Stuff I learned in the Army
I’ve been an anti-imperialist of one sort or another since 1993, and a pacifist since 2007 or thereabouts. I’ve counseled against joining the military — to no avail, given that two of our own kids joined the Army anyway. So what I’m about to write about some “positives” or at least lessons I took from the experience of a full career in the Army (20 years on active duty, and four and a half as a reservist, spread between 1970–1996, with two short “breaks in service”) in no way is intended as a recommendation to anyone to join up for any reason. War is an unmitigated obscenity that not only destroys, cripples, contaminates, and kills, but it morally and spiritually deforms its surviving participants.
None of this is describing the Army now, given that all I know about the Army now is secondhand information. It’s changed since I was there. Hell, it changed considerably between the time I was in, from Vietnam to Somalia. Throughout that period — and probably today as well — there was and is a constant tension between its own culture and institution. That is to say, military culture is marked by almost medieval forms of solidarity which come into constant conflict with the brute stupidities of institutional bureaucracy (a marriage which is nonetheless necessary).
I’ve written elsewhere about the media-fueled misconceptions of the military, portraying soldiers as dead-eyed, snap-to, killer robots who bite the heads off of snakes and are programmed with ninja skills. There’s one specialty in the Army called “Flute and Piccolo Player,” okay? Having said that, the Army (all military organizations, really, but I knew the Army) does a kind of shock-treatment strip-down and re-formation. (You still come out on the other side liking the same music; your personality is enhanced, not erased.)
My experience was a tad more barbarous than today, but that was back during the draft era, when drill sergeants in Basic Training would occasionally put knots on people’s heads to get their point across. Then again, some of my fellow soldiers had come in through the old system:
“You’ve been convicted of grand theft auto; you can have three years in a work camp or three years in the Army.”
“I’ll take the Army, Judge.”
The essence of Basic Training was to tear away and burn our self-centeredness and to instill some baseline discipline and solidarity. It began by shearing off our hair — stripping away any form of vain or superficial self-expression — and dressing us in identical uniforms. (To this day, I support school uniforms.) Then we were put on a bus, with duffel bags of new gear, whereupon we were met by a phalanx of bellowing drill sergeants who started terrorizing us into “prompt obedience” before before we’d even dismounted.
“You’re not in Kansas anymore, Dorothy.”
The truth is, most of us had no experience of discipline prior to basic. A few former jocks did, but even for them this was some next level shit. No football coach had ever, at first sight, shouted “dickhead” or “maggot” or “shitbird” at them from spitting distance. The system didn’t adapt to you, you adapted to it. There were no student evaluations of the faculty. Quitting, as two of my comrades tried by going AWOL on the third day, resulted in your capture and the choice between an Article 15 fine with an ass-whipping in the SDI office . . . or prison. (My two comrades took the fine and the ass-whipping and finished Basic Training. I ran into one of them later that year in Vietnam.)
Within eight weeks, everyone spoke the same language, observed the same customs and courtesies, made our beds the same, shot the same rifles, ate the same food, shat together on rows of unenclosed toilets (which we also cleaned together), submitted to the same schedules and details, slept the same hours, and knew how to march together in precision formations.
We’d started out with farmers and slackers and street orphans and petty criminals and college boys, white people, black people, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Filipinos, and Arapaho — you name it, we had it . . . most of us, it was our first time in the constant presence of these once-others. For some of the white boys, the subordination to black drill sergeants was a terrible shock. (Get over it!)
Understand, the “old guys” among the trainees were like twenty-three. I was eighteen. A lot if us couldn’t even grow a respectable mustache (had that been permitted in Basic Training).
What solidarity didn’t overcome our initial differences through our standardization was further forged by collective punishments. The drills were both our masters and our common enemies, by design. Justice was never the issue. The drill sergeants had combat patches on their right shoulders, reminders of where most of us were eventually bound, and The Issue, of which we were constantly reminded, was getting us into and out of Vietnam without being killed or maimed by a guy they called “Charlie.”
One of the marching cadences we sang went, “Late at night when you’re sleepin’, Charlie Cong comes a creepin’ all around.”
