

I approach these questions not as a distant, dispassionate observer, but as one who served as a combat pilot in the south-west pacific in World War II and as an air-intelligence officer during the Korean War. More recently, I've spent fifteen years studying a martial art called aikido, one dedicated to harmony, but a marital art nonetheless, with roots that go back to the medieval Japanese samurai. Through my association with this art, I've developed training programs and simulation games designed to produce the warrior spirit in men and women who never plan to go to war.

Among the people drawn to these programs, one in particular stands out as having dedicated himself wholeheartedly to the warrior's path. He is Jack Cirie, a highly decorated Marine veteran with two tours of duty in Vietnam. Cirie is a thoughtful man who has spent twenty-two years studying the way of the warrior. He is now in charge of an experimental training program for Army Special Forces troops. He is devoted to world peace. Cirie and I have spent countless hours exploring the mysterious paradoxes that keep cropping up around the subject of warriorship: the remorseless interplay of creation and destruction, the ageless relationship between violent action and noble character.

Jack Cirie went to Yale in the early 1960s. He was an All-Ivy League football defensive back and Yale's Most Valuable Player in his junior year. He majored in Latin-American studies, and considered joining the Peace Corps. Most of his friends were going to law school or going into their fathers' businesses. Cirie was interviewed by Colgate-Palmolive, and that was the end of his job interviews. "I decided that what I wanted was a military experience, and for me that meant going to war. I wanted to be in a position where everything was at risk, where you get a chance to see inside yourself."