Sparta (7 page)

“What are your thoughts, Con?” asked Marshall.

About this place?
Conrad looked up, but Marshall was holding his menu. The waitress stood beside him. His father was asking about food.

Conrad cleared his throat. “Veal parmigiana,” he said at random.

The waitress didn't move.

“Ah,” Marshall said. “Did you see that on the menu? I think they just have seafood.”

“Oh, sorry.” Conrad looked down. “Right. Scampi.”

When the waitress had gone, Lydia drank from her water glass and looked at him.

“So, Con,” she said, “how are you really?”

He looked at her. His father, too, was waiting.

But it was impossible to drag the whole lumbering world of Iraq—hot, smoky, contaminated, the fucking sand, and the sound, that terrible enveloping sound that filled the world—to this table. None of it was transferable. The sound of mortars. The foul black smell of the shitters. Setting out through the narrow streets of Haditha. Waiting for the sound, the giant earth-stopping sound of explosion. The screen you put between yourself and the rest of the world. He had no words for this; there was no bridge between that place and this.

“Glad to be back,” he said, and smiled.

 

4

The difference between a cult and a religion depends on what's being worshipped. It's a question of whether or not the object is divine, and whether or not the worship is excessive. But the definition of divinity is subjective, so the answer will depend on who you ask. Zoroastrians or Jews, for example, might consider Christianity a cult. Civilians might consider the Marine Corps a cult. But true believers know that what they follow is a religion.

Becoming an initiate into anything involves instruction, ceremony, belief. It means yielding certain personal freedoms in exchange for the power, knowledge, privileges, and protection offered by the group.

*   *   *

The city-state of Sparta, in ancient Greece, was organized around the premise of military supremacy. All its components—religion, law, education, the family unit—were part of a system that held the military paramount. The warrior, with his lethal and seductive glamour, reigned supreme. Sparta was the dominant military presence in Magna Graecia for some three hundred years, from around 650
B.C.
to 350
B.C.
It then lost its dominance but remained independent for another two hundred years, until it was finally conquered by Rome. When Conrad studied Sparta, in his classics courses, he realized it had lasted as a country far longer than the United States.

Conrad wrote his senior thesis on Sparta. He was interested in the extreme demands the military put on the society, how the society responded to those strains, and how to define “extreme.”

All Spartan citizens were full-time soldiers. Citizenship was limited to male descendants of Sparta's founders, but only healthy ones. Selection began at birth: male babies were examined by a council of elders, and imperfect and weak infants were abandoned to die of exposure on a mountaintop. Healthy boys lived at home until the age of seven, when they left to start training—the
agoge
. For the next ten years they lived in communal messes where they studied reading, writing, music, and dancing, but primarily military subjects.

Conditions in the
agoge
were deliberately harsh in order to toughen the young warriors. Each boy was given only one piece of clothing a year, a cloak. To make them resourceful, the boys were underfed. They had to steal food to survive, though if they were caught, they were punished. The physical training was demanding. They were trained to fight in phalanx formation: closely linked, shield over chest, sword in hand. They marched so closely that each soldier's shield partly protected the man to his left. This was part of what created such a powerful bond of loyalty and trust between them; also, each young soldier had a close relationship with an older mentor, who acted as his adviser and guide.

Every aspect of their lives was affected. The trainees were expected to speak like soldiers, to be terse and witty: the word “laconic” comes from
laconia
, a Greek word for the region of Sparta.

At eighteen Spartans graduated from the
agoge
. At twenty they became members of one of the
syssitia
, military messes or dining clubs, and it was here that they formed their closest personal bonds. They remained full-time soldiers until the age of thirty, and until the age of sixty they were active reservists. At thirty they were required to marry, and they left the messes to live with their wives and children. The system, with its intense focus on military training, produced legendary warriors who were fiercely loyal to their fellow soldiers and their country.

The business of Sparta was war, and all else was subjugated to that. Since its citizens were full-time soldiers, all other business was transacted by noncitizens. Manual labor was performed by Helots
—
state-owned slaves who were often captured soldiers and their families, brought back from foreign wars. Sparta's economy was primarily agricultural, and the Helots did the farming, living in small outlying villages. Relations between the two groups were hostile: Spartans were suspicious of the slaves, and in order to prevent mutinous stirrings, Helots were routinely mocked and beaten, to crush their spirits.

Sparta was governed by two hereditary king-priests, as well as magistrates, or ephors. The ephors took office each year, and at that time the state declared a ritual war against its Helots. The act of murder was a serious offense, carrying the burden of blood guilt, but killing a Helot was not considered murder. Helots could be killed with impunity.

The ritual war took place in the autumn. At that time, certain graduates of the
agoge
were chosen for a secret rite called the
krypteia.
These soldiers were sent out at night, armed only with knives, into the Helot villages. Their mission was to stalk and kill any Helots they thought troublesome.

The political purpose of the
krypteia
was to suppress the possibility of revolt: the young warriors on their nocturnal raids struck terror into the Helot community, like members of a secret police squad. But for the soldiers it had another, darker function: the
krypteia
legitimized the kill. It gave the soldiers moral permission from the state, the church, and their comrades to step outside the bounds of humanity. It broke down the psychological restraints against murder.

Humans have a powerful and innate resistance to killing other humans. Something in the heart curdles at the prospect. The sound of screams, the sight of blood, the evidence of pain: all arouse an urgent need to quit. The human recognizes itself in the other. Within the military, this deep empathetic response causes profound problems. To be effective soldiers, men must be persuaded to kill other men. They must be persuaded to give up their recognition of another man's humanity.

