The Myth of War

We condition the poor and the working class to go to war. We promise them honor, status, glory, and adventure. We promise boys they will become men. We hold these promises up against the dead-end jobs of small-town life, the financial dislocations, credit card debt, bad marriages, lack of health insurance, and dread of unemployment. The military is the call of the Sirens, the enticement that has for generations seduced young Americans working in fast food restaurants or behind the counters of Walmarts to fight and die for war profiteers and elites.

The poor embrace the military because every other cul-de-sac in their lives breaks their spirit and their dignity. Pick up Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front or James Jones's From Here to Eternity. Read Henry IV. Turn to the Iliad. The allure of combat is a trap, a ploy, an old, dirty game of deception in which the powerful, who do not go to war, promise a mirage to those who do.

I saw this in my own family. At the age of ten I was given a scholarship to a top New England boarding school. I spent my adolescence in the schizophrenic embrace of the wealthy, on the playing fields and in the dorms and classrooms that condition boys and girls for privilege, and came back to my working-class relations in the depressed former mill towns in Maine. I traveled between two universes: one where everyone got chance after chance after chance, where connections and money and influence almost guaranteed that you would not fail; the other where no one ever got a second try. I learned at an early age that when the poor fall no one picks them up, while the rich stumble and trip their way to the top.

Those I knew in prep school did not seek out the military and were not sought by it. But in the impoverished enclaves of central Maine, where I had relatives living in trailers, nearly everyone was a veteran. My grandfather. My uncles. My cousins. My second cousins. They were all in the military. Some of them - including my Uncle Morris, who fought in the infantry in the South Pacific during World War II - were destroyed by the war. Uncle Morris drank himself to death in his trailer. He sold the hunting rifle my grandfather had given to me to buy booze.

He was not alone. After World War II, thousands of families struggled with broken men who, because they could never read the approved lines from the patriotic script, had been discarded. They were not trotted out for red-white-and-blue love fests on the Fourth of July or Veterans Day.

The myth of war held fast, despite the deep bitterness of my grandmother - who acidly denounced what war had done to her only son - and of others like her. The myth held because it was all the soldiers and their families had. Even those who knew it to be a lie - and I think most did - were loath to give up the fleeting moments of recognition, the only times in their lives they were told they were worth something.

"For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' 'Chuck him out, the brute!'" Rudyard Kipling wrote. "But it's 'Saviour of 'is country' when the guns begin to shoot."

Any story of war is a story of elites preying on the weak, the gullible, the marginal, the poor. I do not know of a single member of my graduating prep school class who went into the military. You could not say this about the high school class that graduated the same year in Mechanic Falls, Maine.

- - -

Geoff Millard was born in Buffalo, New York and lived in a predominately black neighborhood until he was eleven. His family then moved to Lockport, a nearby white suburb. He wrestled and played football in high school. He listened to punk rock.

"I didn't really do well in classes," he says. "But that didn't seem to matter much to my teachers."

At fifteen he was approached in school by a military recruiter.

"He sat down next to me at a lunch table," Millard says. "He was a Marine. I remember the uniform was crisp. All the medals were shiny. It was what I thought I wanted to be at the time.

"He knew my name," Millard adds. "He knew what classes I was taking. He knew more about me than I did. It was freaky, actually."

Two years later, as a senior, Millard faced graduation after having been rejected from the only college where he had applied.

"I looked at what jobs I could get," he says. "I wasn't really prepared to do any job. I wasn't prepared for college. I wasn't prepared for the workforce. So I started looking at the military. I wanted to go active duty Marine Corps, I thought. You know, they were the best. And that's what I was going to do.

"There were a lot of other reasons behind it, too," he says. "I mean, growing up in this culture you envy that, the soldier."

His grandfather, in the Army Air Corps in World War II, had died when he was five. The military honor guard at the funeral had impressed him. As a teenager, he had watched the burial of his other grandfather, also with military honors. Millard carried the folded flag to his grandmother after receiving it from the honor guard.

The pageantry has always been alluring. "We marched a long time," Louis-Ferdinand Céline, who fought in World War I, writes in Journey to the End of the Night:
There were streets and more streets, and they were all crowded with civilians and their wives, cheering us on, bombarding us with flowers from café terraces, railroad stations, crowded churches. You never saw so many patriots in all your life! And then there were fewer patriots . . . . It started to rain, and then there were still fewer and fewer, and not a single cheer, not one.
And nearly a century later it is the same.

When Millard told his mother he wanted to be a Marine, she pleaded with him to consider the National Guard. He agreed to meet with the Guard recruiter, whose pitch was effective and simple: "If you come here, you get to blow shit up."

"I'm seventeen," Millard says. "I thought being in the military was the pinnacle of what coolness was. I was just like, oh, I get to blow up stuff! I signed up right then and there on the spot. But the interesting thing he didn't tell me was that the 'shit' that he referred to would be kids.

"They don't teach you when you're in land mine school that the overwhelming percentage of victims of land mines are little kids. Because, like, in the States, a little kid will chase a soccer ball in the streets. And overseas, a little kid will chase a soccer ball into a minefield. Whether, you know, it happens in Korea or Bosnia or Iraq, kids get killed all the time by land mines. They get maimed by them. And that's just a reality of our military industrial complex. We put out these mines. We have no concern for what they do."

Not that this reality intruded on his visions of life in the military when he began.

"I just thought of it like this stuff you see on TV where cars blow up and stuff like that," he says.

For Anthony Swofford - author of Jarhead, a memoir about being a Marine in the first Gulf War - the tipping point came when the recruiter, who assured him he would be "a fine killer," told him he could book a threesome for $40 in Olongapo in the Philippines. "I'd had sex three times and been the recipient of five blow jobs and fourteen hand jobs," he writes. "I was sold."

But sometimes there's no need for a recruiting pitch. The culture does enough to make war, combat, and soldiering appealing.

Ali Aoun was born in Rochester, New York. His father is Lebanese. His mother is from the Caribbean. He says he wanted to be a soldier from the age of nine. He was raised watching war films. But even antiwar films such as Platoon and Full Metal Jacket celebrate the power and seductiveness of violence. He wanted this experience as his own. He says no one pushed him into it.

"I enlisted," he explains. "It was something I always wanted to do, although I got more than I bargained for. You never really know a woman until you jump in bed with her. It's just like the Army: you never really know about it until you enlist. It's not about defending the country or serving our people. It's about working for some rich guy who has his interests."

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