Below are notes by James Fallows and others about the modern relationship between the American public and its military, in response to his cover story “The Tragedy of the American Military.”
You don’t need me to tell you that Phil Klay’s Redeployment is worth your attention. Last year it won the National Book Award for Fiction. But I do want to highlight an Essay he read last night on the PBS Newshour, on the theme of what Klay would tell his young son about his service as a Marine in the Iraq war. The full four-minute version is embedded here; below I’ll mention the part that struck me.
Here is how Klay ends, on the “lessons” of his service. Emphasis added:
I volunteered, after all. All of us did. That’s how we wage war now. A fraction serves, and a majority decides in hindsight which politician to blame it on….
You don’t get to decide the broad course of history, only your role within it. I wish I could evade responsibility for all that’s gone wrong in Iraq and only think about the sacrifices of those I served with, the heroic efforts, the courage of the Iraqis I met, the lives of both Iraqis and Americans saved by the medical staff at my base….
But I can’t. I’m an American citizen, responsible, just like every other citizen, for every part of the war, not just how I felt about the end of my part.
In a democracy, everyone shares responsibility. Troops don’t issue themselves orders. War is paid for by our tax dollars and ordered by politicians we as a people need to hold accountable.
So, I guess this is what I will tell my son. I will tell him it’s my job now and until I die to be an informed citizen. I will tell him about joining institutions, government or otherwise, that are working for a better world.
Blame, versus responsibility: I’ve added emphasis to this passage to highlight the contrast.
In a chickenhawk nation, it’s easy for politicians and public to wait around and decide whom to blame when things go wrong. What’s much harder is accepting responsibility for war-and-peace decisions as they are being made ( for instance, now) and for the lasting consequences, good and bad, foreseeable and not, as they accrue. As I mentioned last week in discussing Nancy Sherman’s book Afterwar, merely saying “thank you for your service” has become a largely empty ritual. The real demonstration of thanks, as Klay points out, is service as an informed, responsible citizen.
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I’ve also mentioned many times the powerful book God Is Not Here: A Soldier’s Struggle with Torture, Trauma, and the Moral Injuries of War, by Lt. Col. Bill Russell Edmonds. Here is a video of Edmonds lecturing on various aspects of moral responsibility, last month at Clark University.
I've been following your posts and book list, and have a recommendation: The Good Soldiers, by David Finkel.
Non-fiction (Finkel was an "embedded" reporter with a US Army battalion for 8 months between April 2007 and April 2008.) This is the All Quiet on the Western Front of the Iraq war.
A harrowing book- be prepared for that. I wanted to quit about 1/4 the way through. But I felt a duty to read it clear through- if the guys lived it and Finkel chronicled it, I could at least read to the end.
People need to know about this book.
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Best Picture winner, 1946 (Wikimedia)
What It’s Like to Go to War, by Karl Marlantes. Since its publication five years ago, I’ve often noted here the excellence of Matterhorn, a Vietnam novel by my longtime friend Karl Marlantes. A reader writes about Marlantes’s subsequent book:
Karl Marlantes’s What it’s Like to Go to War is a Viet Nam and postwar memoir that belongs on returning soldier reinstatement and chicken-hawk cautionary reading lists too.
When reading about the roadblock tragedy today in your first post about Afterwar, I thought of the similar scene in One Bullet Away….
When you read What it’s Like to Go to War, consider if any part of Marlantes’ suggestions for bringing veterans back whole into civil life remind you of scenes in the film The Best Years of Our Lives. I was reminded of his book when I watched the film again recently with my kids. The movie is old but not dated for this topic.
From another reader on the same topic:
You mentioned Karl Marlantes's harrowing Matterhorn, but an even better book for this topic is his follow-on non-fiction What it's like to go to war. He addresses these exact issues, not just from the standpoint of the trigger puller, but also from the viewpoint of the officer who orders artillery and air attacks that kill dozens.
In your list of books about healing moral injuries, I hope you mention Jonathan Shay’s Achilles in Vietnam. It is one of the most profound and humane books on healing trauma I have seen (indeed, it is one of the most profound and humane books I have ever read).
