Points Summer Book Club

In Chapter Two we're introduced to Corporal Himmelstoss. A postman in civilian life, the war has raised him to a command rank in military life. And he behaves like a petty tyrant. Reading about Himmelstoss's idiocies, and how difficult it is for Baumer and his comrades to endure the pointless sadism, I was reminded of a conversation I had at my high school reunion a couple of years ago with a buddy from my class. My pal was deeply conservative, and had been totally gung-ho about the military in high school, and entered college on a ROTC scholarship. He was brilliant. Is brilliant. When I met him again 20 years later, at the reunion, he had flown in from Iraq, where he was serving in a Reserve unit.

He was full of contempt for what he described as the idiocy of military life. To him, it was one vast bureaucratic entity, where following procedure not only meant more than common sense, it meant everything. He was resigned to the fact that this is how it is to be in the Army, but he hated every minute of it.

What I didn't have the presence of mind to ask him, though, was if he saw any deeper logic in that mindless routine. In the first Himmelstoss passage in this chapter, Baumer talks about how the constant drills during military training broke young men down and remade them in the miitary's image. He makes them sound totally miserable, but then concludes:

We became hard, suspicious, pitiless, vicious, tough -- and that was good; for these attributes were just what we lacked. Had we gone into the trenches without this period of training most of us would certainly have gone mad. Only thus were we prepared for what awaited us.

Another story: about 15 years ago, when I was living in Washington, DC, I came home to Louisiana to visit my folks. I ran into N., a childhood friend. Last I heard from him, he had gotten mixed up with drugs in high school, and ended up joining the Marines, hoping to change his life. He ended up getting thrown out after he was discovered doing crack. He came over to visit one night while I was home. He was clearly high on something. His eyes were glassy. He told me about basic training, and though he didn't characterize his training in any particular way, listening to his matter-of-fact description made it clear to me that the Marines were trying to destroy his conscience and turn him into a killing machine. They were teaching him to utterly dehumanize the enemy, to make the enemy easier to kill.

Here's the thing, though: had the Marines not done this, they would leave their men vulnerable to death. Destroying their conscience and remaking them as killing machines was necessary to their survival in war. And, in turn, necessary to our survival as a nation. Reading "All Quiet" is helping me to understand the violence that war does to the souls of the men we ask to fight it on our behalf.