In my shambolic journey through young adulthood, I once joked that at one time or another I had managed to consider every possible career and life trajectory other than joining the military. Now, earlier this summer, I finally managed to cross that last missing item off the list. Despite opposing nearly everything the U.S. military has done in my politically-conscious lifespan, I strangely found myself a month or so ago checking out the procedure for officer enlistment in the U.S. Navy, and seriously thinking about doing it.
What drove me to this unlikely consideration was primarily the same old motivation that has prompted people throughout history to take the King's shilling: the promise of job security. Specifically, it occurred to me that the military employs lawyers, and that they get benefits and tenure for about as long as they want to stay there. What appeals to many people about the military, after all, is that they seem to want you there (at least they give you that impression before you have mortgaged your freedom to them) and that they have resources to throw around. Plus, it offers to many young people a solution to the omnipresent existential dilemma that confronts us in the state of freedom. The military, whatever else it does, at least tells you what to do. And that's something!
But even beyond the promise of certainty that the military provides, in both its willingness to boss and control one's life and its promise to compensate this loss of freedom with job security and benefits, I was also drawn to the sheer weirdness of the idea. "The military?" people would say, "You?! But you're the last person I thought would ever join the military." And I would say: "Precisely!" As with all the other bizarre career pivots that I have contemplated over the years, the more improbable it seems the better. At the same time as the thought of joining the military beckoned because it solves the existential terror of freedom, therefore, in this sense it also seemed to hold out the reverse: a kind of existential freedom. After all, it meant that I still had the ability to dramatically reinvent myself; I had the power to do something utterly unexpected.
If my vulnerability to this kind of appeal to the hunger for self-reinvention is not entirely healthy, it at least is not unique. There's a passage in Nicholson Baker's outstandingly original and lovable stream-of-consciousness novel The Mezzanine, in which one of the narrator's relentlessly-detailed and closely-chronicled internal meditations shifts to the paradox of why the shoelaces of men's dress shoes should be so brittle, when the laces of men's sneakers have long since attained such an admirably high level of tensile strength. In the course of his meditations, Baker's protagonist discovers an article by a group of materials scientists who have devoted their lives precisely to the problem of shoelace strength. He suddenly feels called to chuck his entire job and life up to this point, and devote himself with the same passionate intensity henceforth to only this shoelace project.
Plainly, I'm not the only person in the world who is so suggestible, then, or so prone to consider a complete life-overhaul on a dime!
Another example, even more apropos to my military temptation, occurs in Donald Barthelme's late career novel Paradise. Here, the protagonist—a modernist architect who designs big glass boxes, much like Barthelme's own father—sees an ad recruiting people for the CIA one day in the paper. He notes that he publicly opposed nearly everything the CIA has ever done, and everything they stand for. Yet, he found himself seriously considering sending in an application regardless. All at once, his whole life up to that point didn't matter. "I suddenly thought, it might be interesting to do that," says the character, "Even though I've always been opposed to the CIA [...] the stuff with Lumumba in Africa, the stuff in Central America [....] and I'm sitting there thinking about how my résumé might look to them, starting completely over in something completely new, changing the very sort of person I am, and there was an attraction, a definite attraction."
Yes, a definite attraction indeed! Changing the very sort of person I am—that's exactly the appeal! But why should I desire such a dramatic change? Because the lifespan is finite, and if I want to experience multiple potential lives, I'm going to need to pack them into the same existence. Plus, it seems unfair that the world should look down on these attempts at radical self-reinvention, whilst at the same time seeming to demand them through the functioning of our modern economy. The world today is changing at such a rapid clip, and those of us in the workforce are forever being told that we need to be flexible and prepared to rethink our whole career trajectory at short notice in response to unpredictable and rapidly-unfolding technological change. Plainly, a digital economy requires a protean self! Yet we sneer at those who attempt to be protean, and pooh-pooh the temptation to radically shift course at mid-stream as a symptom of dilettantism.