If you haven’t read it [JF: I have], it is structured as a meditation on Achilles’ moral breakdown in the Iliad, culminating with his dragging the corpse of Hector around the walls of Troy—all filtered through Shay’s work with the men (Vietnam veterans) he has treated for combat trauma. The notion that combat trauma is as old as combat, and that loss of honor through being forced to commit what “normal,” civilian society sees as crimes is at its root, has stuck with me for many years.
I know and tremendously admire this book and join the reader in urging others to find and read it.
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Afghanada, a radio drama by the CBC in Canada. A reader in Toronto says:
I don't know if you already know Afghanada, but it was a radio play on the CBC. Khan Soror, a well-know Afghani actor played a a part and advised. Scott Taylor was the military advisor, so it was gritty and sounded real to someone like me (reserve force).
Late last night I explained why I thought that Nancy Sherman’s Afterwar was an important non-fiction entry in the still-not-large-enough canon of works explaining our modern chickenhawk-era culture of war. I named a few related works, and this morning I find reminders from readers of others that certainly deserve mention too:
Consequence magazine. Consequence describes itself as an “international literary magazine focusing on the culture of war.” I am chagrined to say that I had not known about it, but at least I do now. A few days ago it published a review of God is Not Here, by Bob Shea.
The HBO one-season series Generation Kill, which I know about but have not seen. I thought the original book Generation Kill, by Evan Wright, was very good.
The FX one-season series Over There, which I saw when it originally aired ten years ago and also admired. Its possible that it was too ahead-of-its-time, for a mainstream audience, in its darkish view of the Iraq invasion and the aftereffects.
Restrepo, a powerful documentary film by Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington that follows a U.S. unit through a year in Afghanistan. The film came out in 2010; a year later, Hetherington was killed while covering the Libyan civil war.
One Bullet Away, by Nathaniel Fick. Fick was a young Marine Corps officer during the invasion of Iraq and also fought in Afghanistan. His book was one of the earliest notable memoirs of the war.
I know there are more, but that will hold us for now. Thanks for the reminders and tips.
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Update The video of the Georgetown session is now online. You can find it here, or in embedded version in my preceding post.
In my “Tragedy of the American Military” article early this year and in many updates since then, I’ve referred to Ben Fountain’s great novella Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk as the emblematic work of fiction for our Chickenhawk age. As a reminder: a chickenhawk nation is one willing to do anything for its military except take it seriously — in particular, thinking seriously about the wars to which it will be committed, and about what will happen to the troops when they return (except for halftime ceremonies at football games, like the one Billy Lynn portrays).
A week ago I attended and had a small part in a session at Georgetown in which veterans of our modern wars talked about something usually missing from our talk about “saluting the heroes” or “boots on the ground.” That something was the effect on the troops of the decisions they had to make in combat and the “moral injuries” they inevitably incurred in even the most successful and “glorious” wars.
For instance, in a terrible real-world case described at the Georgetown session: During the occupation of Iraq a young U.S. officer, commanding a roadblock checkpoint, sees a car barreling toward his soldiers at night. He gives all the established “slow down” and “turn back” warning signals. By this point in the occupation the Iraqis knew how the checkpoints worked and what the rules were. But as the car continues to bear down, the young officer finally orders his men to do what the rules of engagement called for: to riddle the car with machine-gun bullets before it could get close enough to set off a bomb — if that is what it contained. Only when they go to inspect the wreckage do the Americans learn that they have just killed an Iraqi couple, with their young daughters, who had been hustling to the hospital so that the pregnant mother could deliver another child. The soldiers were doing their job; the Iraqi family suffered more than a “moral injury”; but those soldiers would also never be the same. Two of them later killed themselves.
The literature of war has long dealt with impossible choices and moral injuries. Just in semi-modern history we have works from Cold Mountain to the The Red Badge of Courage about the U.S. Civil War; All Quiet on the Western Front from the German side and the great war poets from the British side, about the first World War, and the non-comic parts of Catch-22 about the second; now-largely-forgotten works like The Bridges at Toko-Ri and The Hunters about Korea; Matterhorn and others about Vietnam; and the dozen other titles that will come to mind.
