Chickenhawk 
by 

Robert Mason (Goodreads Author)

 

National PTSD

Chickenhawk is an old-fashioned sort of memoir, one with a moral that is as general as it gets. Bob Mason’s account of his time as a combat helicopter pilot describes a personal trajectory that countless others have experienced - from unflinching enthusiasm to eventual toe-curling embarrassment and regret at one’s naïveté and poor judgment. Mason is intelligent enough and honest enough to describe the detailed progression.

Mason had a boyhood dream to fly helicopters. The idea of ‘helping,’ perhaps even saving lives through his skill as a pilot was something that grew from a childhood fantasy to a young man’s ambition. As luck would have it, in the mid-1960’s the US Army needed enormous numbers of young folk as pilots for their new Air Cavalry which, the country was assured, would bring the annoying war in VietNam to a successful conclusion. He signed up and in so doing fell down the deepest rabbit hole of his life. As did many others.

Young men begin to mature, if they ever do, when they come to the realisation that their youthful ideals are just polite rationalisations for their own selfishness. The recognition that the stupidity, maliciousness, and inherent mendacity of the world are things they participate in fully regardless of intentions can come as a shock. It’s worse than when you found out that your parents were people who frequently made the same mistakes all other people make. 

The world wants your idealism in order to exploit it. This is the way society works. Corporate, professional, religious or political life will exploit it reasonably well. But the military is the gold standard institution for the exploitation of the young. And nowhere is idealism better exploited than in the military in time of war. By the time you get what military life reality is, it’s too late to do anything about it. You’re stuck fast in a morass of madness.

This explains why young idealists - those who want to ‘give something back’ or ‘make a difference’ or ‘eliminate world hunger’ or just ‘serve’ - end up being among the most cynical and self-serving people in middle age. Their resentment in the face of reality is overwhelming. The world doesn’t want their idealism except for its energy, dedication, and unthinking acceptance of what is frequently just plain evil. Everyone is eventually ground down. Careers turn into open prisons in which prospects are limited to the ladder of institutional advancement, the next rung of which means not receiving significantly less pain but being able to dispense a little more to those lower down. This compensation is rarely satisfying.

Nguyen Cao Ky, former head of the South Vietnamese Air Force and Prime Minister in 1965, provides a chapter-epigraph in Chickenhawk. It seems to me particularly apt as a summary of both the lack of maturity prevalent at the time and an explanation for the kind of stunned national resentment that has been simmering ever since: “Americans are big boys. You can talk them into almost anything. All you have to do is sit with them for half an hour over a bottle of whiskey and be a nice guy.” As Mason says in a sort of commentary on Nguyen’s remark: “No one likes being the fool. Especially if he finds himself risking his life to be one.”

Could it be, I ask myself, that the elevation of a man like Trump to such political prominence in the United States is an unconscious but nevertheless purposeful symbolic cultural reaction of the country to its own insistently naive idealism? A sort of national PTSD? There are, it seems to me, worse explanations.