Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country (23 page)

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AMERICAN CHARACTERS

Toward the beginning of his book
After Virtue
, the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre introduces the concept of
characters
and reflects on their importance.
“Characters,”
he writes, “are the masks worn by moral philosophies.” They describe “those social roles which provide a culture with its moral definition.” Characters by no means command universal assent. Yet those who celebrate and those who despise a particular character “unwittingly collaborate as a chorus in the theatre of the present.” Through characters, “moral and metaphysical ideas and theories assume … an embodied existence in the social world.”
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Writing in 1981, MacIntyre identified the reigning characters in Western, and especially American, culture as the Rich Aesthete, the Manager, and the Therapist. In the United States, the passage of time has diminished the centrality of all three. A new trio has emerged in their stead: the Celebrity, the Geek, and the Warrior. These figures provide contemporary American society with at least a simulacrum of moral definition. Of the three, the warrior has the lowest profile but may well exercise the greatest importance, imputing a sense of purposefulness to an increasingly disordered society.

Who doesn’t love celebrities? After all, they provide vicarious escape from an everyday existence that social critics and ad agency copywriters join hands in depicting as confining and banal. As an antidote to anomie, nothing beats glamour. If not endowing life with meaning, glamour at least infuses it with sizzle. Celebrities exude and define glamour, no matter how fleeting and ephemeral. The most important social function of celebrities is simply to appear, presenting themselves to be discovered, admired, adored, gossiped about, criticized, ridiculed, and ultimately pitied (often in precisely that sequence). They satisfy our itch for fantasy and our appetite for schadenfreude. We worship them when they are on their way up and follow them no less avidly when they crash and burn—when Britney Spears, head shaven, beats a car with a baseball bat; a bleary-eyed Lindsay Lohan gets hauled into court for the umpteenth time; or Katie leaves Tom standing high and dry. And we love them (yet again) if they manage to drag themselves out of the mire to appear “clean and sober” on the red carpet or gorgeously arrayed, if carefully airbrushed, on the cover of
Vogue
. And for those who can’t manage full recovery, there’s always reality TV to offer a not-to-be-sniffed-at consolation prize.

Hollywood remains today, as it has been for decades, celebrity central. Yet celebrity has moved well beyond the world of entertainment. Celebrity-athletes who reprise the time-honored rise-and-fall narrative (O. J. Simpson, Tiger Woods, Lance Armstrong) rivet our attention. Rock-star politicians (Bill and Hill dominate the category) enjoy an exalted status, eliciting the same over-the-top response as rock-star musicians. Then there are the instances of cross-pollination, the merger between actress and NBA star or supermodel and NFL quarterback, elevating the celebrity quotient of both parties and feeding an even greater craving to peer into their lives. In Boston, where I teach, the leading daily newspaper routinely informs its readers (typically with accompanying photograph) when Gisele Bündchen walks her son through the Common or Tom Brady goes bike riding along the Charles River. In the city I call home, the doings of the Bündchen-Brady household qualify as newsworthy indeed.

If the celebrity offers momentary escape from the quotidian, the geek promises empowerment. As used here,
geek
refers to the moguls of the information age who have demonstrated a genius for converting bytes into dollars: Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and their imitators. Yet it also applies to the far more numerous and largely anonymous meme queens who through blogs, forums, social networking sites, instant messaging, and video streaming drive a culture that is moored to nothing more than irreverent whimsy and jeering ridicule. The appeal of this culture lies in its very impermanence. What’s not new is by definition passé.

The geek has largely succeeded in convincing Americans, especially the young and the hip, that instantaneous access to information holds the key to personal fulfillment. In practice, the promised empowerment all too frequently translates into subservience and subordination, a compulsion to tend to the beeps, buzzes, and vibrations of objects supposedly designed to do our bidding. Whether the thickening of the electronic web that envelops us serves to increase the accumulated storehouse of wisdom remains unproven, to put it mildly, the social media fad offering a case in point.