What were some takeaways from this initial phase? We were indoctrinated into violence, for sure, but organized violence. We also learned some rudimentary virtues. Don’t whine — it does no good, and it breaks the morale of others. Don’t make excuses. “The maximum effective range of an excuse is zero meters.” Pull your weight — or it’s pulled by others. You are not an individual. Accept criticism (even the harsh kind, especially the harsh kind). Pay attention. Work to standard. Help each other out. Bear your inevitable suffering with a little Stoicism.
This stuff turned out to be important a few months later when some of us took turns sleeping in the mud and manning a Claymore mine together on an ambush position.
In Vietnam, I smoked what we called Bongson Bombers with guys I’d never have met in my former life. Half my unit in Vietnam were black guys who turned me on to MoTown music, new forms of expression, and unlikely friendships of shared circumstance. We shared cigarettes, food, sleeplessness, stories, and sometimes fear.
I hate admitting there was anything good about the Army, especially war; but some of these “virtues” are actually transferable.
Even much later, in units with relaxed grooming standards, like Delta (see photo above), there were still some fundamentals that one did not violate. “Be in the right place, at the right time, with the right uniform and equipment.” No excuses.
I still, to this day, as a septuagenarian, get agitated when I think I might be late. Not just because there’s a whisper from my subconscious that I could be in trouble, but because — as someone who also made and enforced schedules — I internalized the idea of respecting the time of others. When I became an “organizer” of sorts, after the Army, as a politicized civilian, I had to bite my tongue — a lot — with people who were chronically late and missed deadlines . . . and sometimes even perversely proud of it. (Yeah, it’s all about you, asshole!)
Other things I learned.
I traveled, but not as a tourist. And old colleague said once, “We had the world’s worst travel agent.”
In those travels, I was forced to confront the fact that Americans — even tough guys in the military — are pampered, deskilled babies. On patrol in Tam Quan district, we stopped for a nuc-bahm (limeade, sold by a local mamasan). I was looking up at coconuts growing thirty feet above us, when a kid — maybe twelve — asked me for my belt. I’m game. He made a loop of it, then put it on his bare feet and used is to ascend the tree with a machete in one hand, quick as a spider monkey, lopping off two coconuts, and shimmied back down. We’d thought we were big brave boys for mock exits out of the thirty-foot towers in jump school with multiple safety measures as a “net.”
That kid, a twelve-year-old who could wield a machete like a surgical tool, was never leaving the place which we saw as some grand challenge. We at least looked forward to “going back to the world,” where our electronic and gas-powered slaves would insulate us from bugs and snakes and weather . . . and the need for vernacular skills.
Descending a mountainside in the Peruvian Sierra, felling sorry for myself with my sixty-pound ruck and blisters and ten miles left to go. A Quechua woman passes us, heading uphill, a bough across her shoulders with forty-pound containers of water on each end. That night, we’d be back in the barracks, drinking cold Cristals, one bottle of which was a day’s wage for some.
All the Army’s shock treatments, physical “challenges,” and torture schools, they’re not to turn us into tough guys; they’re for making sure we might be able to hold our own alongside a peasant woman.
Not everyone in the military absorbs this lesson. It’s easier to discount and dehumanize those strangely competent Others as backward-ass animals. Those with eyes, though, they’ll gain perspective, maybe even the gift of humility. Those “people,” they’re us, and they tell us just how far we’ve been removed from ourselves.
The Army taught me about apprenticeship. That’s why aspects of Alasdair MacIntyre’s philosophy were immediately accessible for me. And not just skill/practice apprenticeship (that’s pretty obvious), but mimetic apprenticeship. You want to learn how to be patient, you watch that guy who displays uncanny patience; then you “fake it til you make it.” You want to learn how to be firm and fair — not an easy skill — you watch they guy who does it right. One of the most important things I learned though this absorptive mimesis was hardship humor.
The Army was an institution and a practice that took turns making you uncomfortable, frustrated, sore, pissed off, crazy, and occasionally satisfied. You can bitch and whine about the bad things—making yourself as miserable as you’re making everyone around you — or you can turn it into laughter. Lot of people who don’t understand this, who haven’t passed the whining stage, this upsets them. “It’s not funny!” It’s not funny, which is exactly why it is. A lot of the best humor is just a restatement of unpleasant reality, seasoned with some acceptance and camaraderie. It’s fucked up, but we’re helplessly in this together. Humor can get you through a lot. A lot more than impotent anger.
