Angry Planet - The Cult of the American Military Academy

Episode Date: August 10, 2026

Journalist Jasper Craven joins the show today to talk about his new book God Forgives, Brothers Don’t. The book is a deep dive into the history of the American military academy and how it has shaped the country’s conception of manhood. Craven’s investigation led him from Valley Forge to West Point, uncovered a strange 20th century Joe Rogan who changed his name so it sounded like a lion’s roar, and landed him multiple interviews with Graham Platner.A brief history of Jasper CravenWhere lost boys flyThe Nancy Mace skeleton keyFrom West Point to the Citadel“The gentleman soldier”Army engineers as public relations campaignBernarr MacfaddenMasculinity, American styleThe Scabbard and the BladeOfficers versus enlisted“Send me”“What the military does is create powerful bonds between men.”God Forgives, Brothers Don’tThe Complications of Graham Platner’s Veteran IdentityBattle of the SexesSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. I think this is the first time of having this experience where most of the people who've blurbed your book on the back are people that have been on the show. Incredible. I haven't had harp or Swofford.

I would love to have Swofford. would be really It would do a depressing episode where we like just talk about Jarhead sequels which I'm sure he would hate to do Hello and welcome to another conversation

about conflict on an angry planet I am Matthew Galt Sir, will you introduce yourself? I am Jasper Craven And we are here today to talk about the long march of military education the making of American manhood. The book is God forgives, Brothers Don't,

which is not the first thing I had read from you. The two things that really caught my eye were the Platner profile in the New Yorker and the Baffler piece, which is kind of like a, I would call a profile of Hegsef, but more of viewed from a distance and kind of charting it along with what's happening to the American military right now.

It is a book primarily, about, I would say its thesis is, where did this military education system come from in America? How has it affected American masculinity? How has it affected the military's masculinity, the idea of masculinity, and how has that infected the rest of the culture? You say that that's fairly accurate? Right on the money. Right on the money?

How does one become interested in this topic? Yeah, well, I think. think the sort of straightest line between my life and work and this book concerns my dad, who was a prominent anti-war activist during Vietnam. He had Howard Zinn as a history professor at Boston University, dropped out to become involved in the anti-war movement, briefly dated Jane Fonda, helped organize Mayday. Like he got, you know, he was pretty deeply enmeshed. And, you know, knowing my father, growing up with him, I certainly like learned a lot about the military and how it preys on youth and children, boys in particular.

lost boys, really. And at the same time, I sort of, you know, knew that my father himself was a lost boy, came from a household of alcoholics, left home as early as he could. And as I started to cover the military as a freelancer a few years ago, I discovered that he had nearly joined the military, but sort of found this alternative path, which is very rare in which, you know, instead of sort of like embracing a military identity, he became this piece. And he sort of, you know, waged peace, built his identity around it largely.

That sort of catapulted his career as an organizer and a filmmaker. And so I was just, I was always really fascinated by this brief window. during Vietnam where this alternative form of masculinity and sort of mission briefly sprouted and was obviously like violently suppressed by the Pentagon largely because I think they were worried about, you know, the sort of anti-military archetype supplanting the one they had cultivated over many decades, centuries really. Um, so, but I, you know, so these ideas were sort of like bouncing around in my head, but I wasn't really sure how to tell that story. I mean, you know, often these themes are explored really richly in, uh, military memoirs, but, you know, I'm not a vet. I can't tell that story. I, I've read a lot of them. And from that, you know, picked up sort of a thesis, I think. But, um, Really, it was the Mother Jones piece I wrote a few years ago about Valley Forge Military Academy just outside of Philadelphia that sort of helped me secure like a framing for how to tell this story because, you know, military education, military schools.

They're not sort of top of mind generally when people think about the military. And that's largely because, you know, most people enlist in the military. They don't go through the officer training programs. They, you know, go through boot camp and all the rest. But here at places like Valley Forge at Service Academies like West Point, through ROTC and JROTC and even Boy Scouts and other sort of youth military style programs, I think the like the ideology of military masculinity, the tactics, everything is most explicit. There is a curriculum. There is a pedagogy. So when I was investigating this one military school, Valley Forge, I was just, it felt like easier to tell a story about these ideas in a way that made sense.

And, you know, I mean, also just like so many of these schools are microcosms for how the Pentagon works. And the Pentagon is just like such a massive bureaucracy. It just feels impossible to wrap your arms around. But here at Valley Forge, for instance, or at West Point, you can see, you know, self-dealing, you can see administrative corruption and a good old boys network and terrible abuse, military sexual abuse, hazing, all of the rest. And so I was like, oh, here's actually a way for me to try to tell this story that feels manageable and somewhat specific. It's so funny because I don't think, we don't think about it, right?

