I Don’t Know, But I’ve Been Told

This weekend as I rushed to the Hoyt-Schermerhorn stop in Brooklyn, I passed a recruiting center where a couple of Marines monitored young hopefuls doing chin-ups on the scaffolding out front. As one soldier gave a nice-effort slap on the shoulder to a kid dropping before the others, an older, chisel-cheeked Marine, his back to the storefront, tracked me rushing by.

I couldn’t figure out a smile. Because in that moment I was shuffling through a little circuit I always fall into when I see soldiers: I feel afraid of their intensity, their willingness to die, their training in violence; then I feel instantly guilty for being afraid; and then I get a kind of remote reminder that they’re willing to kill and die in the name of everything and everyone I know, and I feel gratitude; and then I feel sorry for them that they have to do that, because I’m instinctively anti-killing and I wonder if they might be too; and then I feel a little frustrated that they don’t seem to be allowed principles of their own that they are or are not willing to kill and die for. That they can’t pick when they fight. And then I feel condescending.

Lately, as I read my grandfather’s letters from his service in World War II, it’s been striking me as strange that I get so uncomfortable around soldiers. I’m only one generation removed from one I knew and loved, one I can easily relate to when I read his letters from combat. And yet I have this knee-jerk alienation from uniformed soldiers I see in person, this stubborn sense that we’re different creatures entirely.

So here’s how I’ve been working back to an explanation.

At the foot of the basement steps in my grandparents’ house in Chicago, my grandfather kept his army helmet hung on a nail, a bullethole punctured in the metal just above where your ear would be if you tried it on.

That helmet gave me the shivers when I was a kid. First, I was unconsciously aware of it as a mute artifact from the wild violence of war. It seemed to tow behind it vivid, terrible realities, killings, the essence of some unimaginably overwhelming experience, but the thing itself was faceless; one, dark color–a seal over those realities rather than something that expressed them.

I also had an unarticulated sense that the bullethole was a tunnel to the possibility of some other present, a small hole through which the entire chaotic spread of the history of time funneled to pass in a moment, emerging and spreading on the other side into the rumpled, technicolor present I know. How if the hole had been slightly oblong, punctured at a different angle, or if it had been a centimeter higher because, say, the German firing had been faintly distracted by a bird flying overhead, the banner of time extending from the other side of that hole would have been different, my family erased from it, the lives of people around us expanding to fill the empty spaces we left behind.

And thirdly, had that been true—if my grandfather had been killed by that bullet, if my family had never sprouted into the universe—as sad and unthinkable as it was, I remember believing it would have been in service of a good reason.

So I guess I theoretically understand the notion of sacrifice–willingness to die. Well, I only really understand it–family-erasing, time-continuum-altering sacrifice–in the name of justice. But there’s so rarely a clear case of wrong endangering right, and even more rarely an occasion when the people who stand to get killed are perfectly aligned with one view or the other. And I don’t really understand willingness to kill at all.

I’ve often felt that the good wars are in the past. That there are certain truths we now understand about war and its tolls, and certain facts about the way we fight now (given the brutal efficiency of new technology we can’t resist employing) that make it impossible for the horrors of war to exist in reasonable proportion to any excuse we might find to resort to it.

So I’m very anti-wars, and it’s particularly hard for me to understand volunteering to serve in the military knowing what we now know. Maybe that’s part of it.

More: that condescending pity. My uninformed instinct has always been that people join the modern military out of desperation, for lack of better options. On a Greyhound trip from DC to Charlottesville last year, the man sitting next to me was telling the man behind us that he was out of work and out of dough and desperate for something to do. The man behind us told him to join the Army. Well, my seatmate told him, there was the nagging problem of a felony conviction.

“It might not matter. Depends on how long ago it was,” the man behind us said.

“Got out last week,” my seatmate said.

The man behind us paused. Crime waivers, I’ve learned, have become more commonplace in recent years as the military has strained to meet recruitment goals. “If you can figure it out, you should do it,” he said. “Look at it this way: you get killed on the street, your family gets nothing. You get killed over there, the Army takes care of your people.”

This incident became a convenient piece of evidence I waggled to prove that we were sending our country’s working class to die for us, and that’s why I had this complicated reaction, of course, because they were agents of their own victimization. But statistics don’t bear that out. Overall, we seem to have a middle class military, and the dismal economy and an improved GI Education Bill have produced jumps in recruits hailing from the richest one-fifths of neighborhoods.

So what else bothers me? What made me shrink back when in our elevator to class a student of mine told me she was in ROTC and would serve in the Army when she finished college? What made me then want to seize her by the shoulders and suggest maybe she wait tables or take the LSAT instead?

Maybe I felt she’d been boondoggled, because I believe the technique of military recruiting is a bait and switch. The ads feature smooth, young faces speckled by the blinking lights of a huge computer console, smiling soldiers swooping in a helicopter over an empty canyon. They reach out to young people craving identity, adventure, and challenge, making the sort of aspirational, self-actualizing promises that become an airbrushed seal over the physical reality of killing and dying. I heard recently that much of the new military technology is modeled after video game technology, to capitalize on the video game industry’s cognitive reflex research, and to capitalize on the advance training many new soldiers will have had with the equipment.

So maybe it’s the lie about continuity–that the military seems to go to great lengths to deny that service in wartime will totally rip a person out of the fabric of their life.

In any case, I’m working to stop overthinking it and just go with the gratitude part.