I remember a forced march we did in Jordan (yeah, the country). Nine hours we walked, mostly in the dark, with those heavy-ass rucks, load-carrying equipment, helmets, and weapons. For around ten miles of it, we were between two mountains on some kind of plain that was covered in round stones varying in size from golf balls to baseballs — some strange natural phenomenon designed by an angry angel to destroy bipeds. Within the first two or three miles, this demonic terrain had bruised the soles of our feet so badly it sent electric arcs of pain up our legs. By the time we’d passed over this massive stone field, even in the icy night, we were drenched with effort and plantar agony. We were all still limping when we retired to our platoon tents the next night, after a palliative hot meal and a rest.
That night, when we were supposed to go lights-out, one guy said, “Next time we do this, they can just tie us to our bunks and beat the soles of our feet with ball peen hammers.” The whole platoon fell into silly laughter. Then the follow-on jokes started, and the laughter became irrepressible. After half an hour of sounding like a girls dorm on nitrous oxide, the first sergeant descended on the tent to quell the disturbance. We were keeping the other tents awake. He was an odd guy with an old penile injury that left him capable of pissing over the wing of a C-130, and he had a brain-mouth disorder that gave him trouble saying what he meant sometimes.
“Quiet down in there,” he said, then for some reason, “or I’ll . . . drink your cocoa.” We went totally hysterical.
That was one of the best nights I ever spent in the Army. Our feet still hurt like a bastard.
I became various sorts of leader by and by; not a commissioned officer (the college-educated bosses, the military’s ruling class). I was a non-commissioned officer, one of the guys who comes through the ranks. From that experience I learned that one of the worst things you can do to someone is humiliate them. People will forgive assault and battery far more easily than they will public humiliation. A lot of leaders in the military and elsewhere will use public humiliation. They gain obedience, but they lose loyalty. Humiliation plants a seed of malignant hatred and the glowing ember of eventual revenge. Praise in public, punish in private. When I remembered that, my subordinates were mine in mind and body.
The world would be a better place, I think, if we had a rule against humiliation. In the Old Testament, to “whiten” a person’s face with shame (humiliating them publicly) was tantamount to killing them — a form of social death.
There were and are scandals in the military. Mainly about lack of accountability in several guises. Honestly, though, the culture on the internal ground of the military, excepting its relation to the “outside,” is one that generally demands accountability (more so the lower you are on the rungs of power, as it is everywhere). One of the things you have to get used to saying is, “I fucked up.”
Not “Things went wrong.”
First person singular.
We had an extreme form of accountability. If one of my troops went down with heat exhaustion because he hadn’t sufficiently hydrated, my first line supervisor didn’t chew that troop’s ass. He chewed mine, and someone had chewed his.
Yes, I lined people up and watched them comply with a directive to drink the contents of one one-quart canteen every hour.
When you take the role of a boss in the military, you’re responsible for everything that happens in your unit. You are responsible for its performance; you are responsible for the troops’ health and welfare; you are responsible for all your equipment.
What I see these days in cyborg dystopia, observing all kinds of online “debates,” if you could dignify them with that term, is that most people have lost that crucial capacity, the capacity to admit error or fault. That’s what happens, I guess, when we’ve been divided into “independent” egos. We’re left with pure assertion, no way out, our last best desire aimed at the humiliation of our adversaries. It’s easy to fantasize, from a veteran’s point of view, a Big Basic Training where the lot of them are shocked back into skin-in-the-game solidarity and taught how to say, “I fucked up.”
Admitting you’re wrong is counter-cultural.
In the Rangers, with whom I served on three separate occasions, “lead by example” was a religious doctrine. You want to issue pushups as a collective punishment for some minor infraction? You assume the position and call the repetitions while you perform the exercise. Leaders were first to take on hardships and the last to reap benefits. When I was a platoon sergeant and the chow line was formed during field exercises, the lowest ranking troops went first, and the highest ranking last. The platoon leader and I were the last two in line. If the chow was short, or the mealtime ran out, oh well. The very idea that being in charge was invested with privilege was anathema. That wasn’t universal in the Army, but I took it with me.
