Volunteers: Growing Up in the Forever War by Jerad W. Alexander
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Best of All Possible Worlds

Jerad Alexander grew up on American military bases. These are not unlike American middle class suburbs (except that they are significantly safer). They share a similar uniformity of design, a similar social system, and a similar lack of any discernible aesthetic or intellectual interest. Residents in both are fed similar cultural diets - through formal education, public ritual, and conventional popular wisdom - which are meant to convince them that they are the most fortunate people on earth. America is promoted to itself in these places as both an exception to the norms of governance found elsewhere in the world, and as exceptional in its benign execution of its capacity for violence. America, it is claimed, is exactly as described by the 17th century philosopher Leibniz - the best of all possible worlds.

The consequence of this insistent propaganda since its foundation is a profound but naive conservatism which goes far beyond the political or religious aspects of life. Among other things, it establishes a deeply held class consciousness by the upper and lower middle classes. The tension between the two manifests in as a neurotic compulsion to belong, to be attached to something that marks them as special in a society that values conformity to this principle of superiority above all else. Eccentricity, like irony, is notably lacking in the American character.

In American society one either accepts the economic and social cards one has been dealt; or tries frantically to get a new deal. The latter has always been available only for the few; and despite the hype, even fewer break through than ever before. But even for those who strive to overcome class conservatism, the established game, the implicit acceptance of middle class divisions as a cultural fact, is evident. Both groups are motivated chiefly by fear, one of falling into relative poverty, the other of becoming entirely destitute. This fear was seen clearly by James Baldwin regarding race but I think that it also is generated by an acute class consciousness.

Alexander is a self-identified product of this American class system. Apparently his entire life has been dominated by the military distinction between the officer and enlisted classes. Enlisted men and commissioned officers inhabit entirely separate worlds. This is the foundation of military society, but it is also a model for American social structure. The officer and enlisted classes offer opportunities for advancement but only within the class structure. Movement between classes is rare and not encouraged. Officers lead, direct, command, and decide. Enlisted personnel make, repair, obey, and suggest (they also sweat and suffer inordinately in military life). This is precisely the division of labour in the corporate world that dominates American society. The shop floor simply does not rise to the boardroom.

Alexander’s reported experience is of the lower ranks of both the military and the wider society. This, I think, is the real subject of his memoir. It is a depiction of a culture that is stifling in a very particular, one might say exceptional, way. There is a subtle but pervasive resignation that emanates from its rigid class divisions. Paradoxically this resignation does not show up as despair but as the obsessive search for somewhere to feel special, to belong, to become a recognised part of the social machine. This is so for both classes and not just in the military. And as Alexander describes in detail, these two classes despise and fear each other. That this is articulated more by military personnel than civilians is a consequence of the formality of the arrangement in the former not any substantive differences.

Alexander was indoctrinated virtually from birth into a culture that not only marked him as second class but also prepared him for a gruelling love/hate relationship - with his country as well as the military - that would keep him in his place despite the obvious inequity in status, position, and prospects. His subsequent life in the Marines (indeed his ambition as per his class) was one of hard drinking, vacuous talk, artificial camaraderie, and pain casually received, not by an enemy but by his own superiors. He was taught by rote and repetition to respond instinctively - to orders, defined situations, and the prevailing childish machismo of his colleagues.

What Alexander found in the Marine Corps was a place of refuge from The Real World, that is, American society outside the Marine Corps. The Corps is to American society, according to Alexander, as American society is to the rest of the world. The ideal Marine is the apotheosis of the American Dream - he has a definite place, no matter how humble, in the military corporate hierarchy. The Marines constitute a community of true believers. They are the real clerics of Americanism. The Marines are rowdy, boisterous, hard-nosed monks who are committed to some vague idea of spiritual superiority. Wherever they go, they remain Marines and proud of it.

Yet they are treated abominably by the officer class, not only initially but throughout their service, especially when they are in combat. They complain constantly about this while simultaneously professing total commitment to an abstract ideal. The factory line worker in constant danger of becoming unemployed by ‘corporate level’ decisions is no less suspicious, even hateful, toward his/her own management officer class. Yet this same factory worker will proclaim the superiority of corporate capitalism and his/her fear of any possible reform with equal vigour.

Marines, like many other Americans, carry with them an insulating shell of resistance to assimilation wherever they travel. This can be perceived as naïveté but it is in reality an active defence mechanism that prevents dilution of commitment, and therefore belonging (the British Empire had a similar programme to prevent the horror of ‘going native’). It is the most obvious manifestation of American conservatism - if anything new were worth knowing we would already know it and already have it. Strife between the middle classes may be tedious but it’s a tradition at the heart of American conservatism. Each class polices the other.

Another more mordant way of saying this is that most Americans are trained to remain children. They have never been taught how to learn anything beyond conventional wisdom. Learning itself is often thought a subversive activity that threatens The Dream. The class system promotes a sort of permanent infantilisation. They love guns (actually all explosive ordnance) because they’re adult toys; religion because it supplements belonging and feelings of existential superiority; conspiracy theories because secret knowledge gives them confidence of their self-worth and judgmental acumen; and passionate awkwardness about anything proposed by their own leaders because they are convinced that others are as incompetent as they are in dealing with change, which of course they are.

Near the end of his personal saga, Alexander reveals his own growing recognition of the dodgy bill of goods he has been sold. In a chapter epigraph from John LeCarre, he signals an important recognition: “war is nothing if not a return to childhood.” He then presents what can only be called an epiphany, too late for the victim but a crucial sign of maturation that appears to be rare among his colleagues. It’s as if the con of his entire life was finally revealed:

“Our mythologies have formed our ideologies, our ideologies have led us to patriotism, and our learned violence as an expression of that patriotism has led us to volunteer for this, and now we stand in a circle and look down at the dead man… ”

Alexander says, “War stories are the bookends of the American story.” But they are really more than that. The way America fights its wars has always been a reflection of the way America lives. And the way it lives is within a rather rigid even though unacknowledged class structure which is maintained by a bogus mythology, including a pervasive fear about anything which might undermine the mythology.

Consequently America as a nation learns nothing from its experience. Alexander’s book could easily be about The American War in VietNam of more than a half century ago or about the War in Afghanistan which has recently ended. And Alexander himself is indistinguishable in the long line of other enthusiastic children who have simply ignored the lessons of the past and doesn’t understand that he typifies his society despite his atypical experience. I have no doubt that his memoir will be similarly ignored by future generations of Americans. The motivation to learn seems lacking when one lives in the best of all possible worlds.

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