REVIEW: “The Heart and Fist” follows humanitarian soldier
I never knew that someone who was so interested in serving the world and those in need could at the same time be a soldier. Eric Greitens deployed four times as a Navy Seal, and served many humanitarian missions to other countries.
The two don’t seem as if they could go hand in hand. In reality, the idea of a humanitarian soldier just sounds wrong in my head. How can you serve those in need and kill people?
When I heard about Greitens’ book “The Heart and the Fist” this summer, I knew I had to read it. At the time I figured it would help me relate to a friend in the military and to maybe see the world a little differently. In reality, this book changed the way I look at soldiers and the world.
I’ve always wondered how I would have responded to world events like the genocide in Rwanda or Bosnia or how I would impact the world with service. So by reading this book I learned three very important lessons, about the lessons of survival, about strength and about religion.
In Rwanda, Greitens served as a volunteer doing innumerable tasks such as driving long distances to help with border crossings, providing first aid in a hospital and pointing out issues within the relief effort.
I read the chapter on Rwanda only a few days after watching the movie Hotel Rwanda, about the violence and genocide that took place within a group of people who could only tell the difference between races by a card declaring it. I was still reeling from the horror these people had committed against them. When Greitens arrived in Rwanda, he said he didn’t see the same sights he had expected, the sights of Hotel Rwanda.
“The images of refugee camps and border crossings that flooded the international broadcast media did not tell the whole story,” Greitens said. “They left an impression of a desperate, downtrodden, despairing people.”
So Greitens saw the people in Rwanda start to heal. To smile again. I learned from this chapter that even though many people see terrible things, experience things no one should ever have to remember or have in their past that we can all heal, and that there are lessons to be learned from events such as the Rwandan genocide. Greitens puts it perfectly.
“If people can live through genocide and retain compassion, if they can take strength from pain, if they are able, still, to laugh, then certainly we can learn something from them,” he said. So he took their pictures to share the lesson with the rest of us.
Navy Seal training is notoriously the most difficult in all the military, and yet because of his experiences with humanitarian aid Greitens decided to, much inline with his past as a boxing champion and Rhodes Scholar, be with the best.
“I’d learned that all of the best kinds of compassionate assistance meant nothing if a warlord could command a militia and take control of the very place humanitarians were trying to aid,” he wrote. “The world needs many more humanitarians than it needs warriors, but there can be none of the former without enough of the latter. I could not shake the memory of little kids in Croatia drawing chalk
pictures of the homes that their families had fled at gunpoint.”
I learned that Navy Seals are trained differently – not just trained to kill, but trained to think.
“SEALs are frequently misunderstood as America’s deadliest commando force,” Greitens wrote. “It’s true that SEALs are capable of great violence, but that’s not what makes SEALs truly special. What makes SEALs special is that we can be thoughtful, disciplined, and proportional in our use of force.”
Greitens said he saw SEALs protect a child from gunfire while entering a house, assess that a man was armed, remove his weapon and incapacitate him. Warriors are special because of their ability to use strength for good, he said.
In India, Greitens served alongside Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity in a home for the destitute and dying. These women spent their entire lives caring for those who, much like them, didn’t have a penny to their names and had nowhere else to go.
“The sisters lived their entire lives in faith, but to me, it seemed that they needed to whisper barely a world about their theology because the integrity of their work said everything,” he said.
When we live our religion, we don’t need to speak about it. While this idea may seem to run contrary to the mainstream religion in Utah, I think it rather complements it. Living a life for good shows we are good.
Greitens’ story can be difficult to read, but it’s powerful. It showcases, from a man who’s been on both sides of the service spectrum, that force and love are important and can be one and the same. This book was not in the normal genre of my reading list, but is one that will stay on my bookshelf for a very long time.
– april.ashland@aggiemail.usu.edu
Twitter: @AprilAsh2012