This isn’t cult-of-personality shit. Leadership is not about successful manipulation. Yes, it absolutely and inescapably requires hierarchy; but it’s service, like parenthood.
Another lesson: logistics. Ideas are a dime a dozen. Willpower without logistics is pissing windward. You want ten people to do something? Let’s make the wild assumption that they’ll stay on script (usually the first obstacle to enacting “ideas,” especially with “activists,” the direction of whom is akin to herding squirrels). Have you detailed (and I mean detailed and reheasrsed) their actions in a coordinated plan? Transportation, personnel administration, housing, food, medical, communications, waste disposal, money, schedules and actions, accountability, chain of command, weather contingencies, backup plans . . . on you go. Great idea you have there; now give me a feasibility study, a list of names, and a defensible op-plan.
Some soldiers (not all) experience something that emergency workers, medical professionals, cops, undertakers, and war zone residents do: encounters with the pre-cosmetic dead.
A ruined, battered corpse speaks to you in a voice that locks onto your bones. Memento mori. As you were, I once was; as I am, you shall be. It’s not organ music and compulsory sentiment. It’s animal mortality, stinking and wet. Everyone used to know this, I mean really know it. People outside the metropoles still do.
This is not a source of “trauma,” perhaps the most overused word in our hyper-delicate time. We live in a pretense, our dead separated from us, surrounded by simulacra and machinic mediation. Much of our “trauma” is the recognition — even for a moment — of this ridiculous pretense. Without this “really knowing,” having seen myself and my loved ones in the pre-cosmetic dead, I doubt I’d have ever understood the real power of the cross.
I also learned about degeneracy. War is a phenomenon that far more often morally degrades its participants than it elevates them.
Some people deal with the disillusionment of the pre-cosmetic dead by embracing depravity. Serial murderer Richard Ramirez stoked himself on a veteran friend’s trophy photos of dead Vietnamese. From the modern metropolitan pretense, these “psychopaths” are slingshot into its psychic mirror, embracing the “traumatic” reality as a love of horror, knowing no middle ground.
War is a practice that cultivates this peculiar psychopathy. War veterans have all know one or more of these guys. Some of us have been part of outfits where they’re held in the highest esteem. I learned that in the Army, too. There is such a thing as psychopath masculinity. It can be enculturated, take heed. I was once so close to it I could feel its magnetism. That, too — “the horror, the horror” — eventually revealed to me the power of the cross, and why it is so important for men — by which I mean adult males — who are most susceptible to this form of depravity . . . the reverse-sacralization of evil.
This isn’t the norm, but is an inevitable ramification of war. For most participants, the moral degradation of war is less extreme, taking the form of (most often racially) othering the “enemy.” Before you can justify killing, it helps to dehumanize the ones you may kill. This is particularly problematic for American troops, whose missions since World War II have been oriented toward the subjugation of people who pose no threat to the US. Military occupation obliges the soldier, an invading foreigner, to control populations where they live; and this obligation to control entails the same kind of psychological defense against the cognitive dissonance of pointing weapons at total strangers in their own land.
When I hear soldiers rationalizations, I understand. I don’t agree; but I understand. When I hear civilians, who have no experience of the reality of this inhering moral degradation, trying to justify wars and military actions, my mental response is short and brutal: “Fuck you! You don’t know what you’re talking about! It’s not you who did it, or you who’ll do it the next time.”
And so we come full circle back to my original equivocations and contradictions, back to the reason I don’t recommend the military to anyone, even as I empathize with fellow veterans and sometimes share their selective nostalgia about selfless teamwork, camaraderie, shared hardships, and the institutional capacity to make decisions and carry them out without seeking “consensus” among a bunch of self-centered whiny-babies for ten years at a stretch.
The military has the virtues entailed by purpose; but the purposes are those of the Prince of this World.
There was more, but these are just a few things I learned in the Army. Thanks for listening.