Courage Under Fire

Three on a match: serious stuff

Superstitions and rituals flourish during wartime. Like sailors, gamblers, and athletes, soldiers going into combat must learn to live with uncertainty and chance -- except in a soldier's case, chance can get you killed.

"I'm not a superstitious man," British Major Richard Streatfield told the BBC two years ago, just before returning from service with NATO forces in Afghanistan. "But as this tour progressed, I've noticed that there is an increasingly superstitious element that has crept in. I've listened to the same piece of music every night for the last three months." He tells of fellow Brits wearing talismans and a platoon commander putting on his boots in the same order every day. "Inexplicable," says Streatfield, "except for the fact that it has become his ritual. There are a hundred more -- the small rituals  of those who need everything to be on their side."

Facing the chaos of combat, soldiers do everything possible to control what is in their power to control. They clean, maintain, and prep their equipment as if their lives depended on it, because their lives do depend on it. They rely on their training. They trust their brothers in arms. But they also know that their survival often depends on sheer dumb luck, and for that they turn to ritual. For them, superstition becomes a way to cope with stress and to cultivate the illusion of control. It's no laughing matter. It's what keeps them going, day after day.

I don't know whether Corporal Jaime Pilcher has studied psychology, but the military convoy driver offered an insightful explanation of his superstitious rituals to the American Forces Network in Afghanistan.  "When you're going on a mission, you're always thinking about the worst," he says. "So if you come back from a successful mission, nothing happening, you basically try and repeat that. I get in my truck the same way. I listen to the same song."

Do soldiers truly believe that their talismans and rituals protect them? It doesn't matter. And if you asked them, I'm not sure whether they could tell you honestly. Talismans and rituals are tools, just like rifles and MREs, and they're trusted until they fail.

During the first Gulf War, Giora Keinan of the University of Tel Aviv studied Israeli civilians who endured Saddam Hussein's Scud missile attacks -- random death falling out of the sky almost every night. Like soldiers, many of them turned to superstitious rituals and magical thinking to cope with the stress. "It is of interest to note," concluded Keinan, "that persons who hold magical beliefs or who engage in magical rituals are often aware that their thoughts, actions, or both are unreasonable and irrational. Despite this awareness, they are unable to rid themselves of this behavior." I have to ask: under the circumstances, why would they want to?