Broken Arrow!

I will not hold you in suspense. Room 101 is a therapist’s office.

It is the last place many people will go. Sometimes they misunderstand what to expect—they think it’s just a place where you learn to blame your parents. Sometimes they think of therapists as touchy-feely creeps. If faith-based, they may assume that all therapists are secular and anti-religious (they aren’t). These objections extend to the persons who enter therapy, who are often regarded with contempt by those who reject therapy.

But I sometimes think it’s because the objectors intuitively know what’s in Room 101. The worst thing in the world is in Room 101. And the worst thing in the world is indeed in Room 101—in the therapist’s office.

But there is also the therapist, who serves as guide and protector as their client gradually confronts the problems they have shoved out of conscious awareness and which therefore own them.

Sometimes people—this is especially true of men—think that entering therapy would be a confession of weakness.

Just the opposite.

In their 1990 book “King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine,” Robert L. Moore, a professor of psychology and religion; and Douglas Gillette, a mythologist, draw upon Carl Jung’s concept of mythical archetypes to create an introduction to the psychological foundations of a mature, authentic, and revitalized masculinity. I teach Moore/Gillette in my “History of War” course.

I first introduce students to Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, who pioneered many basic psychological concepts relevant to the warrior ethos. The first key concept: we possess all human potentialities, but we choose—or usually our families and society choose for us—which potentialities to embrace and which to reject or hide. The parts we consciously accept are what Jung termed the Persona. Those we reject he called the Shadow. Jung argued that we repress—push outside our conscious awareness—what we regard as being the darker sides of ourselves.

Jungian psychologists have a simple but powerful way to identify a person’s Shadow: ask them what kind of person they most dislike. In my case, it’s bullies. To my chagrin, I have come to see that I myself can behave in a bullying fashion, and never more so than when I fail to see that I have that potentiality. A self-aware person can manage if not master their Shadow. If they cannot, their Shadow owns them.

A second fundamental Jungian concept is the collective unconscious. One of Jung’s students, Joseph Campbell, explored this idea throughout his life, and discovered that all societies basically possess the same mythic stories. The characters and stories are different, but the structure and significance of these stories are strikingly similar. Campbell’s most influential book was “The Hero With a Thousand Faces” (1948), which examined the myths concerning heroes from all around the world. He found that these myths had a common structure and common archetypal characters within them.

The basic structure of the Hero’s adventure is the journey from one place to another, an adventure involving a kind of death and resurrection into a new form of being. Every one of us took such a journey at the beginning of our lives: from a fetus, living in a water world that was enclosed and protected; to emergence into a wholly different world as a newborn.

Students of Jung have posited four mature masculine archetypes in Jungian psychology. It is important to realize that, since Jung believed that humans had *all* human potentialities, this is by no means an assertion that only men can possess a warrior ethos or behave as warriors. Jung would never have agreed with that. Rather, he and Joseph Campbell recognized that these potentialities, in mythology, tended to be expressed in terms of men as having certain archetypal features and women as having others. He would have approved of the idea that we all have what would stereotypically be called a masculine and a feminine side.

Here are the four mature male archetypes in Jungian Psychology:

King (the energy of just and creative ordering)

Magician (the energy of initiation and transformation)

Lover (the energy that connects men to others and the world).

Warrior (the energy of self-disciplined, aggressive action)

The Warrior archetype is the principal driver of personal growth.

A central concept of the Warrior archetype is that it is in two parts. The Hero’s journey is essentially the journey of a Boy, who imagines himself as being self-sufficient. However, if a Boy develops properly, he learns that if he is to grow, he must leave behind the belief that he is self-sufficient and must learn to ask for help.

Many men never transcend the Boy aspect of the Warrior. In fact, society often misleads them into believing that a man should be self-sufficient, and that to seek help is to show weakness.

Yet without seeking help, we cannot slay our demons. An alcoholic, for instance, cannot transcend his alcoholism. But to call for help requires a kind of death—often felt as something akin to death—in order to be resurrected as someone no longer owned by their alcoholism.

I was intrigued by the idea that the mature masculine involves a Warrior who asks for help, and tried the think of a war movie that illustrated this concept. I hit upon “We Were Soldiers” (2002), which also obeys the classic motif of the Hero Team and the Mentor and Shadow Mentor. In mythic terms, in the film Lt. Col. Hal Moore (Mel Gibson) functions as Mentor. Sgt Maj. Basil Plumley (Sam Elliott) functions as a kind of Shadow Mentor, who reflects the realism of war but exists in a functional, subordinate relationship to the Mentor.

There’s a key scene in the middle of the film, when Moore’s battalion is surrounded by numerically superior North Vietnamese troops. Watch the film clip, but keep in mind the script. I haven’t found a clip that captures the entire scene the way I would like you to see it, but this one is close enough. You only need to watch the first 52 seconds.

These lines precede the excerpt:

Forward Air Controller: My pilots do not see the enemy. They cannot pick out our friendlies. Bravo-Six, say again….You gotta tell your company commander to pop smoke now. They need to mark the lines now!

Infantry officer: We have no lines! We have enemies and friendlies mixed in all over the place.

The officer reports to Moore: Sir, our perimeter is collapsing. Alpha Company and Bravo Company cannot hold. Charlie Company is being overrun.

[The film clip begins here.]

Hastings, Moore’s radio-telephone operator (RTO): Net call! Net call! Keep this net clear!

[Moore makes a circuit so that he can take in the situation. I think you can see a brief expression of psychological death on his face just before he orders up his RTO.]

Moore: Hastings! Broken arrow!

Hastings, into his radio-telephone: Broken arrow! I say again! Broken arrow! We have broken arrow!

Headquarters RTO: Confirm. Broken arrow.

Hastings: Broken arrow confirmed.

Man in civilian attire at headquarters, probably CIA: Broken arrow?

Officer: That means that an American unit has been overrun. It calls in every combat aircraft for support.

Man: My God, there's no hiding it now.

*My God, there’s no hiding it now.* Absolutely goddam right. An attempt to hide it would have been fatal—to Moore’s battalion in the movie, to the chance for healing and growth in our own lives.

You have to have the guts to cry for help, loud and clear, and keep crying out until you get it.

And crying out for help was the very thing Senator had been taught his whole life never to do.