> >Nobody made them sign up. Period.
>
>No, most of them did it because there were not more attractive
>options, and there was a lot of lying. Deception is a form of
>force, I wouldn't be the first to argue.
Quite right, regarding both push factors (high levels of working-class youth unemployment, especially among young men of color) and pull factors (wages, benefits, elusive promises of higher education, some chances of seeing other parts of the world, etc.).
Here's a review of a recently published memoir of war and military life _Jarhead_ by a Gulf War veteran Anthony Swofford, which may be of interest to some:
***** "Jarhead" by Anthony Swofford In this self-lacerating memoir, an ex-Marine sniper who fought in the Gulf yearns to escape from the myths of warfare and the sadism of military life.
By Laura Miller March 10, 2003
... Swofford was a lance corporal in a United States Marine Corps scout/sniper platoon who saw combat in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait during the Gulf War. Specifically, he was fired upon by both the enemy and his own side, but didn't actually kill anyone himself. His war was short, and it only takes up the last third or so of this slender book. Of necessity, Swofford devotes more pages to his childhood and youth, his training in the U.S. and overseas, and the several months he spent stationed with his platoon in the Arabian desert waiting for the war to begin.
Initially, "Jarhead" delivers some jolts. Marine barracks are not known for their decorum, but Swofford describes his mates and himself as brutal, petulant, thoughtless, wretched, sadistic, wrathful and sometimes borderline sociopathic. He remembers being beaten mercilessly by a sergeant, holding a gun to the head of a fellow Marine until the other man wept uncontrollably, fantasizing for hours about the "pink mist" resulting from a properly-aimed shot to an enemy's head, contemplating suicide, auctioning off seminude photos of his unfaithful girlfriend, looting the corpses of Iraqi soldiers for trophies and consuming impressive amounts of cheap booze and porn.
From "Jarhead," you will learn that Marines pump themselves up by watching war movies on video: "We yell Semper fi and we head-butt and beat the crap out of each other and we get off on the various visions of carnage and violence and deceit, the raping and killing and pillaging. We concentrate on the Vietnam films because it's the most recent war." The fact that these films are meant to be antiwar doesn't faze them. "Actually, Vietnam war films are all pro-war," Swofford writes, "no matter what the supposed message." Marines love them because "the magic brutality of the films celebrates the terrible and despicable beauty of [our] fighting skills."
You will also learn that both of the Marine recruiters Swofford met with in his 17th year (the first time around he couldn't get permission to enlist from his father, an Air Force veteran who said, "I know some things about the military that they don't show you in the brochures") made access to inexpensive foreign prostitutes a highlight of their pitch. And that despite their hearty enthusiasm for the services of such ladies (not really available in Saudi Arabia, it must be said), the Marines Swofford served with were obsessed with the fidelity of the wives and girlfriends they'd left in the States. They maintained a "Wall of Shame," a post to which they duct-taped photographs of cheatin' women with notes detailing their betrayals: "This bitch fucked my brother," etc.
And then there's the grotesquely sexualized horseplay and hazing, the preoccupation with homosexual acts and the inability to distinguish them from violent domination: the "boot" Marine who was nicknamed "Ellie Bows" and referred to by the feminine pronoun; the football game that degenerates into a "field-fuck" of pantomimed sodomy inflicted on "typically someone who has recently been a jerk or abused rank or acted antisocial"; tricking the new guy into thinking they're going to brand him with a red-hot coat hanger; referring to mouths -- and new recruits -- as "cum receptacles."
Finally, you will see that if the creative impulse flourishes anywhere in the Marine Corps it is in the elaboration of spectacular profanity. One recruit parodies drill instructors by strutting through the barracks, hollering "You cumsuckers don't love my Corps. You shitbags disparage the memory of Chesty Puller every day with your lazy carcasses lying around on these cots like desert princesses jerking your rotten clits!" A sergeant knocks the Fifth Regiment as "all the inbreeds and degenerates. They came from the same mama somewhere in the woods of North Carolina. A big old green, wart-covered jarhead-mama. She shits MREs and pisses diesel fuel." (MREs, meals ready to eat, are the dehydrated food on which soldiers survive in the field.) A drill instructor orders Swofford, chosen to be the camp's Catholic lay reader, to "pray like a motherfucker."
...Americans haven't fought a major war in generations. For our average male citizen, military service...is an alien notion. Yet we haven't shaken our age-old sense that war is a crucible of masculinity....Swofford had the misfortune of succumbing to that romance, and to his own "intense need for acceptance into the family clan of manhood," when he was still young enough to sign up.
He began regretting that decision almost as soon as he'd acted on it, and "Jarhead" thrums with a ceaseless litany of curses and self-flagellation. The lot of the jarhead, Swofford explains again and again, is wretched, and the jarheads themselves base. They travel miles to escape their own kind. Their wives and girlfriends don't cheat because they're bored, but because "everyone loves to get over on the jarhead."
"Like most good and great marines," he writes, "I hated the Corps. I hated being a marine because more than all of the things in the world I wanted to be -- smart, famous, oversexed, drunk, fucked, high, alone, famous, smart, known, understood, loved, forgiven, oversexed, drunk, high, smart, sexy -- more than all of those things, I was a marine. A jarhead. A grunt."
