Heroism, tribalism, and the cost of war for the Christian who serves
In the summer of 2005, I sat working in a small Air Traffic Control Tower in
Kirkuk, Iraq. It was a night like any other, with a few cargo planes coming in and the occasional attack helicopter refueling. Then we received an inbound for an
emergency Tornado with an engine out.
It’s difficult to explain what happens in those moments. Most air traffic controllers are the kind of people you see go calm and focus when others panic.
It’s similar to firefighters and police. Imagine being inside your favorite zany sitcom and then in a flash you are watching a tense drama at the flip of a switch.
As the aircraft approached, they spotted another airfield and landed, thinking they had made it to our airport. Immediately their airplanes were surrounded by armed men in trucks; we could hear the panic in the pilots’ voices. We didn’t do anything special, just followed our checklists and procedures. We contacted the next level of ATC and coordinated air support for the pilots.
Later, back at home, I would be honored as a war hero for my efforts—for helping the pilots and eventually aiding them in landing safely at our airfield. It was an odd feeling: pride at being called a hero, confusion at the idea that doing a routine task with no danger to myself could be labeled heroic.
Why did such an action get me labeled a hero? Did you add to my story above and imagine the air support engaged with the ground forces surrounding the aircraft? That they were enemies and of another category? Were not their actions also heroic, maybe more so than mine, as they exposed themselves to real risk?
They were Iraqis. Our allies. Following a checklist the same as me, because an unauthorized aircraft landed on their runway. In the end, they aided the pilots and got them to safety.
Let’s take another example. During Operation Epic Fury this year, an Iranian rocket downed a U.S. fighter jet. Both sides of the conflict declared their own as “Hero.” The U.S. launched a rescue operation to bring the brave pilots home and Iranian ground forces attempted to capture the pilots as prisoners of war.
The thing is, we in the U.S. only see our pilots as heroes in this situation because of tribalism. They are our “good boys” defending our freedom. The Iranians also hail their soldier as a hero due to tribalism; however, his actions, in the most basic understanding of the word, appear heroic. He gave “Goliath” a black eye in defense of his country.
Scripture refuses to let heroism be a tribal category. Rahab, the Canaanite, is honored above Israel for her courage. Naaman the Syrian general is praised for obedience. A Samaritan becomes the model of neighbor-love while Israel’s priest and Levite fail. A Roman centurion is commended for faith greater than anything found in Israel. Even Nineveh, Israel’s enemy, responds to God more rightly than Jonah does. In every case, the Bible honors outsiders when their actions align with righteousness. Modern nations do the opposite. We call our own heroes because they are ours, not because their actions are morally superior.
It gets even more convoluted when we zoom out and examine the State that declares the war and the surrounding reasons. As Christians, we wouldn’t call war itself a sin. God ordered Israel to wage war. Though thinking that the modern state has the authority of God to declare war is a theological failure. Some would then immediately jump to Romans 13 to lecture me on how wrong I am. Well, let us ask ourselves this: if Romans 13 allows the U.S. to attack Iraq, Venezuela, or Iran without question, then doesn’t it allow for Russia attacking Ukraine, or Iraq attacking Kuwait?
It’s easier than we realize to allow ourselves to accept that our side is right. We are not even unique in thinking that we have moral authority and other countries do not. Rome did it under Constantine; the same idea was applied to the Crusades, and even Japan did so as recently as WWII.
Predominantly, though, war is never righteous. It largely differs by degrees, not moral boundaries – when we truly look into the details. So where does that leave the Christian serving his nation as a warrior?
It leaves him, often, standing in a place the nation will later decorate, and the church will later argue about. Consider Desmond Thomas Doss, a Seventh-day Adventist from Lynchburg, who enlisted in 1942 rather than take a deferment. He would not carry a rifle. Refused to work on the Sabbath if he could help it. He asked only to go as a medic. His company answered with mockery, throwing boots at him during prayer, and attempting to have him discharged. He went anyway to Guam, to Leyte, and at last to Okinawa.
In late April 1945 his battalion climbed the Maeda Escarpment, a four-hundred- foot cliff the GIs called Hacksaw Ridge. Japanese fire tore the company apart and drove the living back down. Something like seventy-five wounded men were left on the plateau. Doss stayed. He dragged them one by one to the lip of the cliff and lowered them on a rope-supported litter to hands waiting below. After each descent he prayed to be allowed one more. In the days that followed, he crawled forward of the line, treated men under grenades at the mouth of a cave, and kept working after grenade fragments tore his legs and a bullet shattered his arm. He splinted the arm with a rifle stock that was not his to fire, gave up his own stretcher, and crawled hundreds of yards to an aid station.
The Army called it seventy-five lives. His officers wanted a hundred. Doss thought fifty. President Truman hung the Medal of Honor around his neck and said he considered the honor greater than being president. None of that settles whether a Christian may bear arms, or whether Okinawa was a just war, or whether Romans 13 baptizes every flag. It only shows the bill that war presents even to the man who refuses the weapon. Doss lost a lung to tuberculosis after the campaign. He spent years in hospitals. The men who once wanted him gone owed him their lives, and he spent the rest of his own life quietly, as if the medal were an interruption rather than a verdict.
That is the glimpse, not the conclusion. The Christian soldier—armed or unarmed—still has to decide what obedience looks like when the State speaks and Scripture does not hand him a tribe. Heroism will be claimed by whoever writes the citation. The cost will be paid by the body that climbed the ridge, and by the conscience that has to live with what was done, or refused, at the top of it.
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