Roy Scranton
Socrates was a soldier. In Plato’s Symposium, Alcibiades testifies to his courage and describes how during the Peloponnesian War Socrates disregarded physical discomfort to the point that “the men began to look at him with some suspicion and actually took his toughness as a personal insult.” For Alcibiades, Socrates’s wartime service spoke to his exemplary qualities as a citizen. Decades later, when Socrates was put on trial for impiety and corrupting the youth, the philosopher himself asserted that martial virtues, civic virtues, and philosophical virtues are one and the same. Courage, he contended, is foundational to the civic virtue of dissent, which is vital to the health of the nation.
His fellow citizens were not swayed, and condemned him to death.
So Socrates was a soldier. So what?
IN SPITE OF frequent invocations of war’s eternal verities, the truth is that war has been experienced in different ways by different participants in different times. War is and always has been a cultural activity, and occurs in a specific cultural context. Indeed, war produces cultural meaning. Not only does your average grunt experience war in a given cultural context, but that grunt’s particular culture derives its meaning—manifest, remembered, or imagined—from episodes of war. In this sense, war is like law or architecture, a human activity where ideas become meaningful through being embodied—in the case of war, through physical sacrifice. A dead soldier makes the imagined community of the nation real.
In contemporary American culture, war remains nationalistic and to some degree sensationalistic, focused on what I call the myth of the trauma hero: the story of a noble young man, usually white, psychologically wounded by his encounter with violence. Being a veteran marks one as having served one’s country, but also as having been initiated into a select spiritual fraternity defined by a shared encounter with trauma. Soldiers, that is, embody not only the “imagined community” of the nation but a distinctive caste within it.
The historian David Bell, among others, argues that the particular constellation of meaning through which we now understand the experience of war emerged in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, along with the modern nation-state, the professional national army, and the cult of sensibility. This understanding of war as a spiritual experience, in which the veil of civilized life is pulled aside and the truth of existence is revealed—in Chris Hedges’s words, “war is a force that gives us meaning”—took shape in writing by authors as different as Stendhal and Carl von Clausewitz, and achieved its most resonant articulations in twentieth-century war literature, particularly among writers responding to World War I and what Americans call the Vietnam War.
Today the trauma hero narrative is alive and well, and counterintuitively offers one of the great contemporary appeals of soldiering. War promises not only psychological wounding but also wisdom acquired through a violent encounter with the Real. But the wisdom of war is a double-edged sword. In films such as The Hurt Locker and American Sniper, novels such as Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk and my own War Porn, and short story collections such as Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried and Phil Klay’s Redeployment, the traumatic wounding, hardening, and socialization that characterize military training and the experience of war are depicted as being contrary to civic culture. The skills required to survive on the modern battlefield are at odds with life as a consumer-citizen in mass society. The resulting sense of alienation combines with the image of membership in a self-selecting elite to deepen the caste identity of the contemporary soldier or veteran.
War as an imagined and remembered act remains central to American national identity. Yet the actual experience of war affects a much narrower range of the population. As a practical matter, military service these days tends to be a family affair. According to the New York Times, “More and more, new recruits are the children of old recruits. In 2019, 79 percent of Army recruits reported having a family member who served. For nearly 30 percent, it was a parent—a striking point in a nation where less than 1 percent of the population serves in the military.”
For Socrates, his war service was in many ways coextensive with his participation as a full citizen of Athens. Most of the other citizens of Athens—all men, of course—had been soldiers too. But these days, even during wartime, only a small minority of citizens serve. During the Civil War, slightly more than 10 percent of the population on both sides served in uniform. In World War II, the percentage of Americans in uniform was about the same. Today, less than one-half of 1 percent of the US population is serving on active duty, and a mere 7 percent of the population qualify as veterans.