Like there's a West Point, there's the Citadel, there's Valley Forge, there's all these academies around the country. And it's just kind of part of the bat, like if you eat like, you know, one percent of the population, civilian population is involved in the military. And then like an even smaller subsection of that is part of these military academies. So it's not something that most of the most of the public ever thinks about. And yet I do think it's pretty important to the identities of a lot of people, especially a lot of people in power. Like when I think about Nancy Mace, a low country representative here in South Carolina, like when I learned that she was the first female graduate of the Citadel, which is like this brutal military academy, the Southern West Point, essentially,

it's like everything about her kind of locks into place. for me. It's like that, that, having that as the defining moment of your young life probably like completely sets up Mace for the rest of, of her political career. I think the rest of her life. But it was not always this way. This stuff does have an origin, which you can, which you track down and tell the story of. How do we end up having the West Point out of, you know, the Revolutionary War? When does this stuff get set up? And does everyone agree that it's good at the beginning? Well, before I get to that, I must say, I mean, you're totally right. I mean, I think the Citadel is a perfect touch point and very crucial in understanding who Nancy Mace is.

I mean, the book mentions the first woman who arrived there who did not graduate, who was like viciously suppressed, bullied. I forget what her name is, but like, let's say it was, you know, Tanya. They, they created a sign, dragged it out on the highway. said die Tanya after she got to the Citadel. Like they just were so brutal and she lasted, you know, a couple of weeks. Shannon Falkner. That's what it was. Yes, Shannon.

Who had won a court case to be there. Yeah. That was that was funded, I think, completely by her side by a local author that wrote a book about the Citadel. Oh, no way. And as a graduate of it, the guy that wrote Prince of Tides, like basically, funded her suit. She gets through and then yeah, it does not last very long. And it's Mace like a decade later that actually gets through. Exactly. Exactly. Another person before I get to the history, I mean, I see also Charlie Kirk's

rise and passion and sort of like political outlook largely as a reaction to his being rejected from West Point. You know, he talked a lot before his death about how like it was DEI that sort of, you know, led to his application being denied. And so like a lot of his sort of ideas around, you know, the dangers of the liberal arts and the importance for like alternative, like, you know, Republican ideas, suffusing educational environments sort of start with that moment in his life where he like so deeply wanted to go to West Point and it didn't work out. But that's, That's interesting. I didn't know that about him. So it's this idea that like, I can't possibly be a flaw in me. It must be a flaw in the academy. Right, right. Exactly. You know, because in Kirk's eyes, he is the perfect picture of what a classic West Point cadet is. And, you know, to sort of use that as a segue, I mean, West Point was developed as a military outpost during the Revolutionary War. It was Washington's favorite place to be during,

the conflict. He loved the Hudson and the beauty of the place, but also saw West Point as strategically vital, basically to protecting, you know, colonial outposts north of New York City from the British. And after the war, you know, there was deep skepticism for a standing army, understandably so, from, you know, new Americans. They, especially in New England, you know, had experienced the tyranny of military occupation firsthand and wanted to abolish the army. And essentially that happened, but a few dozen officers remained at West Point. And it's really sort of from that little germ that.

the military again sort of grows into the behemoth we see today, into the military industrial complex. You know, so much of the sort of discussion and debate between Washington and his top aides during the conflict concerned the fact that, you know, their men were ad hoc, badly organized, disobedient and and just sort of, you know, incompetent, really. The British had, you know, a very well-bred officer class, thanks to military schools dotted throughout Europe, one of Washington's top men, Henry Knox, namesake of the Army outpost and gold repository. He had imported many sort of military science books from Europe before the war. He was very smart tactically. He had sort of, you know, taught himself

sort of key engineering lessons when it came to sort of building outposts. But pushed, agitated the Continental Congress and Washington to create a military office. officer program. And there was sort of this struggle in the years after the war. But eventually, in the early 1800s, West Point is organized as the first officer training program in America. And not long thereafter, this brilliant engineer, a man named Sylvanus Thayer, graduate of Dartmouth, valedictorian West Point or two, he becomes the sort of godfather of the place, really reforms it and develops, you know, the sort of core traditions and curriculum and ideas around honor and service that permeate West Point today, but also really every other military program.

Most of them sort of, you know, took the sort of core structure of West Point and replicated it in some way. So in its initial conception, what is the ideal West Point graduate? What, like, who are they trying to forge? What are the qualities? Yeah. So there's, you know, the sort of more practical ideas around what makes a good military mind. You know, first and foremost, engineering is sort of considered vital for any good officer. And, you know, early on, West Pointer's really helped design and build crucial public. works throughout America, which actually gave West Point a really positive reputation,

a lot of the sort of cynicism or skepticism of the place from citizens sort of dissipated as they, you know, saw West Pointers build the Brooklyn Bridge, for instance, or Riverside Park in New York City. And, you know, beyond that, though, like there were sort of these very lofty but poorly defined ideas around honor and service and integrity. You know, a real sense of nobles oblige permeated these places. You know, the officer class has always been one for elites. And so West Point from its conception was sort of marketed as like equivalent to the ivies, a place where sort of brilliant young men go to,

