At 18, my son joined the army. He is a highly intelligent, with an oppositional personality. I expected him to have problems in the service; he did, just not the ones that I had expected.
He did not buckle under the effects of boot camp; that training that turns Boys Into Men.I credit years living in a communal home with fortifying him to withstand some of the more subtle shaming that is done in the name of soldiermaking. No problems with communal bathrooms, and being called a faggot for reeiving a copy of a local paper (mailed by me, the hippie mother) that had gay personal ads at the back. No wasting of his stress quotient on the small stuff. That made it easier for him to endure the time in the quonset hut were the soldiers in training were exposed to tear gas to “toughen them up”. He looked stunning in his dress uniform, body buffed after completing Phase One. I hope that moment remains special to him, because it is clearly what he wanted– to be seen and honored as a MAN.
Phase Two, paratrooper training, is where his soldier dreams became tattered. There was “an unfortunate incident”; some officer made a bad decision and launched a drill in weather where the winds were too high. The men falling out of the planes blew into each other, and got their lines tangled. There were lots of broken bones, and a thirty percent injury rate (the army tolerates 10% in its training exercises). I imagine that the meaning of “cannon fodder” became more clear to my son then.
If they had stopped at Phase Two, my boy might have gone on to become the soldier that I feared. But in Phase Three, my brilliant, heart-connected, carmel-colored boy was selected for military intelligence training. This meant that he would stay “stateside” for an additional 18 months, and he would learn Arabic. I heard nothing for two months. Then I received the phone call with the words that I had been both dreading and praying for.
“Mom, I can’t DO this”
Two things had shattered my son’s illusion of The Glory of a Solder’s Life. Observing the behavior of his superiors, he found no True Men among them. He saw instead a group of broken, traumatized and dehumanized men incessantly looping stories of their war atrocities; “and, I’m supposed to laugh at these things, Mom… I can’t do it”
Second, he realized that military intelligence meant more than the cool spying stuff. It meant that he was being trained to torture people.
My son left the army just under the wire. We still have a volunteer, enlisted army with a clause in the fine print that the recruiter’s don’t expect you to read. It allows the enlistee to leave, within the first six months. No prison time owed.
Post Veteran’s Day, with so much being revealed regarding military suicides and broken lives, I celebrate a special kind of courage. That of opening one’s eyes and heart to make a course correction, rather than risking the loss of one’s soul.
