This is about America and how her common man has become a barbarian, and proud of it
Once upon a time, the American soldier was first and foremost a citizen. A private citizen who had his farm and his family or his job or his business to manage, but when his country was threatened, he dutifully, if somewhat reluctantly, took up arms for his government.
He was not a lifer, not a soldier by trade. He took orders from those career soldiers, and he knew that the generals often knew less than the privates, and almost always less than the sergeants. He knew that the army was a model of mess-ups and confusion and bad organization. SNAFU was a term invented for and by the United States military.
And when he got out of the service, when the war was over and he’d done his time, he went back home and took up his farm, his job, his business, and he raised his family again. And he remembered what a cock-up the whole military was. When talk of war arose again, he remembered how wretched it was, ugly and small and demeaning, and he voted to keep out of war unless it was necessary, absolutely necessary, to fight again. He didn’t want to fight again, he hadn’t wanted to fight the first time, and he damn well didn’t want his sons to fight this time, not unless there was no help for it.
Then his government got the fool idea that war was good for business. (Actually, I rather think that it was business that got the idea that war was good for business — these were the businesses that had made a killing on the war, and they had guaranteed profits to be made from their contacts and their insiders in the upper layers of the Purchasing departments of the military, a sure thing, not like the danger and risk of competition in the free and open market.)
That was when the United States of America decided it was the right thing to do, to fight perpetual war eternally, from now until doomsday, against all comers, and if there weren’t any enemies, we’d just have to invent some, and scare the public into voting to make the war industries richer than they already were.
The country started fighting unnecessary wars. Hell, we had to do it, we had to shoot somebody and blow up some bombs and crash some planes, or else how were we going to buy new ammo and bombs and planes from the arms industry? We fought those needless wars far from our own shores, in places most Americans couldn’t even find on a map, with strange names, strange customs and languages, places and cultures we didn’t understand. We were told it was the right thing to do. And we trusted the politicians and the generals who told us these things.
We were rich enough to pay for it, and still have a good life at home, those of us who didn’t have to go over there and die so that the arms industries could boost their quarterly dividends.
But there was a problem with this arrangement, and that was, that the American citizen found he was even more reluctant to go to war and die or get his arm blown off, if the war wasn’t necessary. And none of these wars was necessary. What was worse, the soldiers who were already over there fighting in these wars found out that the people we were ‘fighting for’ didn’t want us to be over there, didn’t want us to be fighting for us, they just wanted us to go home. They wanted peace too.
That was Vietnam, and the draft split the country in two. The old gents who weren’t in any danger of getting their arms blown off, voted to force the young gents, who couldn’t even vote, to go bet their arms blown off. Except for the rich young gents, and the young gents who were connected — they could get out of it by one trick or another.
After Vietnam, and the deserved loss the United States Government won there, the draft was abolished. The draft was abolished, but nobody could call off the Perpetual War, and nobody could tell the various Presidents that they had to obey the law, because by then the President was above the law, unless he decided to abide by it out of the goodness of his heart or some quirk in his nature.
So the American military became ‘all volunteer.’ ‘All volunteer’ means ‘professional,’ and after that there were no more citizen soldiers. They were all professionals. But they were still soldiers.
I have seen news reports from the 1990s, before President George W. Bush declared World War III, the ‘Global War on Terror,’ or in other words ‘USA vs. Everybody Who Won’t Do As We Please.’ In those old reports, there were tales of kids who went to join the military. They did it for college tuition payments, for good pensions, for guaranteed pay. They joined up to get a job, in other words. But when they got back from basic training, in the brief leave they had before getting their first assignments, they found something strange had happened.
They had changed. They weren’t the same any more. They looked on their old pals with new eyes. Their old friends were ‘civilians’ and they, the new recruits, were ‘military.’
They looked down on these ‘civilians.’ ‘Civilians’ were an inferior race, as it were.
And it was with great sadness that these young men spoke. They felt their loss. They grieved that their old friends were shiftless, lazy, undisciplined losers. But they didn’t look down on themselves, these new recruits. Boot camp and their DIs had broken their souls and given them new souls — the souls of warriors.
Recently I saw another report. This was from an Air Force veteran, who went with his son to the Air Force Academy in Colorado. He was appalled at what he found there. The place had changed since he had gone there. For one thing, it was now a religious institution, run by evangelical Christians who had taken over. For another, the recruits at the academy didn’t think of themselves as soldiers anymore. Now they were ‘warriors’ — Christian Warriors.
It broke his heart, but the old veteran took his son home, and was relieved when his son told him he didn’t want to go to the Air Force Academy and follow in his old man’s footsteps any longer.
Something else happened in America in this period. It began at the height of the Vietnam war and grew stronger in the 1970s and 1980s.
It was Robert E. Howard’s chief literary creation, Conan the Barbarian.
Conan was a warrior. No doubt about that! He lived for battle. He was a lover and a drinker and a gamester, but most of all he was a fighter. He captured the hearts of America’s young men. We all wanted to be barbarians. We all wanted to be warriors, big men who swung big … battle-axes.
Robert E. Howard was by most accounts a scrawny kid, whose father terrorized him, who had an unnatural attachment to his mother, who felt he was somehow less than a man, and whose fantasies made Conan come alive as one of the most vivid, remarkable literary creations of the 20th century. Conan was the man that Howard wished he could be.
The warrior was what all us scrawny, lazy, suburban coal-biters wanted to be. The warrior, indeed, is what civilians who have never fought a battle fantasize soldiers are. The warrior’s glorious victories and triumphs is what chicken-hearted hawk civilians fetishize. The warrior is to them a magical, godlike being. The cowards who ‘had other priorities’ (in Vice President Cheney’s words) and evaded by legal tricks the Vietnam war draft, never learned how messed-up the service can be, or how clueless generals can get, or how SNAFU’d the whole damned Army is. And so they glorify ‘the generals’ and ‘our troops’ without even understanding the hell that war is, the hell that the cowards are sending the servicemen and -women into.
Bill Mauldin’s famous creations, Willie and Joe, the typical GIs of World War 2, never thought of themselves as ‘warriors.’ They barely thought of themselves as soldiers, except under duress, for the duration, and let the armistice come sooner rather than later!
If Willie and Joe ever came up against Conan, they’d have rifles, and he’d have a battle-axe and his sword and dagger. It wouldn’t be a fair fight. He’d slaughter them.
Because Willie and Joe wouldn’t try to kill the half-naked guy in a loin cloth, screaming in strange tongues. They’d feel sorry for the lunatic — for just long enough for him to get within arm’s reach, and hack off both their heads.
The young men of 60 years ago sympathized with Willie and Joe. The young men of 20 years ago — and today — dream they are Conan.
We who tell tales of Eartherea, the Other Land where Dreams are Real, where Cimmeria is a place you can sail to in the misty north, we bear some responsibility for the dreams and fantasies and fetishes of young men who read our tales. We deal in dreams, but young men may be forgiven if they in their youth take those dreams for anything approximating reality.
(Composed on keyboard Sunday, July 13, 2008)
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