prove their medal and sort of both, you know, get a good education, but also inject some, like, you know, toughness into their privileged backgrounds. And, you know, related to that, sort of these core masculine ideas around, you know, the sort of like gentleman's soldier. I mean, Thayer writes at length in the early days of West Point about sort of, creating a gentleman, someone who is polite and, you know, respectful towards women and all of these things. I mean, you know, the promise of military service has long been sort of intertwined with core ideas around manhood and what that brings. So like, you know, part of the recruiting pitch into West Point has always been that it would ensure that women would both be, you know,

sort of enthralled by your strength and your uniform and totally reliant on that strength. And so those sort of early classes of West Point cadets were all male, very conservative, generally privileged, and, you know, also pretty brutal. Like one of the more interesting things in my research was that, you know, there were these, really terrible hazing scandals at West Point in the early days that like could have you know felt sort of snatched from the headlines of any sort of frat at like University of Arizona today. I mean just like really sort of juvenile stuff, you know, forcing cadets to chug Tabasco, starting underground fight rings. I mean, there's a long and really interesting sort of like relationship

between college frat culture and military hazing. So, I mean, I mean, that's sort of another key thing that I think West Point and other military schools pioneered was this idea of sort of a brotherhood built around abuse, shared abuse, that can, you know, really wreck one's own sense of self. And yes, might create a sense of like community and camaraderie, but is fundamentally empty in some key ways. Can we talk about some of the early resistance to this? Because again, like we'd kind of teased, it was not universally beloved. You said earlier there was a deep skepticism about this place before the engineers start coming out and building public works projects. Yeah. So, I mean, many early lawmakers, including famed frontiersman Davy Crockett, sought to abolish West Point,

feeling that it was this sort of elite out of touch institution that, you know, ultimately promoted tyranny and authoritarianism. And, you know, so there were, you know, probably a half dozen or so serious attempts, legislative attempts to abolish the place. Things really soured. I mean, as you noted, I mean, there was sort of this brief. period where West Pointers are helping build America, work on the railroads, all of that kind of stuff, and that engenders good feelings. But then the Civil War comes around and dozens and dozens of West Point cadets defect, leave West Point, abandon their studies, join the Confederacy, many other graduates, including, you know, Robert Lee, a Nguer, a, no, a, no, a,

did West Point graduate, you know, design, you know, basically run the army, the Confederate army. And, you know, Lincoln's Secretary of War basically blames the conflict itself on the sort of ideologies that were taught at West Point. That, you know, strangely enough in, like, the years leading up to the Civil War, West Point divided companies between northern and southern cadets. So there was sort of like on a on a sort of local level here at the school, North and South was already sort of battling and competing with each other. And so there was a lot of anger after the Civil War just about how West Point had, you know, trained all of these turn coats. So, you know, there's,

I mean, one of the sort of strange, strangest facets really in sort of American life is that when you look at the polling, when you look at public sentiments, generally people are against the military state. Generally, they want focus on domestic issues. Generally, they understand at some level the damage that the U.S. military does to the human psyche and to domestic priorities. and yet, you know, time and again, the military state has just organized itself and grown. And largely that's been, you know, by fearmongering. I mean, America has been, you know, waging conflict for most of its history. And so anytime there is sort of any whiff of conflict coming or currently occurring, the military does a very good job at sort of scaring up support for,

for their programs and also just sort of designing and evolving their pitches to young boys and also how they, you know, bring them in through often very, you know, there's like economic promises like GI Bill, but there's also these sort of bigger and tangible ideas of sort of what the military will do for you psychically. And, and so that sort of, you know, continues. There's sort of a brief period of peace before World War I. That sees another huge sort of, movement against military education. This one is largely pioneered by female public school teachers, suffragettes, educational pioneers, and members of the clergy. There's this push to create compulsory military education in middle schools across the country in high schools, and they sort of push really hard against that. And they have peace on their side, so it's harder for the military to craft an argument, but sort of very craftily, they create what is called the preparedness movement, which is essentially just, you know, fear mongering about a coming conflict and sort of,

you know, agitating for involvement in World War I. And ultimately, they essentially went out thanks in large part to lots of money and support from industrialists who, you know, want military contracts and also sort of see in military education a beneficial system of ideas that creates compliance and that they think will sort of, you know, help create a more obedient workforce in general. Tell me about since we're in this part of the timeline, McFadden, is it Bernard? Is that how you say his first name? Bernard, yes, born Bernard, but he changed his name legally to Bernard because he

thought it sounded more macho like a lion's roar. Two R's instead of a D. Yes. Yeah, McFadden is a very interesting figure. Someone I compare in the book to Robert F. Kennedy or Joe Rogan, other sort of like Manosphere figures. This is a man who grew up in the wake of the Civil War in Missouri, you know, on land, deeply scarred by that conflict still reeling from the economic fallout and the sort of human

casualties of that conflict became an orphan at a very early age, was very sick as a boy, very gaunt, very thin, and ended up on a farm and began exercising and sort of like built his body through being outdoors and also sort of getting into the burgeoning, fitness movement brought over by fellow German immigrants. They sort of pioneered, you know, gym culture in America. And so McFadden ultimately brands himself sort of as the first and foremost physical fitness trainer. In America, he starts a magazine empire that rivals that of William Randolph-Hurst. and writes books about physical education,