But Swofford is smart, and, like most of his fellow Marines, he knows he suffers and may die to secure America's access to oil fields he'll never profit from. "None of the rewards of victory will come my way, because there are no rewards, not on the field of battle, not for the man who fights the battle -- the rewards accrue in places like Washington, D.C., and Riyadh and Houston and Manhattan, south of 125th Street."...
Not surprisingly, his tour of duty makes Swofford feel like a chump, and in the portions of "Jarhead" that describe his life after he gets out of the Marines, he wants nothing more than to shake off his former identity. Hatred of the Corps feeds into self-hatred for being the type of guy who enlisted, like a snake eating its own tail. The feeling that he and his comrades "would always be jarheads" plagues him. There are varieties of pain in "Jarhead," submerged beneath the terrors of battle and the pangs of a rotten crotch, so exquisite they'd do a torturer proud...
<http://www.salon.com/books/review/2003/03/10/jarhead/print.html> *****
Swofford says that he initially thought of writing a novel about the Gulf War and then turned it into an autobiography (Dinitia Smith, "War Witnesses at an Intimate Level," NYT 17 March 02, <http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/17/books/17JARH.html>), so it is possible that he exaggerated in a novelistic fashion the elements of Marine Corps life that he felt his reader would expect and desire. Nevertheless, the culture of anxious and aggressive vindication of manhood that Swofford writes about is disturbing, especially as it appears to be an important factor in recruitment. Military life has no monopoly of such a sexist and homophobic culture, but there is no denying that it has been unable to exist without it in this and many other nations in modern history. What does it mean to say, "Support Our Troops," just at the moment when women in the military are breaking the silence about the culture that protects rapists against victims (be they women soldiers here or women civilians overseas)?
According to Katha Pollitt, today 15 percent of the US military is female (Katha Pollitt, "Phallic Balloons Against the War," 24 March 2003, <http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030324&s=pollittt>). Women have made an inroad in the military, but they are still a tiny minority, and recent revelations of rapes at the Air Force Academy prompted one woman to write the following op-ed on the eve of war:
***** NYT March 18, 2003
Rallying Around the Rapist By DEBRA DICKERSON ALBANY
You know that look you get when someone thinks you're full of it? The eyes narrow as if there's a thick, black smoke cloud between you, the head turns skeptically to one side, the brow crinkles in a look that can be read only as, "You have got to be kidding me." I know that look well.
I grew up poor and black. I escaped poverty in large measure by enlisting in the United States Air Force and staying for 12 years. The service claimed me as one of its own: I was decorated, I was promoted early, I earned bachelor's and master's degrees and became an officer. I was an official golden girl.
But along with all the support and encouragement came incredible sexism. It was infinitely more difficult to be female in uniform than to be black. As the ultimate expression of that, I was raped by a member of my own unit, in my own bed, on Christmas Day 1981, shortly after reporting to my first assignment, at Osan Air Base in South Korea. I was 22. I pressed charges and my attacker confessed. Then the second phase of the nightmare began: the military blamed me.
At the base hospital, the doctor examined me with one hand while holding instructions he seemed barely able to comprehend in the other. A male airman mopping floors wandered in and out while I lay naked, no covering having been deemed necessary. No women were present then, or during the investigators' interrogations.
Soon, I learned that my commander was against me, too. He never asked how I was doing, let alone offered me a day off or a chance to call home. I received no counseling. Had I gone to what passed for therapy, I would have lost my security clearance. The only time he broached the subject was to tell me he was having me evaluated for alcoholism. Translation: he was forcing me out of the service.
My fellow airmen ostracized me. Another unit member who was charged with killing his infant while drunk was surrounded by weeping airmen during his trial. No one except a sympathetic major, who wasn't even in my chain of command, came to support me during my rapist's trial. My peers drafted a character statement attesting to my rapist's high morals and their disbelief in the guilt to which he had confessed. The unit's women led that effort. Had he falsified an expense voucher, he'd have done hard time and been discharged. For raping me, he got six months and served two. He lost his security clearance but went on to retire with full benefits.
I blamed my commander for everything. But I refused to hold the Air Force complicit. Why? Desperation, I guess. A need to believe that the Air Force truly did consider me one of its own. At that point in my life the service was all I had; I didn't have any other choice but to persevere. I didn't deal with the rape for a decade - I was a tough working-class chick, see? I praised the service at every opportunity. But I lived like a fugitive, setting booby traps, afraid to sleep, nightmare-ridden when I did, avoiding social situations like the Christmas party where my attacker homed in on me.
Still, I lived. And even thrived professionally, commander be damned. By the time I was ready to deal with it, in my 30's, I rationalized the service's complicity with a confidence that it had learned from situations like mine. "It's totally, utterly different now," I'd swear to skeptical listeners. "That could never happen again."
That's why I became so familiar with that "you've got to be kidding me" look. No wonder. People were right to think me a fool. If wholesale rape and scapegoating of victims is going on at the Air Force Academy, it must still be pure hell in the trenches. My eyes have finally been opened, however late in the game. I was never one of the Air Force's own. My rapist was.
Debra Dickerson is author of "An American Story" and the forthcoming "The End of Blackness."
<http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/18/opinion/18DICK.html> *****
There would have to be a better way of expressing our invitation to working-class men and women in the military to join us than the slogan '"Support Our Troops."
Yoshie