The closest we’ve come for our modern wars would include The Hurt Locker, whose angle was that Jeremy Renner’s anti-IED specialist found meaning mainly in his recklessly dangerous work; or Homeland, whose angle is that Claire Danes’s CIA analyst has been driven crazy by the clues she missed; or maybe American Sniper, whose moral calculus involving Bradley Cooper’s sharpshooter I won’t try to untangle.
I am sure there are more, but for now my point is that Afterwar is a real step forward in assessing what America’s modern wars have done to — and also for — the one percent of America’s people who have fought them, and how the other 99% of the country should respond. For instance, it has an entire chapter on the tangles of that familiar phrase, “Thank you for your service.” One veteran says to a civilian, “Don’t just tell me ‘thank you for your service.’ First say, ‘Please.’” Sherman explains why this means, “Don’t take for granted my service. Don’t be cavalier in a call to arms. Take greater responsibility for the wars that our country wages.”
If a video of last week’s session goes on line, I will mention it, because many of the veterans’ accounts were remarkable. For now I will strongly suggest that you get and read this book.
Tennessee Titans cheerleaders honoring the troops last week. (AP / James Kenney)
Let’s continue our saga of the professional sports-world’s embrace of military imagery, costuming, and honoring-our-heroes celebration. A reader points me to this piece by Dan Wetzel, in Yahoo, on why the coach of a team named the Patriots, who himself grew up in Annapolis where his father was a Naval Academy coach, refuses to wear the dress-up camouflage gear other NFL staffs and cheerleaders have displayed during this month’s “Salute to Service.” Wetzel writes:
Belichick's commitment to the cause [of respecting military service] can't be questioned. What can be questioned is the league demanding someone wear a camouflage hat. It is a mostly meaningless gesture and doesn't signify anything. It's a sort of forced, show-pony act that has become pervasive….
Maybe the league's intentions here were 100 percent noble. Considering its publicity-conscious way of doing business and that recent paid patriotism scandal though, it can also feel like this is more about what the military can do for the NFL than what the NFL can do for the military.
The reader adds:
Speaking of Belichick, do you think he's a Stoic i.e. a true follower of the teachings of Epitectus? Given the hysterical bed wetting many Americans are engaging in currently in the wake of the Paris attacks, I think we could all use a dose of stoicism.
Short answer: Yes. I am agnostic in most of the passionate debates about whether Belichick’s Patriots symbolize good or evil. (I like the sheer efficiency with which they win, and their amazing years-long sequence of little-guy receiver and running-back stars. But because I’m not from Boston it would feel phony to make them “my” team.) I will say that I like the Stoic style.
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From a reader who grew up in the United States but has lived and worked for many years in Japan:
The chickenhawk / military fetish … illustrates the thin ice we are walking on a la, on the obscure side, J. G. Ballard`s Kingdom Come. Ballard`s book is about an English town that goes fascist gaga over sports and shopping with a store manager staging a coup at the mall. Boundaries blur, candy turns to rocks, rocks turn to candy.
Your label of chickenhawk nation is easy to twist into that we should become hawks, all in. The chickenhawk nation has a certain passive ring to it, we seem to have gone beyond that.
I remember in the 60`s the F-4 flyovers before football games with one jet peeling off representing POW`s and MIA`s (I was about 10 at the time, part of the TV pregame), but I do not think anything special was done for baseball games, I guess too many, would break the budget. On a trip back to the US a few years back I remember being shocked at the overt, over the top patriotism before the start of a baseball game (again, TV), so I think we are a big step up and over what was done during the Vietnam War.
It is this extraordinary report, by Brian Castner, published today in Motherboard. It is called “One Degree of Separation in the Forever War,” and I promise you will find it worth the time, and later reflection.
I would like everyone thinking about, or voting on, American foreign and military policy also to read and absorb this essay. Readers owe thanks to Brian Castner for writing it. The public owes deep respect to the Hines brothers whom it describes.
Opening of the piece on Motherboard. Please read it.
In response to this past week’s NFL observances of Veterans Day, including camouflage-themed clothing for coaches and sideline staff, a reader sends a comparative note on how pro sports teams elsewhere recognize this occasion:
You mentioned lapel poppies in the UK the other day. Worth noting that how the UK observes Remembrance Day is very different even at sporting events. Here is some fan-shot video from the proceedings at Arsenal's Emirates Stadium in North London this past Saturday:
He adds:
In addition, every player had a poppy embroidered on their jersey. I find this way of marking the occasion far more meaningful than the overly jingoistic version that seems to predominate on our shores.