purchases a number of military schools where he imposes his sort of specific regime, which includes a lot of weight training but also a strict diet, intermittent fasting. McFadden is very anti-vaccine. He calls white bread the greatest humbug ever foisted on civilized people, loves raw vegetables. I mean, a lot of kooky ideas. His magazine once featured a man who swore by the benefits of an all-grass diet. So it is, there's sort of this like completely insane out there ideology that that feels very

much aligned with what we're seeing today. America doesn't change. I know. It's very, it's very funny to go back and read history. and there's characters like this all over. I know, I know. It really is bonkers and somewhat depressing. I mean, the last just, the last like 10 years of going, Obama, Biden, Trump, Biden, Trump has been like, everything just seems to be like getting compressed and it's it's all too much.

But McFadden is really agitating for American involvement in World War I. he sort of sees this as crucial to sort of building the requisite strength in American boys. And, you know, one thing I sort of argue in the book is that the sort of strong man culture that's emanating in Europe from Hitler and Mussolini bleeds into America. I mean, there was like a lot of anxiety around the sort of eugenics movements there. where, you know, American War Planners, for instance, became nervous that Hitler was injecting his soldiers with anabolic steroids. And so they sort of responded in turn by embracing a lot of McFadden's ideas, completely rewriting, you know, their own fitness manuals, focused, becoming sort of more bellicose and aggressive in how they trained, you know, introducing hand-to-hand

combat for the first time. The military also, Seated the creation of hundreds of gymnasiums across the country and imposed new, you know, PE practices. I mean, there's sort of this interesting history that I touch on where physical education teachers who had not really had much success breaking into public education systems for a long time, quietly allied with the military. And so became sort of agents of military culture in public schools. The top PE teacher at West Point today, and for a long time, is called the Master of the Sword, which I just find hilarious. So you sort of see really in, you know,

the middle of the 20th century, this hyperfixation on the male form, promoted by McFadden and others that, you know, to this day is sort of psychically complicating boys and leading to, you know, looks maxing and all of the rest, really. Yeah, there's, I think it's pretty well known and pretty well studied the effects of an image-driven culture on women and women's psychology. I think we talk less about what you're zoning in on right now. I'm looking at pictures of Barraar McFadden, and he took a lot of pictures that I would think like, I could see a version of this going out on Instagram today. Or he's kind of in his whitey tides and he's doing his big muscle shots. You know, you look like you're in the back of a 1930s comic book about to buy a dubious training manual is kind of what he looks like to me. Absolutely. I think that's totally on the money.

And, yeah, and, you know, I mean, he also understood. how he could profit from these conflicts and from the sort of, you know, the sort of hang-ups of men who felt insufficiently strong. Once the draft was imposed, he took out adverts and other magazines saying, you know, you could get brought into the ranks at any time. Are you really strong enough to sort of be in those environments, buy my book, learn how to sort of prepare. Don't you want to protect your family. Don't you want to be a man? Don't you want your wife to love you? All of that kind of stuff. So very much this sort of transactional masculinity focused on your own, you know, patented, you know, program for strength and happiness and sexual vitality. I mean, McFadden was also kind of a

sexual freak who dabbled in many relationships. felt the need to just loudly and proudly pump up his chest and his sexual exploits to sort of, you know, fill the void, it seems. It's funny. He looks like a cross between John Brown and RFK Jr. He does look like John Brown, actually. It's very weird.

Yeah, yeah. And I mean, so the RFK stuff, obviously sort of these weird wacky health, health ideas. But a sort of other interesting, like small historical wrinkle is that when FDR was running for president, obviously here's a man bound by a wheelchair. McFadden offers a critical cosign to FDR, you know, proclaiming that he is physically strong enough for the job, that his own infirmities should not be sort of factored into voters thinking. And I mean, FDR was clearly skeptical of this fellow, didn't take him too seriously,

but appreciated that boost and created the Department of Health and Human Services as president. And there was sort of some debate over whether he had quietly promised McFadden, the cabinet, Post in exchange for this endorsement. McFadden visited the White House talk to FDR. And so, yeah, like he, McFadden was sort of crucial to creating this agency that RFK Jr. would ultimately fill, though he was deemed ultimately too sort of insane for the job. I just got to put a pin in that. I've got so many other questions.

What is the scabbard in the blade? Yes, the scabbard and the blade. So a lot of the book deals with, you know, these sort of like youth programs that, you know, basically dress up military service through pomp and circumstance and sort of the promise of status. And one is the Boy Scouts, which I write about that was focused on, you know, elementary school kids, elementary school boys. And then another is, is Scabbard and Blade. So ROTC, which was basically created during the Civil War with the creation of land grant colleges, but sort of formalized in ROTC years later, sort of pitched itself as its, you know, recruitment numbers on campuses were flailing as equivalent to a fraternity. So Scabbard and Blade was. a military fraternity created by ROTC and, you know, sort of like a blend between a fraternity

and a secret society, which I mean, I guess all fraternities have these sort of secret of subcultures that are used to entice young men in. But they sort of acted, you know, they offered the same sort of perks as a fraternity, you know, they had parties, they showed movies. They, you know, gave recruits uniforms and brass and, you know, sort of promoted their manliness in various sort of on-campus demonstrations. One, they would hold dances and advertise in local papers about specific women who would be in attendance. They also had like kissing competitions I think at University of Wisconsin, you know, the cadets would like kiss hundreds of girls over these, over the course of a few hours.

