Magic Hours (19 page)

Never fear. Kaplan has found our saviors. They are called the American Military.

 

 

Imperial Grunts,
Kaplan's gritty account of life among America's front-line soldiers in the War on Terror, is the first of what he promises will be several books. Kaplan had the full cooperation of the Department of Defense while researching this alpha volume, and despite being treated by the military like “an oddity, a threat, and a VIP all at once” Kaplan grew close to the soldiers. He tells us how this was possible: “When the battalion found out there would be a journalist among them, there were rude complaints,
another fucking left-wing journalist.
Then an 18 Delta medic... used the NIPRNET to check me out online. He downloaded some of my articles and pronounced me ‘okay' to the others.”

Kaplan describes receiving a “command briefing” that began with an Orwell quote: “People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”
Imperial Grunts
is that peaceable sleep's lullaby. The book is not merely an account of twenty-first-century soldiering; it is also
Kaplan's attempt to define, defend, and justify American “imperialism.” On this point
Grunts
is a thesaurus of incoherencies.

“Indeed,” he writes, “by the turn of the twenty-first century the United States military had already appropriated the entire earth, and was ready to flood the most obscure areas of it with troops at a moment's notice.” To say the least, the notion that the United States effectively rules the planet is an emaciated one. Does Kaplan not remember the endless haggling the United States was forced to do on the eve of the Iraq War to enable its use of other nations' airfields? Do other nations' desires and integrity really mean so little to Kaplan? But at the Pentagon, we learn, Kaplan gazed upon a Mercator Projection of the U.S. military's areas of responsibility and saw a planet chopped up into jagged rectangles of supposed command (CENTCOM, EUCOM, PACOM, and so forth). He “stared at it for days on and off, transfixed. How could the U.S. not constitute a global military empire?”

In an interview, Kaplan has said, “our challenges abroad are exactly like those of other empires in history.... You don't like the world ‘imperial' for America? Tough luck.” So what is Kaplan's understanding of imperialism? “Imperialism is but a form of isolationism, in which the demand for absolute, undefiled security at home leads one to conquer the world.” Okay. But then: “The grunts I met saw themselves as American nationalists, even if the role they performed was imperial.” Got that? And: “America's imperial destiny was to grapple with countries that weren't really countries.” It is? They
aren't
? “Imperialism was less about conquest than about the training of local armies.” Oh. “All America could do was insert its armed forces here and there, as unobtrusively as possible, to alleviate perceived threats to its own security when they became particularly acute.” But didn't you just say that—oh, wait. He's still going: “The Americans wanted clean end-states and victory parades. Imperialism, though, is a never-ending involvement.” Before long
you're wondering if taking a good old-fashioned American dump in a U.S.-dug latrine in Yemen is not also “imperialism.”

The ideas in
Imperial Grunts
are garbage, but the book is often absorbing. Here credit goes to the spectacular locales (Colombia, the Horn of Africa, the Philippines, Mongolia, Afghanistan) Kaplan visits, though they are usually described in incompetent etudes such as, “to the north loomed a
Planet of the Apes
landscape.” Once he reaches the Philippines, things get interesting. With some Green Berets Kaplan goes to a restaurant, where he describes the local women, whom he calls “girls,” as “typical
Filipinas
: small-boned, symmetrically featured [again!], and walnut-complexioned beauties, with twangy, mellow Spanish-style voices and subservient oriental manners, a devouring mix of South America and Asia.” But for one Green Beret vanishing “for an hour with a girl into the darkness of the beachfront,” the evening is, Kaplan assures us, “innocent.” U.S. military personnel are forbidden from fraternizing with local people, in my view wisely. Kaplan, though, writes, that this forbiddance was “a shame.... Had this been the old Pacific Army, some of these men would taken some of these girls as mistresses.” And then gotten them pregnant, and left, and reduced them to pariahs within their culture. Soon enough the horny Green Beret returns to their table. “Driving back,” Kaplan writes, “someone joked about smelling his finger to see where it had been.” That needless “to see where it had been”: pure Kaplan. The man's cluelessness is equally apparent at a funeral for a slain soldier in Afghanistan, where Kaplan describes the “thumping, rousing song” that is played: Barry E. Sadler's Vietnam-era chestnut “The Ballad of the Green Berets.” It is not a thumping, rousing song. It is kitsch as surely as the old Soviet sing-along “The Internationale” is kitsch.

The soldiers themselves like the song, however, and that is enough for Kaplan, who goes gaga for nearly every soldier and Marine he meets. (“He seemed to have a somewhat cold and
surly nature” is about as negative as Kaplan gets about a soldier. He does note, however, that many soldiers' inability with foreign languages is “where the American Empire, such as it was, was weakest.” Solution: more imperialism.) The problem with loving every soldier he meets is that the soldiers themselves, in Kaplan's hands, quickly shed their individuality. The loss of individuality may be the necessary point of military indoctrination, but a writer has no such excuse when writing about them. While Kaplan is always careful to provide us with
Stars and Stripes
-style enumerations of their ages and hometowns, they are but in a few cases allowed little texture or eccentricity.

Why does Kaplan so adore these rough men? Because they “had amassed so much technical knowledge about so many things at such a young age.” He refers to their “brutal, refreshingly direct” manner. One soldier in the Philippines, Kaplan writes, “made snap cultural judgments of the kind that would burn an academic's reputation, but which in the field prove right seven out of ten times.” And that's 70 percent! (“The Afghans are just great,” one soldier says. “Yeah,” says another. “They love guns and they love to fight. All they need are trailer parks and beer and they'll be just like us.” These are presumably the kind of snap cultural judgments that have thus far served us so well in the War on Terror.) “Nobody,” Kaplan writes fondly, “is afraid to generalize in the bluntest terms. Thus, conclusions do not become entangled in exquisite subtleties. Intellectuals reward complexity and refinement; the military, simplicity and bottom-line assessments.” But rest assured they are scholars, too: One soldier is reading “Cervantes in the early-seventeenth-century original text,” while another is “dipping into the complete works of James Fenimore Cooper.” “Bad things happen in the world,” Kaplan is told by a soldier. “You do the best you can, and let the crybabies write the books.” The soldiers' and Marines' various thoughts and feelings,
as transcribed by Kaplan, are rarely more complicated than this gunky self-congratulation.