In contrast to the celebrity or the geek, the profile of the warrior does include a prominent moral component. The warrior is the one
character
actually connoting character, providing assurance that America has not lost its ability to produce brave, self-sacrificing idealists.

Yet in performing that function, the warrior has become something other than a mere soldier. Indeed, the warrior has eclipsed the soldier.

To appreciate the distinction, consider two instances, separated by more than a half century, when
Time
magazine selected the American fighting man/person as its Man/Person of the Year. The first occurred during the early stages of the Korean War. When
Time
designated “G. I. Joe as Man of the Year” for 1950, developments on the battlefield were actually looking grim. Communist China had intervened, and U.S. forces were careening southward in disarray.
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The second occasion occurred during the early stages of the Iraq War.
Time
’s collective designation of U.S. troops as Person of the Year for 2003 came at a moment when that conflict, too, had taken a turn for the worse. U.S. forces were struggling to suppress a growing insurgency. The difference in
Time
’s coverage speaks volumes about the evolving image and status of the Americans sent to fight our wars.

In its first-of-the-year issue for 1951,
Time
described U.S. forces in Korea as “the nearest approach to a professional army that the U. S. had ever sent into war.” Yet the content of
Time
’s cover story belied that statement, depicting troops who were at once dutiful but doubtful, willing but less than enthusiastic, not terribly competent but capable in extremis of rising to the occasion. “The U. S. fighting man” sent to Korea, observed
Time
, “was not civilization’s crusader, but destiny’s draftee.” Having no particular desire to fight, he viewed the war itself as “a terrifying affront.” The GI was a bundle of contradictions: “soft and tough, resourceful and unskilled, unbelievably brave and unbelievably timid, thoroughly disciplined and scornful of discipline.”
Time
freely acknowledged the GI’s shortcomings. “His defects were many, serious—and understandable.” Not least among them was an inadequate level of training, for which commanders compensated through a lavish reliance on matériel. As “the most comfort-loving creature who had ever walked the earth,” the American soldier “went forth into battle, brandishing his chocolate bars [and] his beer cans.”
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Still,
Time
concluded, “he had proved himself able to endure the thrusts of a brave and well-led enemy.”
4
Illustrating the article and bearing persuasive witness to that judgment were sixteen small black-and-white photos, each hardly larger than a postage stamp. Battlefield portraits taken by famous
Time-Life
photographers like David Douglas Duncan and Carl Mydans, most showed drawn and haggard foot soldiers who had seemingly found little glory in war. By no means masters of all they surveyed, they could at least claim to have survived.

Time’s
first-of-year issue for 2004 took a decidedly different tack. To judge from the images in its pages
,
a reader in 1951 might conclude that the army in Korea consisted entirely of white males. A half century later, the magazine proudly designated U.S. forces “the most diverse military in our history,” depicting U.S. forces in Iraq as a harmonious blend of black, brown, and white, male and female. Better still, they were “all volunteers, in contrast to most nations.”
5

Gone were the grainy black-and-white snapshots. Florid, large-format images showed neatly groomed, well-turned-out, and remarkably well-fed young people, both on the job and off-duty. On operations, they carried (or were encased in) high-tech gear that emphasized their technological sophistication. No one appeared haggard, hungry, or in need of a shower.

