Fear and Trembling in the Garrison

What are the products of our perpetual proximity to violence, even during times of peace? Theo Lipsky, a captain in the US Army, considers the soldiers who thumb their phones, distracted, while guarding explosives for a war that has not arrived, and may not. With some assistance from Kierkegaard, Lipsky seizes on the “great spiritual movements” accessible to the individuals in this singular position, without romanticizing the forces—including indifference—that place them there.

In peace, soldiers must do hard things that only make sense in war. Late nights digging foxholes in the rain mere miles away from one’s own bed only make sense if there’s reason to think such habits will soon save a life. Long, infuriating hours fixing aged tanks only make sense if one expects to lurch toward battle in them. Lonely shifts guarding ammunition only make sense if one anticipates returning fire. It is easier to send a company to the field for training if its soldiers believe their lives will soon depend on what they learn. Without a war on, such work appears to many an exercise in pointlessness. Most persevere for a time if only out of professional discipline. But to reconcile themselves to their work, peacetime soldiers must hallucinate a war for want of one at hand or else live with the absurdity of playing war when there’s none to be had.

To its credit, the army does what it can to make hallucinating easy. Doctrine writers issue thick volumes on fictional wartime scenarios, ready on the shelf for when it’s time to imagine. Almost monthly at facilities spanning hundreds of square miles in the Louisiana swamps and the Mojave Desert, thousands of soldiers fight weeks-long battles against their counterparts in which every exchange of fire is adjudicated by a massive laser-tag system affixed to every weapon, vehicle and body. And training is measured by its realism. Units regularly practice maneuvers with live bullets at night. They do so not only to better themselves but also to convince the soldiers, if only for a moment, by the smell of gunpowder and the arcing red of tracer rounds and the chest-shaking thud of falling mortars, that they’ve stumbled through some portal into the real deal. Banners hang in pacific equipment bays, urging those who pass under them to work as if they will have to “fight tonight.”

Yet morning breaks again without a fight, and in its light one begins to see absurdity.