Being part of the military caste means being part of a subset of American culture that stands in ambiguous relation to the rest of the body politic. The moral authority conferred by the experience of traumatic wounding both valorizes and alienates: embodying national identity positions the veteran as a living critique of our collective failure to maintain that identity. Like Captain America in Marvel’s Avengers, the veteran is at once an avatar of traditional American values and the enemy of a decadent culture that has fallen away from or abandoned those values.
Today, wartime service and dissent have a curious and complex relationship. The former act creates collective identity; the latter strains it. When the two combine, they challenge the metaphysical foundation of the state, its monopoly on violence. Yet having participated in war grants dissent a moral authority.
A soldier, within the military, may dissent against the military; a veteran may dissent against civic society. In the first case, the dissenting soldier betrays their caste and fraternity for a higher ideal. In the second, they play a scripted role, imbued with moral authority but, since the Vietnam War, more or less empty of content. What is another Winter Soldier going to tell us that we don’t already know? And what difference does it make? If we’re winning, such dissent is irrelevant. If we’re losing, it’s unpatriotic. Either way, it serves mostly to remind civilians of how privileged they are to have such stalwart guardians doing their dirty work.
Whether war has ever truly served the American people or has always been just “a racket” (in the words of Major General Smedley Butler, US Marine Corps) may be an open question. What seems undeniable is that the transformation of physical sacrifice into trauma, the professionalization of the military (especially since the end of the draft), and the astonishing cynicism and failure of the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have attenuated whatever collective bonds might once have tied the military and citizenry together.
Some people say this military–civilian divide is a “failure of imagination” that endangers American democracy. I hold another view. The truth is, most Americans have a clear idea of what our soldiers are doing in distant theaters of war: they are defending US political and economic interests, hunting down our enemies, and wreaking vengeance on those who have done us harm. There is no divide here. The US military has a job to do, and most citizens understand exactly what that job is. “Our troops” are agents of American state power. Even in dissent, they are fiduciaries of national identity.
I WAS RAISED in a military family. My father, a grandfather, and an uncle all served in the Navy; another uncle served in the National Guard; my other grandfather served in both the Navy and the Coast Guard. Indeed, no other institution cast as large a shadow over my childhood as did the military, despite the fact that my father was discharged when I was only two years old. A squat Buddha my grandpa brought back from Southeast Asia sat near the door of my grandparents’ home, and a mysterious framed award on the wall of their basement attested to his becoming a “Trusted Shellback” and servant of King Neptune after crossing the equator. My father’s old white sailor cap was a beloved fetish, as were the various patches and insignia I began to collect. Military service, and particularly the adventure of fighting overseas, seemed a defining feature of masculine identity. I dreamed of growing up to become a grizzled, tattooed sailor with salty stories of danger, storms, foreign ports, and war.
The Vietnam War, though long over, seemed omnipresent. My grandfather had worked as a machinist’s mate on a river patrol boat, an experience he never discussed. My father’s closest brush with Vietnam was pulling duty on a destroyer tender that once anchored in Da Nang harbor, but even that slight connection to the war kept it alive in a concrete if dreamy way. All this was powerfully supported by pop culture representations of the war, as well as more literary and historical work. From the Rambo trilogy to action films such as Missing in Action and Behind Enemy Lines (a.k.a. P.O.W. the Escape), through memoirs such as Robert Mason’s Chickenhawk, comic books like G.I. Combat, the magazine Soldier of Fortune, the cartoon G.I. Joe, and the TV show M*A*S*H, to say nothing of much more prestigious and well-known films such as Apocalypse Now, Platoon, and Full Metal Jacket, I absorbed the Vietnam War as an ongoing historical event whose meaning was still being fought over—a fight in which my family had a stake greater than others, because our men had served there.
My childhood was a mélange of Vietnam, World War II, and the Cold War, with its background threat of nuclear apocalypse. I spent hours playing “guns” with my friends in the neighborhood, digging trenches for my G.I. Joe figures, and poring over old military manuals and Jane’s Fighting Ships. At the height of my obsession, I would sometimes go to school bedecked entirely in camouflage, and once got in trouble for bringing a hollowed-out Mk 2 hand grenade to class.