Veterans Day respects and gratitude to those who have sacrificed and served.
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To spare effort by those getting ready to write in and explain this distinction: I do realize that the connotations of Remembrance Day, in England and elsewhere, are different from those of Veterans Day on the same November 11 date in the United States. Originally all these observances were Armistice Day, recognizing the end of World War I hostilities on the “eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month” in 1918. As another world war began, the name was generally shifted to Remembrance Day, which in England serves the purpose Memorial Day does in the United States: that of recognizing those who died in the line of duty. (For more on the Civil War origins of American Memorial Day, see Deb Fallows’s item from Mississippi.) In the United States, Veterans Day is for those who have performed military service, living and dead.
This was the pre-kickoff scene for the Dolphins and Bills yesterday (AP photo, also used in Will Bardenwerper’s WaPo piece)
Will Bardenwerper, who joined the Army after the 9/11 attacks and served as an infantry officer in Iraq, has a very strong essay in the Washington Post just now on the hollowness of the “Salute to the Heroes!” rituals that have become part of professional sports, especially the NFL. The title gives you the idea: “How patriotic pageantry at sporting events lost its meaning.” Here is a sample:
I should appreciate these moments at professional sporting events. I did once, but not so much anymore. Neither do a surprising number of the men with whom I served…. These moments, after a decade and a half of continuous war, have become rote and perfunctory, unintentionally trivializing what began with the best of intentions.
And, more pointedly, about the scenes that might accompany the heartwarming videos of a service member being reunited with spouse and children:
When I saw this, I couldn’t help but imagine what it would have been like if, instead, the Jumbotron had carried live footage of a military “casualty notification” officer in his dress uniform approaching the door of a comfortable home in middle America, stepping across a carefully manicured lawn, knocking on the door, an American flag blowing lazily in the breeze overhead, and having a mother collapse in tears at the sight of him, before he even has a chance to tell her that her only son had been shot and killed in Iraq or Afghanistan.
Very much worth reading. Bardenwerper even has a “to do” suggestion at the end of his essay. Conceivably at some point the chickenhawk shamelessness of these spectacles will sink in.
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Additionally, from a reader on the East Coast:
Yesterday at noon I posted on Facebook that, as a veteran, I was NOT “honored” when the NFL’s partners sell camo clothing.
I got 25 likes, and I only have 100 – 125 “friends”.
Midshipmen march into Navy's stadium before a game against South Alabama in 2013. (Patrick Semansky / AP)
Here’s a strange story out of Annapolis that seems to fit within Fallows’s new thread on Chickenhawk Nation, or the tendency of the American public to express easy gestures of gratitude to the military without at the very least informing themselves about why servicemembers are deployed all over the world, let alone sacrificing anything themselves. (As the son of two retired Army officers, including a Vietnam vet, I’m a bit biased on this.) So here’s the story: Local fans of the Naval Academy’s football team have renewed a seemingly sweet but condescending habit of tossing candy to the brigade of about 4,400 midshipmen that traditionally marches into the stadium at every home game. Things have even gotten ugly:
“[Y]ou get these little cretins who throw [the candy] 150 mph,” then-city police Sgt. Paul Gibbs told The Capital [in October 1998]. Well, the enthusiasts may have returned this season, because complaints resurfaced about the practice — don’t call it a tradition — of throwing Snickers, Starbursts, Tootsie Rolls, even hamburgers at the brigade.
Hamburgers.
“I saw hamburgers lying in the street,” said Bill O’Leary, who has lived across from the stadium since the 1990s. For years, he has called for an end to the throwing. “They throw plastic water bottles at them, too.”