And so in addition to sort of acting as a powerful recruitment tool on campuses, Scabbard and Blade chapters also served as tools of surveillance for anti-war activities. So I was going through the journals at the University of O'Brien. Oklahoma of the Scabbard and Blade president. And you can see him sort of checking in with various chapters, various ROTC cadets, about, you know, subversive activity. And so basically the Scabbard guys were reporting back to, you know, military figures about specific teachers and students who seemed opposed to various conflicts

or sort of military aims, which again, I mean, rings back, you know, feels like an echo with all of this sort of work going on via Cointel Pro and on college campuses during Vietnam. So again, it's like sort of this this parallel history that shows, among other things that, you know, these public sentiments against conflict that are sort of pushing against the sort of core military aims in this idea of masculinity have constantly been undermined to all of these systems and spies and, you know, institutions sort of from the very beginning.

Right. It's this idea that it is things outside of the institution itself that are tearing it down. The rot very rarely comes from inside, right? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Why do you think this is going back to a piece far earlier in the conversation, but it's been kicking around in my brain since you said it? The idea of a gentleman. And there is this aspect of military education or there was that teaches you how to act in a civilian setting. There are standards for codes of conduct for treating fellow humans. obviously those shift and are different.

But now it feels like, and correct me if I'm wrong, that is not being taught. That is not part of what we are interested in doing, especially in the last few years, I would say, has been tossed by the wayside. Why do you think that is, do you feel that's accurate? Do you see that that's been kind of tossed aside and why? Well, I think a major reason why military planners emphasize the need for soldiers to be gentlemen is because just below the surface of these schooling systems is a lot of brutality. You know, again, from the beginning, this is an institution built on violence and a key sort of part of the social. socialization progress is to breed violence and create conditions for violence. And so I think there was just an understanding on like a PR level that it would be helpful for these men to present publicly is very different to be perfect gentlemen, to be polite and humble.

I mean, you know, a huge, again, like a huge concern was that a soldier was an inherently sort of authoritarian figure. But to have this sort of presentation as someone who, you know, tips his cap and is very well dressed and doesn't speak too loudly, like this all helped sort of smooth the path for the military's growth and for its approval in society. and a huge part of that was secured through the West Point cadet hostess office. And there are sort of similar programs at other military schools. But basically, the office, which still exists, is composed of military wives, sort of dead mothers who, you know, in the 20th century, really around World War II at their peak, we're teaching cadets, you know, how to fox trot and hold a teacup and sort of like really sort of focused on these, these performative displays of manners.

They would also bus in girls from Vassar and other nearby colleges for dances and overnight hangouts, I guess, I should say. And so, you know, this not only served the purposes of the military state, but through, the cadet office, you know, created a sort of pipeline for romantic partnership. And I think, you know, cadets were happy with this arrangement. They appreciated their access to women and the sort of respect that their uniform conferred. I mean, many West Point cadets would go to New York City on the weekends around World War II, World War I. and their uniform would guarantee them access to free drinks, a lot of romantic attention, free meals, sometimes free hotel rooms.

Like they were just sort of pinnacles of society. And they really appreciated that and sort of, you know, even though they're like actual behavior, especially in romantic relationships is very patriarchical and brutal often, they were able to sort of maintain this myth. I think where things really changed was Vietnam. And you can sort of see this through the cadet hostess office, through, you know, the sort of beleaguered image of the West Point cadet. All of a sudden, you know, Vassar girls, for instance, start protesting outside of the gates of West Point. And, you know, there's even correspondence I found of like Vassar girls

warning each other about, West Point cadets, just being like, these guys are so starved for female attention. Watch out if you're alone with them. Like they're sort of, you know, and obviously this is paralleling the feminist movement. And so, you know, kind of in a flash, the young male officer no longer is guaranteed access and adulation from women. They are no longer guaranteed free hotel rooms in New York City. they are ashamed or sort of embarrassed to wear their uniform, they're ashamed by their haircut.

