SOME STRANDS OF THE WEB

SOME STRANDS OF THE WEB

     Young men are the warriors. Young men populate the realm of interpersonal force in human affairs. It begins with simply possessing more muscular strength than other people, and combines with a natural male propensity to use that strength in play, in sports(41). But it is when this

natural exuberance becomes commingled with and

motivated by what I call “big ideas,” that young men become the masters of killing that they become. 

     Among “big ideas,” I include all politics, nationalisms, ideologies, and religions. Especially patriotism and religion. 

     Deadliest of all is the combination of patriotism and religion. That is how we slaughter our young.

     And once a young man who is inspired by a big idea becomes armed with anything from a machete to a machine gun, and organized into groups who believe and act as units, then we have the bloodbath that is history as we know it.

     My use of the etymology of the word “infantry” is neither accidental nor incidental. It screamed at me from my experience: growing up in the McCarthy years, being 

raised an American boy in the Pacific Northwest, the 

episode with my stepdad and the Marine recruiter in the 

41 I audited a course in ancient Greek language in graduate school at University of California, Santa Cruz, so I could follow translations of some of the classics, especially Homer and Plato, in the original Greek. During the 10-year Trojan War, at least once when the warriors were taking a break from the fighting, they did so by having athletic contests, including boxing and wrestling. In the Greek, there was hardly a distinction between “warrior” and “athlete.” Soldiers have always come from among athletes.In Vietnam, we played football at my outfit in Chu Lai.

gun shop in Klamath Falls, Oregon; Marine Corps training 

and service; the Vietnam War; journalism travels in Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Costa Rica,

Honduras, Jordan, the West Bank, Gaza, Israel; my summer of study in Leningrad and Prague...: everywhere I saw young men with weapons inspired by, or pushed by, or controlled by, “big ideas” fed to them by older men.

    I have come to see this parade of young men and boys with weapons as being moved around like chess pieces – okay, pawns – because I was one of them. My experience in Vietnam, and the other places I’ve seen the face of war, forced me to see this eternal column of armed boys

and men as something abnormal, monstrous, insane. It is all the more insane because of its normalcy and frequency. In the early stages of my own involvement, I saw our silly, grotesque parade of boys and men burdened with our hardware of canvas and steel as being just another noble but tragic chapter in the march of human history, as I had seen it most intensely during the “Adeste Fidelis” march(42) in advanced infantry training at Camp Pendleton in 1962.


42 See earlier post, "Adeste Fidelis, Semper Fidelis," in Archive.

STRUCTURE OF THE WEB

STRUCTURE OF THE WEB

     There is a web of male kinships and values and desires that determines how and why boys grow up to become warriors, when and how we go to war, what stories we tell and how we tell them when we return from war, how we age as men and warriors, and how old men come to the decision to send their sons, or the sons of others, to war.      The structure and workings of this web are so simple, so obviously present before us, among us, and within us, that its importance eludes us. We stare in bafflement right past the most screamingly obvious and important reason why armies meet in war: that such armies, and the official bodies which raise, fund, and direct them, are made up predominantly of men.

     This male web is of blood and spirit: father and son, brother and brother, uncle and nephew, boy and boy, man and man, coach and athlete, veteran and recruit, corporate executive and junior assistant, pastor and parishioner.

     It is a web of values: be strong, be brave, be loyal, dominate, prevail, achieve, build, destroy, survive. These values are built around a certain covenant which exists among men at war. 

     The many versions of the covenant that existed between me and the other Marines during the firefight at the well in the village of Tho An, and among all fighting men in all wars, always, are the common threads of the most important stories that old men tell to young men, or tell among themselves as boys eavesdrop, from the corner of the room or from the next table in a small-town diner, with a kind of attention they never show in school.

     That covenant is the web's highest value. It is also the core value of our nation.

     The web is above all else a web of male desires: this is the man I want to be, this is how I want to be seen by other men, by women, by children, by history. These are the deeds which I want to be remembered alongside my name. This uniform is my badge of courage.

     And the nation itself is a male entity. That is how patriotism got its name. Nations are founded by males, led by males who, at least until recently in the case of the United States, were elected as much because of their war records as their civil leadership abilities - or who, as in the cases of Dan Quayle and Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, must struggle mightily to overcome the taint of not having served, or of less than valorous service. 

     This male-centrism is also the animating force in our culture. It is the real story in any war movie, cowboy movie, TV-series cop show, adventure movie, "buddy" movie. Themes of national security, the fight against crime, good versus evil are rational overlays - in national political life and in cultural artifacts like movies or television shows - over the emotional core of men fighting for, dying for, seeking the approval of, the other men in their group. Next in importance comes the approval of women, children, parents - society at large.