Episode Forty-One: The Universal Soldier

“This world is the only one that exists. Learn its laws and obey them. This is true philosophy.”

–Telamon of Arcadia

Are warriors essentially the same in all times, in all armies, in all lands? I think they are.

I think the American endurance athlete or firefighter or Army Ranger would have no trouble fitting in with Napoleon’s cavalry or Caesar’s legions or in the ranks of Alexander’s phalanx.

They would think the same way.

Act the same way.

Aspire to the same goals and virtues.

Let me return to the recurring character in my books—Telamon of Arcadia—whom I was talking about in the last episode. I described him in that episode as the consummate warrior in the sense of supreme skills, self-command, courage, endurance, all of the warrior virtues.

But he is also a disillusioned warrior.

Experience has stripped him of all illusion. He doesn’t believe in glory, he doesn’t believe in any cause or flag. He follows no leader. And yet …

And yet he remains a warrior.

In fact he has carried the ideal of the warrior to a place way beyond the citizen-soldier or the champion or the hero.

The character in film who is closest to Telamon (other than Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name) is the samurai Kyuzo in Seven Samurai. Do you remember him? He is the supreme swordsman, the man of few words, who lives only to perfect his swordsman’s skills and his supremacy in combat.

But Telamon is beyond that too.

Here’s another aspect of his character:

He’s a mercenary.

He fights for money.

He’s a soldier for hire.

He wasn’t always. Telamon had been, once upon a time, a believer in causes and flags and leaders.

But time has changed him.

Then there’s another aspect to Telamon’s character (we’ll get into this in greater detail in subsequent episodes.)

He doesn’t seem to be able to die.

He appears in one century, looking to all purposes to be a certain age … say, forty.

Then he appears a century later, in a different war, a different army. But he is still forty.

Again, one of the things that seized me about Telamon (speaking as a writer now) is I didn’t plan him. He just appeared on the page. He showed up fully formed, without me having thought about him or plotted him out. When something like that happens, a writer pays attention.

Something is going on.

Telamon appears in my books, as I said, in different centuries, unchanged. He doesn’t seem to be able to die, or if he does, he comes back fifty or a hundred years later, in another uniform, in another conflict. Why? I don’t know. Perhaps Telamon committed some terrible crime in ages past and this relentless round of warfare is his penance or purgatory.

To my further surprise, Telamon has appeared as the final image in two books (this is a very big deal because a book or a movie’s final image is in many ways its “statement,” it’s what the book or movie wants to leave you with). Again this was unplanned. And even odder because Telamon was only a minor character in each book.

In TIDES OF WAR he appears as the image of the Universal Soldier. The book is about the 27-year struggle between Athens and Sparta called the Peloponnesian War. This conflict was the equivalent in its day of a world war, because virtually every nation on earth was drawn into it. It ended with all parties exhausted by conflict and wishing never to see a sword or a shield again.

Yet this character, the solitary mercenary Telamon, remained, in the book’s final image, shouldering his kit and weapons and setting forth on foot for the harbor at Athens to ship out on another campaign. In other words, he symbolized the eternal nature of war … and the ongoing glamour and fascination of the Warrior Archetype. Here’s the final paragraph of the book:

As the mercenary trekked down toward the farm’s gate, a huddle of gawkers tracked him with their gaze, arrested by his appearance and his kit. This following was comprised not alone of lads but of maids and even husbandmen and dames breaking off at their labors. As the warrior approached the farm’s gate, two boys dashed ahead to open it for him, that he not be put to trouble by the latch. These youths would clearly have trailed him a distance down the lane, or to the harbor itself, had not their fathers hailed them back. I, too, was held by this apparition, unable to turn apart until he had vanished along the avenue of holm oak, whose blossom yields the scarlet dye that colors ever the soldier’s cloak of war.

Why do I cite this? Because this character is an archetype in the most ancient and the most modern sense.

One, he’s timeless. He could be a centurion from Caesar’s legions or a Gunnery Sergeant of US Marines from Afghanistan.

Two, he’s solitary. His story is not a family story or a community story or a national story. The demons he’s fighting live inside his skull. They are his and his alone.

Three, he is his role. He has no other vocation. He embodies the Warrior Archetype on every level.

Four, I identify with him. He’s me, even though I’m not packing a spear or shield or heading off to the harbor to ship out on campaign.

Or am I?

We’ll talk about this more in the next episode.