The Greatest Price We Pay

Posted on March 30, 2005 in Reading War

Over two years ago, I stuck my neck out with a provocative article entitled Our “Boys” are Men Who Made Choices. In the heat of the times, I caught a lot of flak, particularly from a clan of liberals which strove to have it both ways. There was then and there remains now a resolve to make our soldiers out as if they are children. In 2003 I said:

This isn’t Vietnam, for one thing: every man and woman who is over there chose to be there. They are not children as the talk of “our boys” suggests: they are adults who made the decision to make killing and warfare their profession.

I was attacked by a popular blogger who suggested time and again that I was disloyal, that the troops were just doing their job. This is true for many of them, but the March 2005 issue of Harper’s tells the story of who is joining the Army and the Marines these days:

The first day of Reception, the recruits should have been so busy and harassed that they wouldn’t have had time for second thoughts or regrets, but Hurricane Ivan was sweeping through Georgia, and they were confined to their barracks — 104 young men, all keyed up, all on edge, about to embark on some mysterious journey, some awesome transformation that involved uniforms, mud, and guns. There was a constant jockeying for power, fights narrowly averted, a lot of pretense of enthusiasm. When Jeremiah suggested it might be better towound someone than to kill him, he was quickly put in his place. “Fuck that. I’m putting two in the chest, one in the head just like I’m going to be trained to do.”


The men in the barracks were whiter, poorer, and less educated than Jeremiah had expected….Skinheads, ex-skinheads perhaps (since active participation in extremist groups is prohibited), showed off their tattoos — one had been told by his recruiter to say that his swastika tattoo was a “force directional signal”. There were guys who had done jail time, though Jeremiah quickly adds, “Not that they’re bad people by any means, but it kind of shows you the type of person they’re recruiting.”


The next day, a sergeant addressed the recruits with a speech that Jeremiah says he’ll never forget. “You know when I joined the Army nine years ago people would always ask me why I joined. Did Ido it for college money? Did I do it for women? People never understood. I wanted to join the Army because I wanted to go shoot motherfuckers.” The room erupted in hoots and hollers….Jeremiah thought “Oh my God, what am I doing here?

That evening his wrote his first letter home, beginning with the word “Wow”.

“I’m horrified by some of the things that they talk about. If you were in the civilian world and openly talked about killing people you would be an outcast, but here people openly talk about it, like it’s going to be fun.” In his second letter, written while he was doing guard duty, he tells his parents how sad the barracks are at night. “You can hear people trying to make sure no one hears them cry under their covers.”

It’s clear that the services are not uniformly monstrous. On the other hand, we should not grant them carte blanche and immunity for their actions. Many of those deployed as members of the regulars are sociopaths. The others are truly boys who will come out of the military warped and unable to cope in civilian life. More disturbing are the Generation Sub-Xers, raised on video games and Ahnold who have been desensitized to human suffering. This may be the greatest price we pay for our unconditional adulation of our troops: it is one thing to love them as human beings, but quite another to give them permission to destroy.