“The American military is a worldwide fraternity,” Kaplan writes, filled with “singular individuals fronting dangerous and stupendous landscapes.” The soldiers “talked in cliches,” he informs us. “It is the emotion and look in their faces—sweaty and gummed with dust [gummed with
dust
, you say?]—that matters more than the words. After all, a cliche is something that only the elite recognizes as such.” That is surely why, Kaplan says, “these guys like George W. Bush so much.... He spoke the way they did, with a lack of nuance, which they found estimable because their own tasks did not require it.” Besides, those cliche-conscious elites are yellow anyway. As one soldier tells Kaplan, “I believe character is more important than education. I have noticed that people who are highly educated and sophisticated do not like to take risks.” Kaplan himself seems to have come to share this harsh essentialism. One Marine, Kaplan notes, “was not interested in what was interesting, only in what mattered.” In an earlier book, Kaplan could write: “
Such interesting objects,
I had told myself,
each separated from the other by centuries, could be connected only through a lifetime of study, and what could be a better way to spend a lifetime?
” He could also write that a traveler is “an explorer of everything interesting.” No longer.

There is at least one problem with this dismissal of the interesting, seeing that what is interesting, when dealing with foreign cultures, is very often what matters. “We need people who are quick cultural studies,” an Army major general tries to tell Kaplan, which Kaplan deduces not as “area expertise; that took too many years to develop,” but as “a knack... a way of dealing with people.... The right men would find things out and act on the information they gathered, simply by knowing how to behave in a given situation.” Sounds easy enough. And what
kind of soldier would be least equipped, emotionally speaking, to deal with vexed, confusing matters of religion and culture in nations understandably sensitive to foreign occupiers? If you said, “Evangelical Christian soldiers,” well, you could not be more wrong. Kaplan argues that Evangelical soldiers, whose entire worldview is founded upon accepting that everyone who is not a Christian will roast on Beelzebub's spit, is in actual fact the U.S. military's strongest asset, seeing that “morale could not be based on polite subtleties or secular philosophical constructions, but only on the stark belief in your own righteousness, and in the inequity if your enemy.” God will just have to sort them out.

As a journalist I have spent some time around Marines and soldiers, both within and without war zones (my father is a former Marine and a Vietnam veteran), and I have found as much political and intellectual variance among them as one might find among the occupants of an F train into Brooklyn. Deployed soldiers do indeed tend to be good at their jobs, and since their jobs are often irreducibly technical, it is no surprise that their expertise can seem mind-boggling to outsiders. Kaplan is never quite clear whether it is the culture of the U.S. military—egalitarian, clear-eyed, unsentimental, decisive, and, sometimes, despite all that, completely nuts—that attracts such men, or that produces them, but he has some thoughts.

Writing that he “happily admitted guilt” to the charge of having “lost [my] professional detachment and begun to identify with the troops [I was] covering,” Kaplan claims a unique understanding of American soldiers. After all, “I was a citizen of the United States and a believer in the essential goodness of American nationalism.” His argument is that “the objectivity of the media was problematic” because journalists “were global cosmopolitans,” whereas the “American troops I met saw themselves belonging to one country and one society only: that of the United States.”
This is delusional. For one, are there really American journalists who do not think of themselves as American? I would very much like to meet one. And does Kaplan really think it is unusual that American soldiers view themselves as American soldiers? He does. The military, he writes, “is part of another America, an America that the media establishment was increasingly blind to, and alienated from.” This Perrier-quaffing media establishment cannot hope to understand this “vast, forgotten multitude of America existing between the two coastal, cosmopolitan zones, which journalists in major markets had fewer and fewer possibilities of engaging in a sustained, meaningful way except by embedding with the military.”

In
An Empire Wildnerness
, Kaplan voiced disgust with America's “Greyhound underclass,” but in
Grunts
the “country-slash-southern-slash-working-class version” of that underclass is America's very heart and soul. “The American military... was composed of people who hunted, drove pickups, employed profanities as a matter of dialect, and yet had a literal, demonstrable belief in the Almighty,” which he later calls an “unapologetic, literal belief in God absent for the most part among the elites.” But why would a literal belief in God be anything
but
unapologetic? And what do the elites have to do with it? Kaplan uses some tough, pretty-sounding words to conjure up these soldiers, but one scratches at Kaplan's prose just a little to find a nasty little drummer boy incapable of addressing any matter without going after those elites who denied him a job so long ago. He sees the world so relentlessly in terms of class, tribe, and race because he himself is unwilling to see the world in any other way.

“I wish people in Washington would totally get Vietnam out of their system,” a soldier tells Kaplan. He translates this sentiment thus: “[I]t was the politicians who were afraid of casualties, not the American military.” Similar callousness about the lives of the
men he lionizes and lauds are strewn throughout the book: “The working class's attitude to casualties was fairly tough.... It was the elites that had a more difficult time with the deaths of soldiers and marines.” The Marines, you see, “were an example of how government channels the testosterone of young males toward useful national ends.” Like, say, dying. “If the military were much smaller than it was, the result might be only more gang violence within the homeland,” I guess because soldiers are borderline criminals? Along these lines the book reaches its disgusting crescendo: