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.