Dirty Work by Larry Brown
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Young Soldiers Never Get Old

Old people (mostly men) have always induced (seduced) young people (mostly boys) to continue their childhood fantasies of violence and dominance into adulthood by joining the military. The sequence is important: “There ain’t nothing meaner than some little deranged six-year-old sadistic motherfucker loose in a playground.” This youthful sociopathy is a strategic asset that is nurtured.

The military opportunity is presented in quasi-religious terms as a ‘calling’ from God and Country which will demand and develop important personal virtues in impressionable youth - loyalty, discipline, and faith in one’s leaders among the most essential of these. Since it’s easiest to recruit (or coerce) these young people from god-fearing, less than well-educated, under-achieving families, the military has a distinct demographic, historically referred to as cannon-fodder.

Military training has more or less the same aim everywhere in the world - to break down the inhibitions that constrain childhood violence to mere verbal threat or minor mayhem. Such training is necessarily traumatic because “It do something to you to kill another person. It ain’t no dog lying there. Somebody. A person, talk like you, eat like you, got a mind like you. Got a soul like you.” So the most fundamental moral sense must be extinguished: “People shooting other people is bad and don’t nobody have to tell you, you born knowing that.”

Getting that fixed permanently in a young mind isn’t easy. Therefore a new ‘higher power’ has to be established, something called ‘us’, which justifies lethal action. So, as the drill sergeant says, “We got an image to uphold here. The best in the world. There’s a bunch of them going over there in a few months that ain’t coming back. They’re gonna die for their country, they’re gonna die for their Marine Corps, for all the softass civilians like you guys used to be.” From the eternal scrutiny of this higher power there is no escape. The soldier stays in the school yard, now part of a gang.

Only a fraction of military personnel end up as front line troops. They are the ones who do the eponymous dirty work and who get the full ‘benefit’ of their training. This is where the gang matters. They also receive the benefit-in-kind of the training of their opponents and their gangs. The most horrid of the reciprocal gifts received and given is not death but the inability to live with oneself.

Living comfortably with oneself is the most primitive level of ‘normality.’ Disfigurement is bad. Loss of abilities, perhaps even to walk or touch, is worse. But wanting to die is the worst. That’s the part they don’t train you for and the drill sergeant never mentions - what happens when it’s over but so much gets left behind, friends and ideals as well as body parts - theirs as well as ours.

There’s nothing more to imagine in youthful fantasy, and things “ain’t gonna get no better.” At that point Ennui becomes an incurable companion in convalescence: “It woulda been a lot better for mama to see me in my coffin laid out and watch them put me in the ground and blow taps over me than to see me like that.” Staying young is not an option; but neither, for many, is getting old.

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