They are sort of, you know, feeling attacked on all sides. And a deep resentment builds not only at West Point, but across the military, which leads to sort of this idea of humility and sort of service, public service, and sort of duty to country. It all sort of evaporates because it was all very sort of thin, begin with. And so really what happens is what replaces that is a sort of loyalty to the institution of the military and a focus less on these sort of like heady notions of morality and fighting for democracy and all of this stuff. And it just becomes about brutality and aggressiveness and strength. I mean, you know, Vietnam itself, of course, run on a body count strategy by West Point or

William Westmoreland. And so it's like all of these ideas curdle very quickly. And a lot of the sort of performative stuff falls by the wayside. And we're, has not come back. No, it has not come back. And, you know, I mean, part of the what's, what was sort of critical. And again, this, it's, these are very fragile ideas. and they were never fully,

they were never fully utilized or sort of realized, really. But part of what people like MacArthur preached was a sort of, like, truly sort of humility, humor. Like there were, these military men, Washington, too, you know, they could be brutal, fearsome figures. But there were, there were parts of them that I guess you could say are like, sort of more feminine coded. There wasn't just like brutality and stoicism and all of these things.

You know, MacArthur's farewell speech in 1972, I believe, offered a pretty beautiful conception of like what a military officer should look like and what men should look like. You know, he was urging young cadets to not take themselves too seriously to really sort of have a humanistic view of the world. I mean, you can argue whether in practice his own military leadership always comported to those ideas. But with Vietnam, any semblance of humility and also reflection went out the window. I think reflection is like really crucial here because, you know, the Vietnam generation, really the officer class. Like you see a lot of enlisted guys, drafted guys coming back and being like, oh my God.

Yeah, I think that that's really important to highlight here. This whole conversation is you were very narrowly focused on the officer class, the officer training, and like that kind of brain of the Pentagon. Yes, yes. No, that is really crucial because enlisted people by and large are not, I mean, first of all, they're not sort of inculcated in this ideology for that long. and they have an abridged program through boot camp. But, you know, I mean, this is, you know, officers are often sort of in this stew for four years, if not more, if they go to, you know, other like war colleges or graduate programs. So they are deeply brainwashed much of the time.

Plus, they are generally removed to some degree from the brutality of the front line. And so, yes. And so there's this thing that this sort of deep divide that occurs during Vietnam where a lot of the draftees say this war was meaningless, unnecessarily brutal, complete bullshit. I reject this conflict. I feel shame for my participation in it. I am going to fight for peace from here on out, which was revolutionary and incredible. But at the same time, the officer class, the men in charge were designing the battle plans. They are so incapable of reflection because to do so would implicate themselves.

And so that idea goes out the window and, you know, is replaced by, you know, myth and revisionism and, you know, P-O-W-M-I-A movement and all of these ideas that sort of seek to place blame elsewhere. And that continues. That continues throughout the course. Cold War and through the global war on terror. I mean, Pete Higg said this is a perfect avatar of these ideas, sort of in a more extreme form. He goes to Guantanamo, fights in Iraq and Afghanistan, you know, is parroting heavy, heavily neocon talking points about democracy and women's liberation coming to the Middle East.

And sort of at a certain point, once it becomes impossible to defend this conflict, rather than have any real reflection on his own complicity or sort of what went wrong, you know, among the joint chiefs or whatever, he just points to, you know, women and people of color who were sort of elevated in this conflict in unprecedented new ways and says, that's the reason we lost this war. So it's always about just sort of like pointing blame partly because people like Seth are so desperate to protect their own identities. Like when you as a man invest yourself for decades, the most productive years of your life often. In this mission, in this work, you cannot let that identity crack or else, you know,

you fall to pieces. And so there's a sort of, I can sort of understand from an emotional vantage point why these men were unable to sort of let in any criticism because it just was so crucial to who they are and how they've defined themselves for so long. Do you see them as lost boys then, all of them? Like even Platner, Hegsseth, you know, is there, it seems like some of these people were assholes before they went in, I guess. It wasn't just the military that made them this way.

And maybe there is something about the way the military is currently organized that attracts a certain kind of personality that's not going to, that's not going to learn all the wrong lessons. Is that fair? Yeah, I think so. I mean, I have a very hopeful theory of men and don't believe that men are inherently violent. I think, you know, by the time a lot of men enlist or go to West Point or whatever, some of them are bullies or, or, you know, bullies or, or, you know, or brutish or severe. But I think in those cases, those behaviors are likely the result of parenting decisions

or sort of adverse life experiences. I mean, you know, I was talking to Platner a decent amount for this piece I did in the New Yorker about him. And one of, I spoke to a female vet who was very skeptical of Platner. And, you know, we were just, sort of having this back and forth on, pardon me. It was the, you interviewed the tail hook. Yes. Yes. Paula Coughlin. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, she was like, you know, absolutely I think that the Marines, which obviously is sort of, you know, infamous for its misogynistic culture, you know, implanted a lot of really nasty ideas in Graham's mind. And, you know, having talked to his mother and. other people in his life. I don't believe that when

Graham Planner entered the Marines, he was like hateful and deeply misogynistic. I do think probably he, and I asked him about this because there's sort of this theory that I mean, it's not a theory, it's scientific, but combat

veterans in particular are likely to suffer intense, more intense PTSD if they've experienced at least one adverse childhood experience. And so, you know, I mean, Platner obviously, like, suffered deeply. And I asked him, point blank in one of our conversations, I was like, did you have an adverse childhood experience?

