On the second floor of Memorial Union, just outside the Union Play Circle, is a very peculiar painting: a formal, dignified and faintly tragic military portrait of Fredric March, an actor playing the role of Army Major Joppolo in “A Bell for Adano.” Looking at it, you experience all the sobering humility of standing in the presence of someone who is pretending to be a soldier. He pretends to do more by 9 a.m. than you’ll pretend to do all day. He risks his fictitious life and daily-regenerated limbs pretending to fight for the freedoms you pretend to enjoy. If it weren’t for all his hard pretend-work, you’d be pretending to speak German.
With no disrespect intended toward either actors or soldiers, I submit that we have in that painting a concise allegory for the bizarre, conflicted relationship between American civilian culture and the military: two-dimensional, guilty, confused, easily manipulated and often unable to grapple with military reality outside the context of a good story.
In few places is this truer than in the liberal, idealistic political climate of the University of Wisconsin, famous for aiming high in questions of social responsibility.
On the one hand, we, as a culture, are predisposed to reject the mechanisms of warfare and shudder at the very concept of Eisenhower’s “military-industrial complex.” On the other, we have inherited the baby boomers’ collective guilt about Vietnam, complete with all its anecdotes about veterans returning to an ungrateful, hostile, spitting public, in stark contrast to the parades their fathers had received coming home from World War II. Thus, it has become extremely unpopular not to claim to “support the troops,” regardless of one’s stance on the war in Iraq, Afghanistan or anywhere else American soldiers may have been deployed during the weeks when we were too busy to read the newspaper.
Both the spitting and the groveling generate from the same source: American civilians as a whole — and spirited young liberals in particular — know remarkably little about our military. Its whole sentences of uninterrupted acronyms constitute a foreign language. Advancement through the ranks of its dizzying bureaucracy is as majestic and mysterious as if it were the pack hierarchy of a different species. Its subordination to the civilian government seems automatic and without conflict or complexity. Most crucially, for all our love of books and movies about war, we remain powerfully ignorant of the actual experience of the American military outside the context of compelling fiction.
In a nutshell, we are insulated from an institution of enormous importance to our existence as a state and of unprecedented influence in the international balance of power politics. Prior to the Cold War, generations upon generations of young Americans were socialized in the military. Now, more and more of us are predominantly socialized at the university. Let no one mistake this for a complaint; many fortunate young Americans have good reasons for choosing the dormitory over the barracks and the lab coat over the fatigues. However, if we do not critically examine the knowledge and experience that were lost in that transition, we risk a deadly ignorance. Specifically, the University of Wisconsin suffers from a conspicuous lack of courses on military policy, history, theory or experience outside of Officer Education (with the notable exception of the inimitable Jeremi Suri’s two courses on the History of American Foreign Policy). How does this dynamic play itself out in the electorate? For one thing, it renders us easy prey for manipulation. If you don’t believe me, I have a new drinking game for you: re-watch the presidential and vice-presidential debates and take a drink every time either of the vice-presidential candidates mentions a deployed son, John McCain uses the words “scars to prove it,” or Barack Obama asserts his patriotism and social grace by saying he honors McCain’s service. If you’re still alive in the morning, you’ll see my point: It is, evidently, more advantageous to campaign as a war hero than as a senator with decades of experience. The tactic is by no means specific to the Republican Party, although for some reason John Kerry “reporting for duty” was a much harder sell, possibly because Kerry seemed to many to renege on his military obligations by leading an anti-war effort upon his return from Vietnam.
Similarly, a substantial portion of Colin Powell’s near-universal approval, which effortlessly transcends the boundaries of party affiliation and race, derives from his status as a general and decorated war hero. Of course, it detracts somewhat from the image of a great military monolith for one veteran to endorse the opponent of another veteran. Perhaps the complexity indicated by this contradiction might compel us to investigate more seriously the dynamic reality of the experience and the institution that enables us to throw around haphazardly the label of “American hero.”
Courtney Ehlers ([email protected]) is a junior majoring in history and environmental studies.