Beer cans were added to the onslaught during a game against Wake Forest in 2009. Since the late ‘90s, Naval Academy officials have repeatedly urged the public to stop this habit—“It shows a lack of respect for the uniform of our armed services,” according to one statement—but it keeps popping up. Here’s one lame defense from a local fan via Facebook:
“As a kid, I grew up watching the Brigade of Midshipmen marching from the academy to the games at the stadium. My first memories were that we would toss candy to them so they could have some treats during the game. It wasn’t ‘throwing candy at them’ to be disrespectful. Then sometimes they would have candy to thank us and toss it back,”
Short-version background to this post: what I’m calling Chickenhawk Nation is a country whose troops are always at war, but whose people are mainly untouched by war, and that tries to paper over that difference with ritualized “Salute to the Heroes” ceremonies, like today’s throughout the NFL. You can read the long version of the background here, or in other messages on this thread.
Today’s installment: how to think about the popularity of military camo gear among people who have never dreamed of enlisting, and the additional role of flags. First, from a serial entrepreneur who now makes his living as a mariner:
One of the thing I've noticed is that homeless people now festoon their rigs with American flags. This was brought to mind by the fellow who roams our neighborhood in [XXX] with a shopping cart picking up scrap metal, but I've also seen it on shanty boats in the ICW [Intracoastal Waterway] and elsewhere. I'm pretty sure this is a post-9/11 phenomenon, but I think it's lingered because of the thin patriotism that Chickhawkism fosters.
(Wikimedia commons)
My theory is that by adorning their carts, tents, boats, etc with flags (the guy in our neighborhood has 4 or 5 on his shopping cart) these guys feels they are marginally less likely to get hassled by authorities. As someone who has been a vagrant here and their through my life, I know that being hassled by The Man is an ever-present burden that one is wise to take steps to blunt.
I could easily document this, but can't think of a way or reason to do it that doesn't further trample the dignity of these unfortunate fellow, so I just pass it along as something I've noticed in our current Cult of the Flag/ Chickenhawk times.
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Further on the NFL-and-military connection, from a reader in Seattle:
As for our SeaChickenHawks: It’s difficult to reconcile that they’ve taken $453k from the military for such events when you consider this little-known but ugly incident between coach Pete Carroll and Gen. Peter Chiarelli.
The reader goes on to quote from this Deadspin account, unrefuted by Carroll or the Seahawks as far as I can tell, about Carroll trying to convince Chiarelli — who had been inside the Pentagon when the 9/11 airplane hit the building, and whom I first met when he was a young officer at West Point 30 years ago — that the whole attack was a hoax. Sample quotes:
Chiarelli—who grew up in Seattle—is a big Seahawks fan. His post-military work concerns traumatic brain injury research, a cause of some significance to the NFL. And both have plenty of experience leading groups of men on grand American stages.
The sit-down between Chiarelli and Carroll started off normally enough. They talked about the team, and then about head trauma. Chiarelli, who commanded the American forces in Iraq during Operation Iraqi Freedom II, talked about the brain injuries he had seen there. But Chiarelli's mention of Iraq sent Carroll in another direction: He wanted to know if the September 11 attacks had been planned or faked by the United States government.
In particular, Carroll wanted to know whether the attack on the Pentagon had really happened.
You can read more at the Deadspin account. A further fillip on a culture that is symbolically reverent of “the heroes” but in real terms vastly distant from them.
TV screenshot sent in by a reader, November 8, 2015.
In the context of this past week’s “Paid Patriotism” report by Senators John McCain and Jeff Flake, about the way the Pentagon has been paying pro sports teams for patriotic on-field displays, a reader sends a screenshot from one of today’s games:
Sorry for the interruption, but I had to send this from the game on now. All of the coaches are dressed in camouflage!
Yes it's Veterans Day Wednesday, but during the years when I lived in England, where people really know about the horrors of war, no one would even think of dressing up like that. If you wanted to honor vets you wore a red poppy.
And of course red poppies on the lapel are very widespread Remembrance Day tributes in the U.K., Canada, Australia, etc. It’s worth noting that the camo theme in today’s U.S. football games applies not simply to the caps but even to the Bose headsets, as you see here.
The significant point, I think, is that the American public has seen things like this so often that we barely notice any more. The re-themed Bose headsets are another detail that Ben Fountain might have worked into Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, though perhaps he was worried about making the satire a little too broad.
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Update Thanks to a reader for pointing out that in a special salute to the troops, the NFL’s online shop is offering a full 15% off list price to veterans and service members.