In one photograph, an armed American searches an Iraqi family’s “sleeping quarters for guns or suspicious stores of cash” while the “residents watch warily.” In another, an army captain “listens as an Iraqi woman begs for the release of her son, who has been taken into custody.” In a palace once belonging to Uday Hussein, Saddam’s son, a battalion commander and his staff peer at overhead images of Baghdad as they “plan a move against insurgents.” Together, observed
Time
, these troops “are the face of America, its might and goodwill, in a region unused to democracy.”
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Declaring the Iraq War “an expression of American idealism in all its arrogant generosity,”
Time
depicted those troops as the agents of that idealism and generosity, without any of the arrogance. “They are the bright sharp instrument of a blunt policy.” Not too blunt, however,
Time
assuring its readers that “the campaign of shock and awe was always aimed at mind and heart.”
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An essay by the distinguished military historian John Keegan provided the cherry atop
Time
’s coverage. Although carrying the title “The Making of the American G. I.,” the piece actually described the GI’s demise, explaining how the citizen-soldier had given way to the warrior-professional, a development that Keegan heartily endorsed. “There is something Kiplingesque about the modern American warrior,” he began. “He is a volunteer and a professional, as the long-serving regular of Rudyard Kipling’s day was.” In that regard, he was an apt successor to “Kipling’s archetypal soldier, Tommy Atkins.” Like Tommy, the American warrior feels a “personal relationship with his Commander in Chief,” he wrote, thereby equating George W. Bush with Queen Victoria. “Above all, like Tommy, he ships out. Ordered to a strange corner of the world, often at the ends of the earth, he packs his kit, says his farewells and departs. He does not ask how long he will be away or where he is going or why. If the President gives the word, that is enough.”

These new warrior-professionals differed fundamentally from the citizen-soldiers who had fought in World War II, Korea, or Vietnam. “America’s armed forces are becoming imperial,” Keegan continued, adding reassuringly that this was occurring “without their country’s becoming imperialist.” Barely containing his enthusiasm, he concluded on an implicitly imperial note. “Pax Americana, like Pax Britannica,” he wrote, “is guaranteed by a body of servicemen and -women who have no equal elsewhere on the globe.”
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Here was a fighting force suited for safeguarding, and perhaps Americanizing, the world.

In Keegan’s considered assessment, the troops fighting in Iraq at the beginning of the twenty-first century had far more in common with British soldiers upholding Victoria’s nineteenth-century empire than they did with the GIs in Korea at the midpoint of the twentieth century. In 1951,
Time
had gone out of its way to specify that Americans in uniform were
not
civilization’s crusaders; by 2004, they had evidently become just that, even if for reasons of political correctness the magazine had banished from its pages any actual reference to crusades.

In fact, Keegan’s essay ought to have given American readers pause. After all, the army that enforced the British Pax had achieved a rather mixed record of success, losing decisively to an armed rabble at places like Saratoga, Yorktown, and New Orleans and subsequently enduring disasters on widely scattered battlefields from Afghanistan and the Crimea to Sudan and the Transvaal. Why having present-day American warriors replicate this experience should qualify as a good idea might seem self-evident to a Briton like John Keegan. Yet any of
Time
’s American subscribers with even a modest knowledge of British imperial history might well have entertained doubts. Kipling himself knew what Keegan was choosing to overlook: keeping in line (even while purporting to uplift) the peoples Tommy Atkins disparaged as wogs is an ugly, thankless, demeaning, and ultimately futile task.
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REPEALING THE THREE NO’S

“America is not to be Rome or Britain,” insisted the historian Charles Beard in 1939. “It is to be America.”
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Seven decades on, Beard’s sentiment has a quaint ring to it. Americans have become accustomed to their country asserting “global leadership”—shorthand for doing what Rome and Britain once did—with the heavy lifting consigned to a small but obliging warrior class.

Indeed, without the warrior, the entire enterprise collapses. Absent the warrior who fights without asking “where he is going or why,” assertions of global leadership become unsustainable. Absent the myth of that warrior’s indomitability, evidence that recent wars have depleted America’s power while undercutting its prosperity becomes irrefutably obvious. Absent the insistence that among warriors virtue remains alive and well, the moral confusion pervading society—to which neither celebrity nor geek offers an antidote—becomes impossible to ignore.

American warriors may not win wars, but they do perform the invaluable service of providing their countrymen with an excuse to avoid introspection. They make second thoughts unnecessary. In this way, the bravery of the warrior underwrites collective civic cowardice, while fostering a slack, insipid patriotism. In the words of a hit country song, Americans