This conclusion does not just apply to the military. Edward Shils and Morris Janowitz, for instance, emphasize that the Wehrmacht’s ability to do battle was based not on National Socialist fervor, but on the need to satisfy personal needs within the context of group relationships.⁸⁸¹ Moreover, this aspect of the Wehrmacht’s organization was supported by modern management and personnel techniques.⁸⁸² A soldier’s immediate social environment decides how he perceives and interprets war, and the parameters by which he targets and evaluates his own actions. Every member of a group sees himself as he believes others see him. That, as Erving Goffman has shown in his “stigma” study, provides the most powerful motivation for people to conform to the norms of the group. ⁸⁸³ In war, for an indeterminate length of time and under the most extreme conditions, the soldier is part of a group he can neither leave nor seek out according to his own personal preference. That is completely different from civilian life, in which people select their own groups. The lack of alternatives to the group a soldier is part of and helps comprise makes it an all-decisive normative and practical entity, especially as battle is a life-or-death situation. To paraphrase a sentiment often expressed in American combat briefings in Vietnam: I don’t know why I’m here, and you don’t know why you’re here, but let’s try our best to do a good job and stay alive.⁸⁸⁴

Such sentiments underscore the importance of one’s comrades for everything that happens and is thought or decided during war. This far outweighs the significance of any worldviews, convictions, or historical inevitabilities, which might have provided the external conditions leading to the war itself. The internal reality of war, as it presents itself to soldiers, is the group. That is how war appeared to Vietnam veteran Michael Bernhardt, who refused to participate in the My Lai massacre and was subsequently ostracized. The only thing that counted, Bernhardt later recalled, was how people thought of you in the here and now, how people in your immediate surroundings regarded you. Bernhardt’s unit was his entire world. What they thought was right, was right; what they thought was wrong, was wrong.⁸⁸⁵

The German soldier Willy Peter Reese would have agreed with Bernhardt:

Willy Peter Reese was killed shortly after he wrote these words. His words resonate with another universal truth of war: reasons don’t matter.⁸⁸⁷

IDEOLOGY