Walking the Tiger’s Path: A Soldier’s Spiritual Journey
Paul Kendel
Tendril Press, 2011
“The Tiger’s Path” is the name that the Buddhist teacher Sakyong Mipham gives “the path of discernment” in his book Ruling Your World. “Venturing onto the path of the tiger, we place our paws carefully. We respect karma; we know that every decision we make has repercussions.”
In Iraq in 2005 Staff Sergeant Paul Kendel took his first steps on the tiger’s path. Reading the dharma one afternoon leaning on a Humvee in 120-degree Baghdad heat, Kendel burned with anger and fear. His wife was being unfaithful back home in Georgia. Iraqis could try to kill him any moment. His mother was dying in Florida. Hurricane Katrina was devastating the Gulf Coast.
Who wouldn’t want to take a spiritual retreat?
But a retreat while serving in Iraq with the United States 48th Infantry Brigade?
Kendel was not your average Guardsman. He’d already traveled to the Middle East, had two Master degrees (Cal State Fullerton, History and Anthropology) and half of his life had been enlisted in the US Army or National Guard.
But no Army field manual could prepare Kendel and his fellow soldiers for complexities they confronted in Iraq. Bad guys didn’t wear black hats there. Kendel found Sakyong Mipham’s Turning the Mind into an Ally, Ruling Your World and other Shambhala teachings far more useful in the field and post-deployment than any military training. Indeed, they proved as transformative as formative.
Kendel’s memoir, Walking the Tiger’s Path: A Soldier’s Spiritual Path takes readers through two volatile zones: Kendel’s inner terrain during crises at home in Georgia and explosive Baghdad neighborhoods during a pivotal moment in the history of Iraq. It covers the 48th infantry brigade getting cheered “Go kick ass!” then changed into something quite different while patrolling urban areas.
Upon stepping off the plane, his company began handing out toys, doing the meet-and-greet. But after losing 8 members of their company in one week, infantryman Baker imagined cutting an Iraqi in half with machinegun fire. And Sgt. Moore wanted a kill before going home.
Kendall outs the aberrant mindsets of American soldiers in several action-packed scenes that resulted in needless killings, wounding and traumatizing of ordinary Iraqis.
Mid-deployment, increasingly uncomfortable with the barbarity, and halfway through reading Turning Your Mind into an Ally, Kendel shot off an e-mail to Shambhala International, the organization headed by Sakyong Mipham. Mipham responded by warning Kendel that he was not only in a very dangerous place physically, but also at risk of suffering from anger and bitterness his fellow soldiers had fallen prey to already.
“Because I was a bit older,” Kendel said in an author’s interview, “I had a better cultural understanding, education, the dharma, all that which had in other situations benefitted me, I thought that I was inoculated.”
Yet Kendel experienced a kind of moral breakdown. Unprompted by any outside order, he initiated a patrol in the hostile town of Al-Salaam, setting up an operation post right in front of a mosque. A celebratory gunshot fired at a birthday party led US forces to unload their frustrations on Al-Salaam. They shot at walls, at air conditioners, at clothes hanging out to dry, at satellite dishes, at the mosque’s minaret. Miraculously US forces reported no dead, no wounded from their shooting spree.
After this near-tragedy, his fellow soldiers blamed the incident on bad training, hair-trigger nerves, and even a collective hallucination of having been fired upon by the Iraqis.
Kendel described drawing a bead on an Iraqi civilian, “Talk about out-of-body experiences. I was physically there, but mentally removed. It gave me pause. My God how easy!”
Kendel owns up. He had nearly provoked a massacre, and barely missed killing someone. In a watershed moment in Walking the Tiger’s Path he writes to Shambhala’s Margot Neuman: “Iraq opened a door for me; it showed me that I’m just as capable of violence and ugliness as the people we fight.”
And later in Walking the Tiger’s Path: “The Buddhist teachings talk about the karmic chain of events. Once the ball of anger gets rolling, you feed it and it grows. Catch it initially and you can prevent it from going to the next level. However my rage had hooked me, gained momentum, and progressed into a dangerous situation. If I hadn’t run away from my pain about my wife, if I had faced my fears and anger directly, Al-Salaam might not have happened.”
He drove all blame toward himself under the influence of a keystone Shambhala teaching from Atisha (10th century), “Drive All Blames into One.”
Margot Neuman wrote back, “There are four aspects of an act for it to be a negative karma-producing event: intention, execution, desired result is achieved, and satisfaction in having performed the action . . . If any of these four elements are not present, then the karmic act is not completed,” passing on advice from Monk Lodrö Gyatso to help in alleviating Kendel’s suffering. Neuman went further, telling Kendel intense regret could be a great purifier. Her letters, and his contact with other Shambhala community members, spawned a new gentleness within him.
Kendel’s Buddhist studies during life-changing events saved him and others much trouble and pain.
One weakness of his book is that while Kendel is anything but clueless about the Arab world, (i.e., he invokes his graduate school reading of texts like Edward Said’s Orientalism), Arab perspectives are largely missing from his account of time in Iraq. He doesn’t name a single Iraqi, other than the nicknames the US soldiers give to a few dead men they found. Nor is a single Baghdad street named.
Walking the Tiger’s Path: A Soldier’s Spiritual Journey means to be an personal tale. It’s at once, an instructive war story and a uniquely intimate spiritual memoir. Kendel did not die in Iraq, nor did he kill anyone. He reconciled himself to his actions in a way that he hopes will be useful to returning war veterans and domestic trauma victims alike. There will be no victorious climax to the nightmare of the US occupation in Iraq, but this is a victorious personal story.
Walking the Tiger Path author Paul Kendel is speaking Friday night, March 2, 2012 at 7 pm at the New York City Shambhala Meditation Center of New York City (118 West 22nd Street).
Note: The Ratna Peace Initiative (RPI) continues to offer mindfulness practice techniques at Veterans centers and state and federal penitentiaries. RPI staff Margot Neuman, Cliff Neuman and Gary Allen conduct daylong programs introducing meditation as a psychological tool for the relief of symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Over 148,000 veterans are doing hard time in United States prisons. Many were incarcerated due to crimes committed after having been psychologically traumatized while serving their country.
For more information: see www.ratnapeaceinitiative.org
From February, 2012