In junior high and high school, my interests changed, as did the culture. The Persian Gulf War, while presented in the media as a morally virtuous spectacle of American power, proved something of a disappointment. After the end of the Cold War, the US military’s imperial mission seemed diminished. The armed forces looked less like a noble calling, and meanwhile I was getting interested in other things: role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons, computers, girls, theater. I began to define myself more and more in opposition to my family, or so I thought, seeking my own sense of meaning and selfhood. By the time I graduated high school, the idea of going into the military seemed like a joke.
Fast-forward several years and I was in Moab, Utah, working as a breakfast cook and bookshop clerk. By that point I had few prospects. I’d dropped out of two different colleges, bounced through a series of soul-numbing service jobs, and quit the one job I’d ever had that meant something to me, working as a grassroots campaign organizer for a nonprofit research organization, because I had become disillusioned by the gap I perceived between their values and their practices.
I considered myself a writer, but I’d published only a couple of short pieces in tiny journals. Still, I’d found a community in the desert, and spent most of my time reading and writing. A quiet, quasi-hermetic life among the red rocks seemed an acceptable fate. But in the weeks after my twenty-fifth birthday, three things happened in violent succession that changed my perspective: a friend died; I broke my front tooth in a bicycle accident and couldn’t afford to get it fixed; and nineteen dedicated soldiers of Islam gave their lives to strike a blow to the heart of American empire.
When people ask me why I joined the Army at the ripe old age of twenty-five, I tell them that I came from a military family, and that I wanted to see what war was like, go back to college, and understand how the world had changed after 9/11. I also needed health care and a new tooth. I enlisted neither innocently nor cynically but intentionally and curiously, even searchingly. I hoped to learn from the military and take advantage of the social mobility it promised. I also hoped that a term of service might shape me in meaningful ways without leaving me too warped or damaged to carry on toward my goal of becoming a writer.
I suppose it worked.
THE REALITY OF modern war is that it’s not magic, not a spiritual encounter with truth, not a sacred duty, but a dirty, dangerous, mostly boring job.
Maybe that’s just my perspective. I served four years in the Army and spent fourteen months in Iraq, mainly driving a Humvee around Baghdad. I entered as a private and left as a sergeant. I sustained no combat injuries, though I was given a minor VA disability as compensation for what was essentially wear and tear. No PTSD, no crushing war guilt, and just enough of a taste of combat to know that I don’t like shooting at people or being shot at.
I never experienced the thrill of leading an assassination squad to murder a suspected insurgent, nor did I ever have to fight my way out of a mountain ambush, nor was I responsible for the kinds of administrative and moral decisions faced by four-star generals. I was just another soldier, competent enough and grudgingly determined—first to do my job, then to get the hell out. I still remember my first sergeant trying to bully me into reenlisting, telling me that my idea of going back to school was a farce and that I’d wind up working at McDonald’s. “That dog don’t hunt, Sergeant Scranton,” he kept saying. “That dog don’t hunt.”
The period from when I left the Army in 2006 to when I entered the PhD program in English at Princeton four years later was a complicated and challenging time for me. My efforts to make sense of the ongoing war in Iraq were tied up with my service there, my inherited identity as a member of the military caste, my working-class background, my aspirations to become a scholar and novelist, and my tumultuous personal life at the time, which revolved around a group of veteran writers who came together through the NYU Veterans Writing Workshop.
My thinking in those years was certainly critical, but hardly iconoclastic. There seemed to be widespread popular agreement that the invasion of Iraq was a mistake, a sentiment Barack Obama would leverage against both Hillary Clinton and former Vietnam POW John McCain to win the presidency. There was nothing special at that point in being against the war: it was part and parcel of being against George W. Bush, who had gone from having the highest presidential approval rating ever, in the aftermath of 9/11, to having the lowest rating ever, by early 2008 (an honor he still holds, even after Trump).