Barthelme's protagonist was, by the way—like the author—briefly in the army in the 1950s. Joining the military becomes one of the various life plans that his three young companions in the novel consider taking up—alongside going further in college or getting a job at Burger King. But the protagonist, like Barthelme himself, seems to remember the Army as a place of meaningless drill and routine, where you were forced to do things that didn't need to be done, simply in order to give you something to do, and for the sake of a raw exercise of authority. Such, as I said above, is precisely the appeal of the military. It solves the question of "what should I do next?" by telling you exactly what to do and subjecting you to criminal proceedings in a parallel legal system where you have far fewer due process guarantees if you refuse.
The reason why I would not actually join the military, then, is precisely the same reason, at last, why it had an undeniable temptation. Neither has to do with my moral objections to recent U.S. military policy—the drone strikes, the disastrous wars in the Middle East, etc.—which, I was disconcerted to find, were so swiftly swept aside, just as Barthelme's character forgets his lifelong objections to the CIA; no, the real reason why I could never join the military is that I value my autonomy too much. As much as I resent at times the existential choice and terror that freedom imposes, I also would never want to give it up. I would not lightly sign away my constitutional rights to join a total institution—and the reasons why at last are as much selfish as anything else.
There's an essay by Roland Barthes in his collection Mythologies in which he addresses this topic of military enlistment through the lens of a critique of the James Jones novel From Here to Eternity. He argues that the novel deftly serves as a kind of counter-intuitive recruitment manual for the U.S. military. The story begins, in Barthes' telling, with a completely honest portrayal of the absurdities of the institution—its petty tyranny, its madness, its brutality. But the novel's subtle trick, Barthes writes, is that this admission of the military's absurdity serves as an "inoculation" against the recruit's desire to leave. A more straightforward piece of propaganda, perhaps, displaying the army purely as a theater for heroism and glory, would beggar modern belief and turn people aside with intellectual sneers. But a novel that confesses up front all the frustration and stupidity of the institution, but suggests that one can find meaning and identity in it anyway is a far more potent argument for enlisting in the modern era.
"What are those minor clinkers within any Order compared to its advantages?" the novel's argument seems to run—in Barthes' telling—"They're all well worth the cost of one vaccine. [...] What does it matter, after all, that an Order is somewhat brutal, somewhat blind, if it allows us to live inexpensively? There we are, rid of a prejudice that used to cost us dear, too dear, that used to cost us too many scruples, too many rebellions, too many battles, and too much solitude." (Howard translation).
There it is. That was the temptation that the military so briefly held out for me. That is what I saw, when I imagined myself sitting in a JAG office, collecting benefits and salary, with a reasonably certain jobs guarantee. Could I not accommodate myself to such an Order as that, after all? Was that Order so unreasonable? Why fight it? Weren't there some things I could agree with the military about, after all? Even if I could never forgive them for Gitmo, wasn't this a small part of the contemporary U.S. Navy? Don't we realize we need effective deterrence when we look at what's happening in Ukraine, Taiwan, the South China Sea? And wouldn't joining up be a chance to be a part of something greater? Wouldn't it give me a new start? "... [S]tarting completely over in something completely new, changing the very sort of person I am, and there was an attraction, a definite attraction."
Barthes's point is that the real courage, the real heroism lies in resisting this temptation. To accept the loneliness and terror of freedom—to shoulder the burden of having to decide what to do, even if it means being cosmically alone and unsure of how to proceed. That is true self-assertion. What appeared to me at first as an expression of existential freedom, therefore—the ability to reinvent myself—would, as soon as I had signed those commission papers—transform itself into the opposite: a cowardly rejection of my capacity for freedom. If what I truly seek is the ability to be flexible, to be protean, to experience the many possibilities of life, after all—well, clearly joining the military and signing away my constitutional rights for ten years is the very last thing I should do!
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