The Time of the Hero by Mario Vargas Llosa
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Lord of the Flies - With Guns

As a young man I attended a federal service academy in the United States for four years. So I identify with the conditions in the Peruvian equivalent that Vargas Llosa describes in excruciating detail. From the universal use of nicknames - half of them derogatory, the other half salacious - to the continuous, and often very creative, scheming to evade and outwit authority, to the intentional promotion of sadistic and vulgar brutality in the name of camaraderie, I find myself re-living the most painful, and painfully consequential, period of my life.

A rather disturbing transformation takes place in high-testosterone young males when confined together, voluntarily or not, and subjected to a highly regimented daily routine that is strictly enforced. Essentially they become amoral; every unregulated flaw, neurosis, or hiatus of maturity becomes exaggerated and enlarged in their resistance to a pervasive and arbitrary authority. And this regardless of their religious or ethical background. As Vargas Llosa has one of his characters muse about himself, “Sometimes he could go for several days following a routine that made all the decisions for him, gently nudging him into actions he hardly noted.” I think the reason for this sort of demonic spiritual ennui lies in the deprivation of not simply physical freedom, but - in the case of a military academy - the insistence upon the development of an attitude of extreme social dependence. The result is a kind of hypnosis.

“This place isn’t an Academy, it’s a prison,” says one of its officers. But not even prison puts the demand of spiritual conformity on its inmates, who are only expected to obey, not to admire, the violent ethos of their organization. In the military academy one becomes a stranger not only to one’s body as it is constantly stressed by activities that are meant to be tortuous, but also a stranger to one’s mind which is the real target of military indoctrination. As one of the officers in charge of the Peruvian academy exhorts his charges,“In the army, Cadets, you’ve got to have respect for symbols, damn it.” This process of ideological ‘formation’ continues for a full year without respite until one is expected to adopt the role of ‘formateur’, and do what was done to oneself, to others.

This intensive indoctrination, which is explicitly meant to dis-inhibit whatever ethical reservations one has about military service, is direct and unambiguous. For example: if any member of a unit screws up, all suffer. And all are informed why they suffer and who is to blame. The effect of collective guilt is invariable: the weakest in the unit, those who typically screw up, are persecuted by the group until they measure up or leave. If weakness is not found, it is fabricated in order to facilitate the system. Vargas Llosa knows the routine for creating a victim: “He was normal enough when he got here to the Academy, but you and the others gave him such a hard time you made an idiot out of him.”

Both the physical and psychological therapy are carried out by those who are only slightly older and more mature than those over whom one has charge. These ‘leaders’ have only recently undergone the same regime that they are expected to execute. The only training they receive is what they have undergone as victims one or two years previously. They believe, because they are taught, that it is their duty to become figures of unpredictable and sadistic authority to those subordinate to themselves.

Not infrequently, given a lack of experience, judgement, and conscience, their sadism becomes literal and is carried beyond the merely symbolic. And since there are severe restrictions on the access of adults (experienced officers) who could supervise the application of punishments to the barracks, it is not unusual for discipline to get grossly out of hand. As one of the protagonists points out: “The officers don’t know anything about what goes on in the barracks.” They are absentee warders who prefer not to know the details of barracks life lest they be held accountable. The lunatics do run the asylum.

Vargas Llosa captures this unique and uniquely primitive sociology of barely controlled violence so accurately that it gives me flashbacks. I have no idea whether conditions have altered very much in these institutions in recent decades. I doubt, though, that its essential intimidation and post-adolescent cruelty has been questioned. To eliminate these would be to abolish its core.

After a lifetime of experience in other business, academic and social institutions, I have encountered this kind of existence no where else. Its purpose remains a mystery to me since any practice of its mores outside its walls, even in the regular military, would be met with derision and resistance. During the VietNam war, my own epoch, young, ‘motivated’ West Point graduates were taught the limits of their academy ethos by ‘fragging’ in the field, that is, the killing of an officer by his own men. In The Time if the Hero, the inadvertent ‘escape’ of the academy mores threatens to destroy the entire Peruvian military. As the secret of its deptavity becomes public, the entire institution is compromised.

My experience suggests that the ‘outing’ of the military academy is a good thing. It deserves institutional criticism and castigation. I have never perceived that the experience of the military academy regime is in any way useful in building what is typically called character. The academy is an uncivilized existence which has no points of contact with family, business, or social life. Studies have shown that success during one’s academy training are entirely uncorrelated with one’s advancement in the service, much less one’s broader success or satisfaction in life. Rather, the reason that the sociology continues to exist, to the extent that it does, is that it has existed.

This is known as tradition, ‘we do it to them because it was done to us’. Tradition, from the Latin root tradere, a word connoting simultaneously ‘passing on’ and ‘betrayal’. Both Vargas Llosa and I have little doubt about which interpretation is more appropriate. Tradition is simply a rationalization for continuing abuse. I note with considerable dismay how many of my colleagues from those long-gone days support the kind of systematic political bullying of the current White House. Finally, they appear to believe, they have a Commander-in-Chief worthy of their own training and civic ideals. The effects of indoctrination are indeed penetrating and long-lived.

Vargas Llosa’s epigram from Jean-Paul Sartre neatly summarizes our common experience of the institution of the military academy and its consequences for the society that harbors it: “We play the part of heroes because we’re cowards, the part of saints because we’re wicked: we play the killer’s role because we’re dying to murder our fellow man: we play at being because we’re liars from the moment we’re born.” Perhaps the academy is, as Vargas Llosa implies in the way he presents his narrative alternately inside and outside its walls, merely a more intense, a concentrated version, as it were, of the male-dominated society that moulds it.

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