And he told me, you know, I had loving parents and I was very lucky to have had that. But there was some schoolyard bully stuff that I'm not going to get into. It's going to stay between me and my therapist. But yes, there was something that happened. Again, he wouldn't tell me what. But I do think, you know, when Plattener entered the Marines, there was a certain, you know, semi-toxic strain of masculinity that he had already embraced, probably as a reaction to bullying. And so how, you know, it's, and it's so it's tricky to, you know, calculate all of this or sort of figure out exactly how the military, you know, messed him up.

But I, I think that, you know, I mean, even. with Hegeseth. Like, Hegsteth was always very performatively masculine and kind of a jerk. But it seemed like before he deployed, he had a much healthier view of women. I mean, his high school sweetheart went to Barnard, the All-Women's College of Columbia. So Pete Hexeth as a youngster, while he was at Princeton, almost certainly visited Barnard. Like he was exposed to women of intellect and strength and seemed okay with that. And so, yeah, I mean, I think there are things that sort of develop in boys at a young age that can make them assholes.

But I really do think that even in a lot of those cases, you can sort of link those behaviors, schoolyard bullying, just latent expectations of what men should be too. the military. So I do see it as like pretty profound in creating this behavior, be it in military environments or not. What is the thing, what is the big toxic idea that these academies are inculcating that you see is spreading into the culture? Well, I mean, you know, there's there's a lot of ideas, but I think one of them, one of the biggest ones is this idea of sacrifice. You know, I think all men are expected to sacrifice. Send me, we're seeing now, a thousand times across all the accounts. Yeah, right, right. Exactly. And this is, you know, this is an idea that is prevalent, of course, in military culture, but also just, you know, for men in general, it's expected that if, you know,

a thief, a looter breaks into your house, you go down with the gun, you know, take care of business, that you'll sort of, and even just sort of in day-to-day stuff with, you know, your, family or sort of like suffering on their behalf and there there's you know nuggets of that that i respect i think like doing things on behalf of for for people you love to in that are inconvenient or you know that that involves some amount of suffering are fine but ultimately i think when you take that i think many men take that idea to an extreme um and in doing so it becomes extremely devaluing, you know, it can feel, it can be hard to find an alternative identity or meaning when it's sort of expected at the end of the day, a lot of your value comes from your willingness

to die on behalf of the state or whomever else. I mean, there's a really interesting quote from a 1966 West Point graduate John Wheeler who said that basically his entire sort of mindset that coming out of West Point revolved around the idea of finding, you know, ideas, movements, beliefs, things that are worth dying for, whereas women, he reasoned, you know, orient their lives around fighting for things that are worth living for. I mean, there's just sort of ultimately an ethic of destruction that the military promotes as opposed to creation. And, you know, in the case of Grand Platner, before he entered the Marines, he spent four summers, I believe, in the White Mountains of New Hampshire on a trail crew.

This was by all accounts, kind of a hard drinking, hypermasculine environment. You know, he was using chainsaws. He was building his muscles. He was getting dirty in the mud. But ultimately, he was creating something. He was creating something. And he could feel a lot of those sort of like classic masculine things, which, which, you know, without having to destroy.

And so I think about trying to sort of shift these mentalities, I think looking at programs like that can be really helpful. It's funny. My instinct on some of the stuff is to kind of fight you on it. But then, like, I just think about the way the current war is being conducted and the way Hegsef is reshaping the military. And I, it is, you know, when the, when the leaders in charge are looking at you at the face and saying this is about destruction,

this is about killing, it is about maximum lethality, that is the whole point of all of this stuff. And yeah, sure, you're told that there are political aims in the region, right? That,

you know, we have to make sure they don't get a nuclear weapon. But no one's working. The whole thing seems to be just in service of destruction. And also kind of the aesthetics of destruction, too, without the thought to achieving a political goal, which is, you know, what I think the military should be for. It's for, you know, forcing your will onto somebody else. And these days right now, it just seems like it's about the force. And that's, that's it, full stop.

Yeah. I mean, I don't, you know, I don't deny that, you know, soldier has sort of been man's defining vocation throughout global history. And I can understand to some, you know, in a real way, why that is, you know, there was long a need to sort of secure borders and resources and access to the seas and all of these sorts of things. And there is something noble about that in creating a state that is secure, that is protected, where communities can live in peace. Like, I'm not like necessarily an abolitionist or anything like that. But, and part of the problem stems from the fact that, like, there were. are these sort of tangible goals associated with state violence that could be justified in some way. Obviously, there was a lot of brutality, unnecessary brutality involved in this.

But today, I think young men look up even just, you know, World War II and their ancestors, and they feel this like crushing pressure of like, okay, my grandfather, you know, saved the world from fascism. and they want in some like pure way to find a similar battle that can protect their country that can promote positive ideas. But American foreign policy is so warped at this point that it can feel impossible to find a mission like that. And so instead, you know, you're just seeing this sort of energy lash out in all of these strange ways. I think, you know, like, whether it's Uber violent security guards or ICE officers or, you know, I think this culture permeates a lot of police departments. But and I think like there is a way to sort of actually salvage some of this stuff.