If I dissented from anything, it was from the simplistic and reductive ways that contemporary American society viewed military life, the experience of war, and the occupation of Iraq. I dissented especially from the trauma hero narrative, which not only obscured the reality of Iraq but was even forced on me at one point by a professor who seemed compelled to “save” me. I dissented from the idea that there was nothing valuable in military service or that anyone who served was a chump—that, as Chris Hedges put it, “war is a story of elites preying on the weak, the gullible, the marginal, the poor.” The truth was more complex. The war in Iraq was indeed a disaster, but my service there meant something to me, however difficult that was to explain to my fellow New Yorkers.
The alienation and dissent I felt in relation toward the broader culture were more than made up for by the sense of belonging I felt among my veteran friends. Over time, though, that, too, began to change. The US occupation of Iraq came to an end. I started grad school and stopped going to the vets workshop as often. Several of us began to find some success as “veteran writers.” And perhaps most important, with my experience as a soldier in Iraq fading into the past, I began to build a new identity as a literary scholar and writer, connected to and fed by but ultimately independent of my identity as a veteran. Or so I hoped.
I often recalled a line that J. Glenn Gray had written in 1973: “Building a life on solid accomplishment is more difficult than being an antiwar veteran and confessing one’s guilt in public.” The observation stung because Gray was himself a veteran. He’d served as an intelligence officer in Europe during World War II, then went on to a career in philosophy. He’d written about his war experience with power and subtlety in The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle, but only years after the fact. Like other soldier-scholars such as Paul Fussell, Samuel Hynes, and Frank Kermode, Gray built a new life after the war on work unrelated to his service, rather than trading on his experience to become a kind of “professional veteran.” His example both shamed and inspired me.
IN 2014, WHILE finishing my dissertation, I got the chance to go back to Baghdad for Rolling Stone magazine, to write about the legacy of the American occupation there, ten years after my tour. Iraq was gearing up for its first post-occupation election, ISIS had just taken Fallujah, the violence was as bad as it had been during the war, and Americans seemed intent on forgetting the whole thing, as if electing Obama had absolved the nation of any responsibility for what happened in Iraq after US troops had left.
I was in Baghdad for almost two weeks. Most of that time I spent interviewing Iraqis: listening to stories of family members disappeared and children murdered in the sectarian civil war nurtured by the US occupation, learning about the legacy of the Iran–Iraq War (another conflict fostered by the United States), listening to weary Baghdadis tell me things had actually been better under Saddam because even tyranny is preferable to chaos. Confronting the irreparable human damage caused by the American occupation of Iraq was a powerful and painful experience, but even more painful was seeing how abruptly and completely the United States had abandoned the people of Iraq after 2011. There were American oil companies in Baghdad, of course, and the flacks at the embassy, a few investors comfortable with high risk, and some journalists visiting for the election—but very little sustained effort on the US side toward cultural exchange, civic investment, or even mere engagement. I was astonished and baffled that we could batter a country for decades, spill American blood to free it from tyranny, and then just walk away.
It was bad enough that the Iraq War was a horrific fiasco, a gruesomely cynical racket, and—in light of the Syrian civil war and the rise of ISIS—a dangerous political error. But that we thought we could wash our bloody hands and not even offer the pretense of humanitarian aid in the aftermath of our recklessness was so ghastly it turned my stomach. My piece for Rolling Stone, “Back to Baghdad: Life in the City of Doom,” was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever had to write. Trying to wrap the article up in a conclusion was physically painful. By the end of the process, as I wrote then, “I could feel nothing but disgust and shame for having been an American soldier.”
I feel the same today. I wish I could say that “Back to Baghdad” was the last thing I wrote about “my war,” or being a veteran, or the problem of how to make sense of the relationship between military service, American empire, democratic ethics, and capitalism. But though the article felt (to me, at least) like a turn away from the ambiguous role of professional veteran I’d been playing, it was followed by the publication of the war novel I’d first drafted several years earlier; by a dissertation focused on war literature; by several other articles and book reviews on related topics; and by a collection of essays that featured a longer version of the Rolling Stone piece. To paraphrase Marx, we may make our careers, but we do not make them just as we please.
I marched against the Iraq War in 2007. I’ve publicly denounced our invasion and occupation of Iraq, American empire, and the American culture of violence from platforms as prominent as the New York Times and Rolling Stone. I’ve written a well-reviewed book of fiction that is both an antiwar novel and an anti-war-novel novel: it not only highlights the depravity of the war but implicates the reader’s desire for war stories besides. I’ve studied war literature from the ancient Greeks to Elizabethan England to the present, and written a scholarly book about how the changing production and reception of American literature of World War II provides evidence of a transformation in how American culture thinks about war.
In other words, I’ve both “confessed my guilt in public” and tried to “build a life on solid accomplishment.” I’ve dissented against American culture and politics as a veteran, and I’ve dissented against veteran culture and politics too. But unlike Socrates, I haven’t been sentenced to death. Rather, it was precisely through my military service, the GI Bill, and my writing as a professional veteran that I’ve been able to climb from a working-class military family to an Ivy League PhD, and now to a tenured job at the University of Notre Dame.
So it is no wonder to me that my nephew recently joined the Army, despite my warning him against it. My admonitions were undermined by my own example, and by the fact that the military is one of the few possibilities left in American society for upward social mobility. I couldn’t deny that I was better off, physically, psychologically, and materially, because of my military service. And I’m certain that, among whatever other ideas might have motivated my nephew, he could see that. Indeed, it may be that the military was the best option he had, just as it had been my best option when I enlisted.
Perhaps I should have worked harder to impress on him that I was one of the lucky ones, and there was no guarantee he would be. Perhaps I should have worked harder to make myself more an example of dissent, and shown more moral courage, and taken more risks to speak out against the moral emptiness of twenty-first-century American imperialism. Because if I couldn’t convince my own nephew that doing what George Orwell called “the dirty work of empire” was morally corrupting, how could I convince my fellow citizens that the moral costs of American empire outweigh the benefits of the “American way of life”?
WHEN I THINK about what kind of dissent might really mean something in America today, I find myself increasingly skeptical of the Socratic example, the martyr for truth. Unlike in Socrates’s time, when the dissenter philosophized in the marketplace and faced his critics in person, today voice is inseparable from platform, and platform inseparable from privilege. Dissent is thoroughly institutionalized, which means thoroughly tamed, whether that institution is a university, the Washington Post, or Twitter.
More and more, I am drawn instead to the quiet dissent of those who refuse the intoxications of social media and the seductions of “having a voice” altogether. I look to those who abjure self-aggrandizing fantasies of changing the world, reject the cynicism of rhetoric and the degradations of politics, and devote themselves to the humble reparative work of staffing homeless shelters, teaching in prisons, organizing the poor, building community gardens, caring for the sick, and volunteering for worthy causes—especially those who, in the words of Pope Francis, “tirelessly seek to resolve the tragic effects of environmental degradation on the lives of the world’s poorest.”
Socrates was a soldier and a dissenter, but so was Francis of Assisi, the current pope’s namesake. As a youth, the man who would become Saint Francis fought in a campaign against Perugia, where he was captured and held prisoner for more than a year. After his return to Assisi, he joined another military expedition but was stopped on the way by a vision and turned from a life of wealth and ambition to a life of poverty, charity, and devotion. Today, as we confront a global ecological crisis with no easy or simple answers, while at the same time being faced with an interlocking proliferation of social crises that range from rising inequality to the failure of democracy to the deeply disturbing effects of social media, we would be wise to ask ourselves what lies behind our dissent, what goals we hope to achieve, and whether our means are consonant with our ends.
Speaking out may no longer be enough. In our time of flood and fire, much like the calamitous thirteenth century in which Saint Francis founded his order, dissent may need to take form not in words but in deeds: not as yet another public profession of critique but as the solid accomplishment of repair.