There are different ways of persuasion. One strategy is to dehumanize the enemy, making his death seem less significant. Helots were ideal for this dehumanizing, since they were both foreigners and enemies. They lived separately from the Spartans and often spoke different languages. Their work was demeaning. They were beaten and ridiculed. On occasion they were forced to get drunk, and then to sing and dance to amuse the crowd. They were treated as less than human, which made them perfect targets for homicide. Moreover, since Helots were forbidden to carry weapons, these first kills would be easy ones.

All this was invaluable battlefield training: no other city-states offered practice killings. Only certain warriors were selected for the ritual, which gave the
krypteia
a glamorous elitist luster. The dark, bloody bond
,
forged in secrecy and violence, strengthened the brotherhood between soldiers. It offered a shared sense of godlike power, the belief that they were above the laws of man and of human nature.

Sparta was an unparalleled success as a military power. Its soldiers were legendary heroes: it was Sparta that brought down Troy. It may have been the most successful warrior culture in history.

Part of Sparta's military success depended on its treatment of the family, which was entirely subordinate to the state. The state superseded the authority of parents over their infant children, ordered small boys to leave home, required close male bonding, and banned marriage for men under the age of thirty. The state was a deeply and intimately invasive presence within every aspect of the life of the individual.

The reasons for Sparta's failure were the same as the reasons for its success: everything was subordinated to the military. The stringently exclusionary citizenship requirements meant that Spartans could not replace the warriors whom they lost in battle. The requirement to wait until thirty to start a family meant fewer children and a diminishing population. Since they could not accept non-Spartans as citizens, eventually their ranks became too diminished to fight effectively. The soldiers were outnumbered by their Helots, who were allowed neither to fight nor to become citizens. Sparta's rigidity in obeying its own strict laws was finally the cause of its downfall.

So,
wrote Conrad,
do we count them a success or a failure?

*   *   *

His own initiation took place at Quantico, in Virginia. Officer Candidates School lasted only ten weeks, but in some ways it was just as transformative as the
agoge.
And in some ways the Marine culture was based on that of Sparta.

Conrad expected the physical duress, push-ups and drilling, exhaustion. And the mental tedium, the psychological stress. That was the point, wasn't it? It was a kind of brainwashing, a relentless conditioning process meant to break you down, devalue everything you were so that you could start over with a new body and a new way of looking at the world. A new mind. It was obvious what was happening, but because it was so extreme, and because there was no alternative, it was completely effective. Everything happened right in front of the candidates' eyes, with their acquiescence. There was nothing they could do about it except quit, and the whole reason they were there was that they would not quit, that they were prepared to endure.

On the first day, when the new recruits boarded the shabby white bus that would take them from the airport to Quantico, a young second lieutenant stood up and came down the aisle. He set his gaze into the distance and began to shout over the noise of the engine. There was no preamble.

“Honor, courage, and commitment are the Marine Corps values,” he called out. “If you can't be honest at OCS, how can the Corps trust you to lead men in combat?”

No one answered. No one had any idea of what to say. No one their age in the civilian world talked like that. Popular culture was driven by irony; the Marine Corps was driven by earnestness. By belief. It had something to do with the fact that Marines stood so straight that their shirts had no wrinkles. That their gaze was so fixed.

At Quantico, they lost everything.

The first to go was appearance: they lost their faces. Not really their faces, only their hair, but the change was so extreme it seemed to affect their faces. Conrad saw himself in the mirror after his hair was gone: without the face he knew, he felt vulnerable and strange.

Everything familiar was taken away. The candidates became objects of derision and contempt, and so did their families, their backgrounds, their education, any source of pride they might have had. Mockery and abuse were the tools.

Once, the sergeant stopped dead in front of Conrad, who stared past him, his hands rigid at his sides. The instructor folded his arms and glared, rage leaking upward.

“Candidate, you're nothing but a skinny piece of trash, you know that?”

There was no swearing at Quantico, and no physical contact—lawsuits had ended those. But the instructors were still ferocious.

“Yes, Sergeant Instructor!”
Conrad shouted.

“How the frig do you think you're going to pass this course, candidate?”

“I don't know, Sergeant Instructor!”
Conrad bellowed back. Big mistake: he'd used the personal pronoun. He should have said
This candidate
instead of
I.

“‘You' don't know? You?”
the sergeant roared.
“Who the heck are ‘you,' candidate?”
He stuck his face right into Conrad's. A big vein in the side of his neck moved under the skin like a snake.
“You think you're some kind of special piece of lowlife trash?”

His face closed in under the hat brim, his nose nearly touching Conrad's. A gob of spit landed on Conrad's eyelashes, and Conrad blinked instinctively and met the sergeant's eyes for an instant.

“Get your eyeballs off me, candidate!”
he screamed.
“What the fug are you looking at?”

“Nothing, Sergeant Instructor!”
Conrad screamed back, his eyes now on the barracks wall.

“Are you looking at me, candidate? Why are you looking at me? Are you in love with me? Do you want to date me, candidate?”

“
No, Sergeant Instructor!”
Conrad screamed.

“
Don't you ever, ever look at me, candidate. I'll make you sorry you were born. I'll make your miserable self into grass. I know what you're like, candidate. I can see right through you. Do you think I want a nasty piece of trash like you in my beloved Marine Corps?”

“No, Sergeant Instructor!”
Conrad shouted.

The contempt from the instructors aroused a kind of answering rage. In fact, during training, rage was the ruling emotion. It was always present, though the level ranged from simmering resentment to throat-choking fury.

They had to yell their responses, which meant an investment of energy. The word they had to yell most was “Kill!” They yelled that all the time—on their way to meals, when an instructor walked into a classroom, and when they drew their chairs out to sit down. At first they focused only on volume. Later, when they were more confident, they concentrated on gusto, zest.