And I think that, you know, I mean, there are ways to exert military force right now that would. help revive a real sense of pure mission in the force. I mean, you know, track down war criminals, extract them from their palaces, bring them to the Hague and have them tried as war criminals. Like there is, there is, there are things that can be done. But I think, you know, crucially is, to all of this would be accountability. I mean, you know, war crimes have gone unpunished. for decades now and generals have gone unpunished for profound failures. You know, they have blood on their hands, civilians blood, U.S. service members blood. Like, there needs to be, there needs to be a sense of accountability. I mean, I often think to the NFL, which is sort of so often used as a

analog to the U.S. military. And while it's true that the sort of personal misdeeds of players often go unpunished, which is maddening. There is a sense of accountability just on the team in terms of tactics strategy. Like if a player is not doing well, they are traded. If a coach fails and doesn't get a winning season, they are fired. There should be that simple. Like it should be that simple. Like there's all of these ideas that Higgs us and all these other people love to promote about,

like, you know, we're the best, we're the brightest for the, you know, we're peerless and how we fight. But the whole institution is just so calcified and sort of dysfunctional at this point because there hasn't been. And Hegseth talked about some of this and some of his writings about just kind of like cleaning house and creating a new culture of integrity and accountability and true accomplishment and creative thinking and all of this stuff. And I think that would also be really critical to sort of reviving the military and making it feel genuinely. productive. I think there's also a

unwillingness in the culture to grapple with the horrors that come after and the horrors that are present even in good and righteous wars, good in air quotes. So I think about, you know, we were talking about World War II and like the crushing weight on the generation that comes after of living up to the things that their fathers did.

And I think about like the art that that generation produced, you know, a couple of years after the war, like there's a camera, it's like the time of our lives, Oscar winning movie about how depressing it is to come back after World War II, catch 22 and Slaughterhouse Five. There's this cycle of young men being excited to go to war, going to war, being disillusioned, coming back and making art about that disillusionment. That is older than World War II. It goes way back. And I feel like when the disillusioned art comes out now, it's shouted down by your Bernards of the era, right? Yeah, absolutely. I think that's a really good point. And I touch on it some.

I mean, you know, the catcher in the rye is a disguised war memoir from J.D. Salinger, who went to Valley Forge, actually, before becoming an officer. I mean, he helped liberate Docow, you know. engaged in some brutal prison interrogations. I mean, he was deeply scarred from the conflict and came away sort of incapable of believing in, you know, these lofty ideals that were then permeating American culture about the soldier and the conflict and everything else. And yeah, I mean, that's, that is the other part, I think, that is crucial to this,

is that a real military culture would honor the complier. of what this work entails and in a deep way engage with the fact that it destroys men. And I mean, you know, there is some of that work sort of latently exists within the VA, which is sort of this, this commitment the country has made to helping rehabilitate veterans and get them back on their feet. And so there is an implicit acknowledgement of how it can be very destructive to serve. But yes, I mean, to sort of elevate, you know, the voices of anti-war veterans, to appreciate their art, to understand that it is not, that the country does not become weaker by acknowledging these things or promoting this sort of more complicated idea of what military service entails. because at the end of the day, young boys and men are still going to enlist,

knowing all of these pitfalls probably. I mean, yeah, I have a full metal jacket poster behind me, classically one of the most piercing anti-war films, but countless young men saw that movie and said, sign me up. And part of that is because, you know, even despite the bodily risks, the dangers of PTSD, all of these things.

There is something really enduring in this culture and among men around the idea of public service and also just around the promise of community and camaraderie with men. I mean, that's the other thing. Like there just needs to be alternative places for this, but oftentimes what the military does best is it creates really beautiful, powerful bonds between men. And that cannot be taken away. That is one thing the military has learned how to do very well. And, you know, like part of that can involve hazing.

Like, I don't think hazing is all bad. I think there are ways to engage in hazing that can be sort of fun and lighthearted and, you know, strength and bonds. So, like, there are things to learn about how the military operates. and there are, the military does to this day sort of offer these really crucial things to some men that they are very grateful for. I think that is a wonderful place to end this episode. Where can people find the book and give us the title one more time? The title is God forgives, brothers don't, the long march of military education, the making of American man. hood, I would urge all to go to their local indies and get the book there or go to bookshop.

That's all for this episode of Angry Planet. As always, Angry Planet is me, Matthew Galt and Kevin O'Dell. It was created by myself and Jason Fields. If you like the show, please hop over to Angry PlantPod.com, sign up, get early access to all of the mainline episodes. Get some bonus episodes that are kicking around in there. for instance, if you'd like to hear the reactions of the initial memorandum of understanding, the initial Iran deal from someone who helped negotiate the Obama era deal, that's on there, and that's never going to get posted to the main line.

You also get access to life during Trump time. My therapy that I'm doing with the audience about the era that we live in, we will have another conversation about conflict on a conflict. An Angry Planet soon. Stay safe. Until then.