I would agree with the advice about finding a woman who can cook, clean, etc.
I still have the best sex with my wife, but she is a clusterfuck when it comes to running the house. She is a stay at home wife, and yet can’t keep the house clean, cook decent meals, or even get the kids to school without my help. She is a disaster with that stuff.
At this stage in my life, I would happily trade her incompetent ass in for a woman who was organized and had her shit together.
when you have a fat friend there are no see-saws, only catapults
Start an IRA as soon as your out of college. Now.
[quote]ProRaven wrote:
I would agree with the advice about finding a woman who can cook, clean, etc.
I still have the best sex with my wife, but she is a clusterfuck when it comes to running the house. She is a stay at home wife, and yet can’t keep the house clean, cook decent meals, or even get the kids to school without my help. She is a disaster with that stuff.
At this stage in my life, I would happily trade her incompetent ass in for a woman who was organized and had her shit together.
[/quote]
I hope for your sake she hasn’t mastered the art of reading, especially this post.
[quote]MaximusB wrote:
ProRaven wrote:
I would agree with the advice about finding a woman who can cook, clean, etc.
I still have the best sex with my wife, but she is a clusterfuck when it comes to running the house. She is a stay at home wife, and yet can’t keep the house clean, cook decent meals, or even get the kids to school without my help. She is a disaster with that stuff.
At this stage in my life, I would happily trade her incompetent ass in for a woman who was organized and had her shit together.
I hope for your sake she hasn’t mastered the art of reading, especially this post. [/quote]
I think he will be OK. Who keeps a computer in the kitchen, anyhow?
[quote]ProRaven wrote:
I backpacked Europe and Africa for 6 months when I was 25 years old. Before that I made sure to drive up and down the east coast of the United States, from the tip of Maine all the way down to Key West. I’ve made the drive to Key West at least a half dozen times.
I tell you this because at this stage in my life…a wife, 3 kids, a mortgage, 2 car payments, etc…I can say to myself in my more stressful moments “at least I got to see the world, see new cultures, and get a shit-ton of ass before I settled down.”
So travel. A lot. Forget about getting a house and a hot car if you can. You’ll be glad you did when you are older.[/quote]
I’ve been considering doing some backpacking myself when I graduate from college. Did you go by yourself, and do you have any ‘advices’ for one contemplating such an adventure?
I met up with my best friend. We would split up from time to time to go solo, and then meet back up for several weeks at a time. I highly recommend it. We had more experiences, and more good times, than I can really type about.
Last bit of advice: I started investing 15-20% of every one of my checks into my 401ks around 23 years old. I’m 38 now, and have over $500k in my 401ks. I could stop today and still have a very good retirement.
So, in a nutshell:
Speaking of travel, is ‘T-Nation Goes to Brazil’ still in the works? If so, we should strongly consider giving it a bigger set of balls and doing it righteously.
staring at you, Wol
Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.
Shit happens, get over it when it does.
[quote]MikeHunt wrote:
when you have a fat friend there are no see-saws, only catapults[/quote]
Oh, Demetri Martin, you’re on funny fucker but your show sucked…
[quote]ProRaven wrote:
I met up with my best friend. We would split up from time to time to go solo, and then meet back up for several weeks at a time. I highly recommend it. We had more experiences, and more good times, than I can really type about.
Last bit of advice: I started investing 15-20% of every one of my checks into my 401ks around 23 years old. I’m 38 now, and have over $500k in my 401ks. I could stop today and still have a very good retirement.
So, in a nutshell:
[/quote]
You are experienced. How long do you think I can last with 12K, 15K and 20K $ in North Africa?
Never, ever, ever, EVER, EVER!, trust ANYONE, who says they don’t like dogs.
Get two tattoos. One that says “Its a dick!” and the other one that says, “It’s NOT a mouth based video game.” You’ll thank me if this ever happens:
Way of the Superior Man by David Deida.
From what personal experience I have managed to gather through my half-of-forty years, I’d say whatever you do, do it for you. No matter what, the people you do it for won’t appreciate it enough.
Now, misunderstand that statement correct. I don’t mean stop giving your mother a birthday present because she doesn’t appreciate it, and you need the money. Give her the birthday present because you love her, and it’s one of the many ways to show it. Do everything with that attitude, and you’ll be well on your way to live a happy, fulfilling and generous life, without being a pushover.
But what do I know, I’m only 20.
wear sunscreen
[quote]ZeroSleep wrote:
Now, misunderstand that statement correct. I don’t mean stop giving your mother a birthday present because she doesn’t appreciate it, and you need the money. Give her the birthday present because you love her, and it’s one of the many ways to show it. Do everything with that attitude, and you’ll be well on your way to live a happy, fulfilling and generous life, without being a pushover.
[/quote]
I don’t give my mother a birthday present because I don’t particularly give a fuck about her.
She would really appreciate it, but I feel I owe it to her not to bullshit her with meaningless gestures.
This way, if I ever do get her something, she’ll know I really meant it.
Or maybe I’m just an asshole.
Anybody’s Son Will Do
Gwynne Dyer
Ordinary people would be loathe to do the sorts of things that soldiers may be called upon to do - but societies seem to need soldiers. As Dyer explains in this chapter excerpted from his 1985 book War, the means of socializing men out of the civilian role and into the soldier/killer role has become institutionalized as a result of centuries of experience.
… All soldiers belong to the same profession, no matter what country they serve, and it makes them different from everybody else. They have to be different, for their job is ultimately about killing and dying, and those things are not a natural vocation for any human being. Yet all soldiers are born civilians. The method for turning young men into soldiers-people who kill other people and expose themselves to death-is basic training. It’s essentially the same all over the world, and it always has been, because young men everywhere are pretty much alike.
Human beings are fairly malleable, especially when they are young, and in every young man there are attitudes for any army to work with: the inherited values and postures, more or less dimly recalled, of the tribal warriors who were once the model for every young boy to emulate.
Civilization did not involve a sudden clean break in the way people behave, but merely the progressive distortion and redirection of all the ways in which people in the old tribal societies used to behave, and modern definitions of maleness still contain a great deal of the old warrior ethic. The anarchic machismo of the primitive warrior is not what modern armies really need in their soldiers, but it does provide them with promising raw material for the transformation they must work in their recruits.
Just how this transformation is wrought varies from time to time and from country to country. In totally militarized societies-ancient Sparta, the samurai class of medieval Japan, the areas controlled by organizations like the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front today1- it begins at puberty or before, when the young boy is immersed in a disciplined society in which only the military values are allowed to penetrate.
In more sophisticated modern societies, the process is briefer and more concentrated, and the way it works is much more visible. It is, essentially, a conversion process in an almost religious sense-and as in all conversion phenomena, the emotions are far more important than the specific ideas…
When I was going to school, we used to have to recite the Pledge of Allegiance every day. They don’t do that now. You know, we’ve got kids that come in here now, when they first get here, they don’t know the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag.
And that’s something - that’s like a cardinal sin… My daughter will know that stuff by the time she’s three; she’s two now and she’s working on it… You know, you’ve got to have your basics, the groundwork where you can start to build a child’s brain from…
-USMC drill instructors,
Parris Island recruit training depot, 1981
That is what the rhetoric of military patriotism sounds like, in every country and at every level-and it is virtually irrelevant so far as the actual job of soldiering is concerned. Soldiers are not just robots; they are ordinary human beings with national and personal loyalties, and many of them do feel the need for some patriotic or ideological justification for what they do.
But which nation, which ideology, does not matter: men will fight as well and die as bravely for the Khmer Rouge as for “God, King, and Country.” Soldiers are the instruments of politicians and priests, ideologues and strategists, who may have high national or moral purposes in mind, but the men down in the trenches fight for more basic motives. The closer you get to the frontline, the fewer abstract nouns you hear.
Armies know this. It is their business to get men to fight, and they have had a long time to work out the best way of doing it. All of them pay lip service to the symbols and slogans of their political masters, though the amount of time they must devote to this activity varies from country to country.
It is less in the United States than in the Soviet Union, and it is still less in a country like Israel, which actually fights frequent wars. Nor should it be thought that the armies are hypocritical-most of their members really do believe in their particular national symbols and slogans. But their secret is that they know these are not the things that sustain men in combat.
What really enables men to fight is their own self-respect, and a special kind of love that has nothing to do with sex or idealism. Very few men have died in battle, when the moment actually arrived, for the United States of America or for the sacred cause of Communism, or even for their homes and families; if they had any choice in the matter at all, they chose to die for each other and for their own vision of themselves…
The way armies produce this sense of brotherhood in a peacetime environment is basic training: a feat of psychological manipulation on the grand scale which has been so consistently successful and so universal that we fail to notice it as remarkable.
In countries where the army must extract its recruits in their late teens, whether voluntarily or by conscription, from a civilian environment that does not share the military values, basic training involves a brief but intense period of indoctrination whose purpose is not really to teach the recruits basic military skills, but rather to change their values and their loyalties. “I guess you could say we brainwash them a little bit,” admitted a U.S. Marine drill instructor, “but you know they’re good people.”…
It’s easier if you catch them young. You can train older men to be soldiers; it’s done in every major war. But you can never get them to believe that they like it, which is the major reason armies try to get their recruits before they are twenty.
There are other reasons too, of course, like the physical fitness, lack of dependents, and economic dispensability of teenagers, that make armies prefer them, but the most important qualities teenagers bring to basic training are enthusiasm and naiveté. Many of them actively want the discipline and the closely structured environment that the armed forces will provide, so there is no need for the recruiters to deceive the kids about what will happen to them after they join.
There is discipline. There is drill… When you are relying on your mates and they are relying on you, there’s no room for slackness or sloppiness. If you’re not prepared to accept the rules, you’re better off where you are.
-British army recruiting advertisement, 1976
People are not born soldiers, they become soldiers… And it should not begin at the moment when a new recruit is enlisted into the ranks, but rather much earlier, at the time of the first signs of maturity, during the time of adolescent dreams.
-Red Star (Soviet army newspaper), 1973
Young civilians who have volunteered and have been accepted by the Marine Corps2 arrive at Parris Island, the Corps’s East Coast facility for basic training, in a state of considerable excitement and apprehension: most are aware that they are about to undergo an extraordinary and very difficult experience.
But they do not make their own way to the base; rather, they trickle in to Charleston airport on various flights throughout the day on which their training platoon is due to form, and are held there, in a state of suppressed but mounting nervous tension, until late in the evening. When the buses finally come to carry them the seventy-six miles to Parris Island, it is often after midnight -and this is not an administrative oversight. The shock treatment they are about to receive will work most efficiently if they are worn out and somewhat disoriented when they arrive.
The basic training organization is a machine, processing several thousand young men every month, and every facet and gear of it has been designed with the sole purpose of turning civilians into Marines as efficiently as possible. Provided it can have total control over their bodies and their environment for approximately three months, it can practically guarantee converts. Parris Island provides that controlled environment, and the recruits do not set foot outside it again until they graduate as Marine privates eleven weeks later.
They’re allowed to call home, so long as it doesn’t get out of hand-every three weeks or so they can call home and make sure everything’s all right, if they haven’t gotten a letter or there’s a particular set of circumstances. If it’s a case of an emergency call coming in, then they’re allowed to accept that call; if not, one of my staff will take the message…
In some cases I’ll get calls from parents who haven’t quite gotten adjusted to the idea that their son had cut the strings -and in a lot of cases that’s what they’re doing. The military provides them with an opportunity to leave home but they’re still in a rather secure environment.
-Captain Brassington, USMC
For the young recruits, basic training is the closest thing their society can offer to a formal rite of passage,3 and the institution probably stands in an unbroken line of descent from the lengthy ordeals by which young males in precivilized groups were initiated into the adult community of warriors. But in civilized societies it is a highly functional institution whose product is not anarchic warriors, but trained soldiers.
Basic training is not really about teaching people skills; it’s about changing them, so that they can do things they wouldn’t have dreamt of otherwise. It works by applying enormous physical and mental pressure to men who have been isolated from their normal civilian environment and placed in one where the only right way to think and behave is the way the Marine Corps wants them to. The key word the men who run the machine use to describe this process is motivation.
I can motivate a recruit and in third phase, if I tell him to jump off the third deck, he’ll jump off the third deck. Like I said before, it’s a captive audience and I can train that guy; I can get him to do anything I want him to do… They’re good kids and they’re out to do the right thing. We get some bad kids, but you know, we weed those out. But as far as motivation-here, we can motivate them to do anything you want, in recruit training.
-USMC drill instructor, Parris Island
The first three days the raw recruits spend at Parris Island are actually relatively easy, though they are hustled and shouted at continuously It is during this time that they are documented and inoculated, receive uniforms, and learn the basic orders of drill that will enable young Americans (who are not very accustomed to this aspect of life) to do everything simultaneously in large groups. But the most important thing that happens in “forming” is the surrender of the recruits’ own clothes, their hair-all the physical evidence of their individual civilian identities.
During a period of only seventy-two hours, in which they are allowed little sleep, the recruits lay aside their former lives in a series of hasty rituals (like being shaven to the scalp) whose symbolic significance is quite clear to them even though they are quite deliberately given absolutely no time for reflection, or any hint that they might have the option of turning back from their commitment. The men in charge of them know how delicate a tightrope they are walking, though, because at this stage the recruits are still newly caught civilians who have not yet made their ultimate inward submission to the discipline of the Corps.
Forming Day One makes me nervous. You’ve got a whole new mob of recruits, you know, sixty or seventy depending, and they don’t know anything. You don’t know what kind of a reaction you’re going to get from the stress you’re going to lay on them, and it just worries me the first day.
Things could happen, I’m not going to lie to you. Something might happen. A recruit might decide he doesn’t want any part of this stuff and maybe take a poke at you or something like that. In a situation like that it’s going to be a spur-of-the-moment thing and that worries me.
But it rarely happens. The frantic bustle of forming is designed to give the recruit no time to think about resisting what is happening to him. And so the recruits emerge from their initiation into the system, stripped of their civilian clothes, shorn of their hair, and deprived of whatever confidence in their own identity they may previously have had as eighteen-year-olds, like so many blanks ready to have the Marine identity impressed upon them.
The first stage in any conversion process is the destruction of an individual’s former beliefs and confidence, and his reduction to a position of helplessness and need. It isn’t really as drastic as all that, of course, for three days cannot cancel out eighteen years; the inner thoughts and the basic character are not erased. But the recruits have already learned that the only acceptable behavior is to repress any unorthodox thoughts and to mimic the character the Marine Corps wants. Nor are they, on the whole, reluctant to do so, for they want to be Marines. From the moment they arrive at Parris Island, the vague notion that has been passed down for a thousand generations that masculinity means being a warrior becomes an explicit article of faith, relentlessly preached: to be a man means to be a Marine.
There are very few eighteen-year-old boys who do not have highly romanticized ideas of what it means to be a man, so the Marine Corps has plenty of buttons to push. And it starts pushing them on the first day of real training: the officer in charge of the formation appears before them for the first time, in full dress uniform with medals, and tells them how to become men.
The United States Marine Corps has 205 years of illustrious history to speak for itself. You have made the most important decision in your
life … by signing your name, your life, pledge to the Government of the United States, and even more importantly, to the United States Marine Corps-a brotherhood, an elite unit. In 10.3 weeks you are going to become a member of that history, those traditions, this organization -if you have what it takes.
All of you want to do that by virtue of your signing your name as a man. The Marine Corps says that we build men. Well, I’ll go a little bit further. We develop the tools that you have and everybody has those tools to a certain extent right now. We’re going to give you the blueprints, and we are going to show you how to build a Marine. You’ve got to build a Marine-you understand?
-Captain Pingree, USMC
The recruits, gazing at him with awe and adoration, shout in unison, 'Yes sir!" just as they have been taught. They do it willingly, because they are volunteers-but even conscripts tend to have the romantic fervor of volunteers if they are only eighteen years old. Basic training, whatever its hardships, is a quick way to become a man among men, with an undeniable status, and beyond the initial consent to undergo it, it doesn’t even require any decisions.
I had just dropped out of high school and I wasn’t doing much on the street except hanging out, as most teenagers would be doing. So they gave me an opportunity -a recruiter picked me up, gave me a good line, and said that I could make it in the Marines, that I have a future ahead of me. And since I was living with my parents, I figured that I could start my own life here and grow up a little.
I like the hand-to-hand combat and … things like that. It’s a little rough going on me, and since I have a small frame I would like to become deadly, as I would put it. I like to have them words, especially the way they’ve been teaching me here.
-USMC recruit (from Brooklyn),
Parris Island. 1982
The training, when it starts, seems impossibly demanding physically for most of the recruits - and then it gets harder week by week. There is a constant barrage of abuse and insults aimed at the recruits, with the deliberate purpose of breaking down their pride and so destroying their ability to resist the transformation of values and attitudes that the Corps intends them to undergo.
At the same time the demands for constant alertness and for instant obedience are continuously stepped up, and the standards by which the dress and behavior of the recruits are judged become steadily more unforgiving. But it is all carefully calculated by the men who run the machine, who think and talk in terms of the stress they are placing on the recruits: “We take so many c.c.'s of stress and we administer it to each man-they should be a little bit scared and they should be unsure, but they’re adjusting.”
The aim is to keep the training arduous but just within most of the recruits’ capability to withstand. One of the most striking achievements of the drill instructors is to create and maintain the illusion that basic training is an extraordinary challenge, one that will set those who graduate apart from others, when in fact almost everyone can succeed.
There has been some preliminary weeding out of potential recruits even before they begin training, to eliminate the obviously unsuitable minority, and some people do “fail” basic training and get sent home, at least in peacetime.
The standards of acceptable performance in the U.S. armed forces, for example, tend to rise and fall in inverse proportion to the number and quality of recruits available to fill the forces to the authorized manpower levels. (In 1980, about 15 percent of Marine recruits did not graduate from basic training.) But there are very few young men who cannot be turned into passable soldiers if the forces are willing to invest enough effort in it.
Not even physical violence is necessary to effect the transformation, though it has been used by most armies at most times.
It’s not what it was fifteen years ago down here. The Marine Corps still occupies the position of a tool which the society uses when it feels like that is a resort that they have to fall to.
Our society changes as all societies do, and our society felt that through enlightened training methods we could still produce the same product-and when you examine it, they’re right… Our 100 c.c.'s of stress is really all we need, not two gallons of it, which is what used to be.4 … In some cases with some of the younger drill instructors it was more an initiation than it was an acute test, and so we introduced extra officers and we select our drill instructors to “fine-tune” it.
-Captain Brassington, USMC
There is, indeed, a good deal of fine-tuning in the roles that the men in charge of training any specific group of recruits assume. At the simplest level, there is a sort of “good cop - bad cop” manipulation of the recruits’ attitudes toward those applying the stress.
The three younger drill instructors with a particular serial are quite close to them in age and unremittingly harsh in their demands for ever higher performance, but the senior drill instructor, a man almost old enough to be their father, plays a more benevolent and understanding part and is available for individual counseling. And generally offstage, but always looming in the background, is the company commander, an impossibly austere and almost godlike personage.
At least these are the images conveyed to the recruits, although of course all these men cooperate closely with an identical goal in view. It works: in the end they become not just role models and authority figures, but the focus of the recruits’ developing loyalty to the organization.
I imagine there’s some fear, especially in the beginning, because they don’t know what to expect… I think they hate you at first, at least for a week or two, but it turns to respect… They’re seeking discipline, they’re seeking someone to take charge, 'cause at home they never got it … They’re looking to be told what to do and then someone is standing there enforcing what they tell them to do, and it’s kind of like the father-and-son game, all the way through. They form a fatherly image of the DI5 whether they want to or not.
-Sergeant Carrington, USMC
Just the sheer physical exercise, administered in massive doses, soon has the recruits feeling stronger and more competent than ever before. Inspections, often several times daily, quickly build up their ability to wear the uniform and carry themselves like real Marines, which is a considerable source of pride.
The inspections also help to set up the pattern in the recruits of unquestioning submission to military authority: standing stock-still, staring straight ahead, while somebody else examines you closely for faults is about as extreme a ritual act of submission as you can make with your clothes on.
But they are not submitting themselves merely to the abusive sergeant making unpleasant remarks about the hair in their nostrils. All around them are deliberate reminders-the flags and insignia displayed on parade, the military music, the marching formations and drill instructors’ cadenced calls - of the idealized organization, the “brotherhood” to which they will be admitted as full members if they submit and conform.
Nowhere in the armed forces are the military courtesies so elaborately observed, the staffs’ uniforms so immaculate (some DIs change several times a day), and the ritual aspects of military life so highly visible as on a basic training establishment.
Even the seeming inanity of close-order drill has a practical role in the conversion process. It has been over a century since mass formations of men were of any use on the battlefield, but every army in the world still drills its troops, especially during basic training, because marching in formation, with every man moving his body in the same way at the same moment, is a direct physical way of learning two things a soldier must believe: that orders have to be obeyed automatically and instantly, and that you are no longer an individual, but part of a group.
The recruits’ total identification with the other members of their unit is the most important lesson of all, and everything possible is done to foster it. They spend almost every waking moment together-a recruit alone is an anomaly to be looked into at once-and during most of that time they are enduring shared hardships. They also undergo collective punishments, often for the misdeed or omission of a single individual (talking in the ranks, a bed not swept under during barracks inspection), which is a highly effective way of suppressing any tendencies toward individualism.
And, of course, the DIs place relentless emphasis on competition with other “serials” in training: there may be something infinitely pathetic to outsiders about a marching group of anonymous recruits chanting, ‘Lift your heads and hold them high, 3313 is a-passin’ by," but it doesn’t seem like that to the men in the ranks.
Nothing is quite so effective in building up a group’s morale and solidarity, though, as a steady diet of small triumphs. Quite early in basic training, the recruits begin to do things that seem, at first sight, quite dangerous: descend by ropes from fifty-foot towers, cross yawning gaps hand-over-hand on high wires (known as the Slide for Life, of course), and the like.
The common denominator is that these activities are daunting but not really, dangerous: the ropes will prevent anyone from falling to his death off the rappelling tower, and there is a pond of just the right depth - deep enough to cushion a falling man, but not deep enough that he is likely to drown - under the Slide for Life. The goal is not to kill recruits, but to build up their confidence as individuals and as a group by allowing them to overcome apparently frightening obstacles.
You have an enemy here at Parris Island. The enemy that you’re going to have at Parris Island is in every one of us. It’s in the form of cowardice. The most rewarding experience you’re going to have in recruit training is standing on line every evening, and you’ll be able to look into each other’s eyes, and you’ll be able to say to each other with your eyes: 'By God, we’ve made it one more day! We’ve defeated the coward."
-Captain Pingree, USMC
Number on deck, sir, forty-five … highly motivated, truly dedicated, rompin’, stompin’, bloodthirsty, kill-crazy United States Marine Corps recruits, SIR!
If somebody does fail a particular test, he tends to be alone, for the hurdles are deliberately set low enough that most recruits can clear them if they try In any large group of people there is usually a goat: someone whose intelligence or manner or lack of physical stamina marks him for failure and contempt.
The competent drill instructor, without deliberately setting up this unfortunate individual for disgrace, will use his failure to strengthen the solidarity and confidence of the rest. When one hapless young man fell off the Slide for Life into the pond, for example, his drill instructor shouted the usual invective - “Well, get out of the water. Don’t contaminate it all day” - and then delivered the payoff line: “Go back and change your clothes. You’re useless to your unit now.”
“Useless to your unit” is the key phrase, and all the recruits know that what it means is I useless in battle." The Marine drill instructors at Parris Island know exactly what they are doing to the recruits, and why. They are not rear-echelon people filling comfortable jobs, but the most dedicated and intelligent NCOs6 the Marine Corps can find: even now, many of them have combat experience. The Corps has a clear-eyed understanding of precisely what it is training its recruits for - combat - and it ensures that those who do the training keep that objective constantly in sight.
The DIs “stress” the recruits, feed them their daily ration of synthetic triumphs over apparent obstacles, and bear in mind all the time that the goal is to instill the foundations for the instinctive, selfless reactions and the fierce group loyalty that is what the recruits will need if they ever see combat. They are arch-manipulators, fully conscious of it, and utterly unashamed. These kids have signed up as Marines, and they could well see combat; this is the way they have to think if they want to live…
Combat is the ultimate reality that Marines or any other soldiers, under any flag-have to deal with. Physical fitness, weapons training, battle drills, are all indispensable elements of basic training, and it is absolutely essential that the recruits learn the attitudes of group loyalty and interdependency which will be their sole hope of survival and success in combat. The training inculcates or fosters all of those things, and even by the halfway point in the eleven-week course, the recruits are generally responding with enthusiasm to their tasks.
But there is nothing in all this (except the weapons drill) that would not be found in the training camp of a professional football team. What sets soldiers apart is their willingness to kill. But it is not a willingness that comes easily to most men -even young men who have been provided with uniforms, guns, and official approval to kill those whom their government has designated as enemies.
They will, it is true, fall very readily into the stereotypes of the tribal warrior group. Indeed, most of them have had at least a glancing acquaintance in their early teens with gangs (more or less violent, depending on, among other things, the neighborhood), the modem relic of that ancient institution.
And in many ways what basic training produces is the uniformed equivalent of a modern street gang: a bunch of tough, confident kids full of bloodthirsty talk. But gangs don’t actually kill each other in large numbers. If they behaved the way armies do, you’d need trucks to clean the bodies off the streets every morning. They’re held back by the civilian belief -the normal human belief -that killing another person is an awesome act with huge consequences.
There is aggression in all of us - men, women, children, babies. Armies don’t have to create it, and they can’t even increase it. But most of us learn to put limits on our aggression, especially physical aggression, as we grow up…
There is such a thing as a “natural soldier”: the kind of man who derives his greatest satisfaction from male companionship, from excitement, and from the conquering of physical and psychological obstacles.
He doesn’t necessarily want to kill people as such, but he will have no objections if it occurs within a moral framework that gives him a justification - like war - and if it is the price of gaining admission to the kind of environment he craves. Whether such men are born or made, I do not know, but most of them end up in armies (and many move on again to become mercenaries, because regular army life in peacetime is too routine and boring).
But armies are not full of such men. They are so rare that they form only a modest fraction even of small professional armies, mostly congregating in the commando-type special forces. In large conscript armies they virtually disappear beneath the weight of numbers of more ordinary men. And it is these ordinary men, who do not like combat at all, that the armies must persuade to kill. Until only a generation ago, they did not even realize how bad a job they were doing.
Armies had always assumed that, given the proper rifle training, the average man could kill in combat with no further incentive than the knowledge that it was the only way to defend his own life. After all, there are no historical records of Roman legionnaires refusing to use their swords, or Marlborough’s infantrymen7 refusing to fire their muskets against the enemy.
But then dispersion hit the battlefield, removing each rifleman from the direct observation of his companions-and when U.S. Army Colonel S. L. A. Marshall finally took the trouble to inquire into what they were doing in 1943-45, he found that on average only 15 percent of trained combat riflemen fired their weapons at all in battle. The rest did not flee, but they would not kill - even when their own position was under attack and their lives were in immediate danger.
The thing is simply this, that out of an average one hundred men along the line of fire during the period of an encounter, only fifteen men on average would take any part with the weapons. This was true whether the action was spread over a day, or two days or three… In the most aggressive infantry companies, under the most intense local pressure, the figure rarely rose above 25% of total strength from the opening to the close of an action.
-Col. S. L. A. Marshall
Marshall conducted both individual interviews and mass interviews with over four hundred infantry companies, both in Europe and in the Central Pacific, immediately after they had been in close combat with German or Japanese troops, and the results were the same each time. They were, moreover, as astonishing to the company officers and the troops themselves as they were to Marshall; each man who hadn’t fired his rifle thought he had been alone in his defection from duty.
Even more indicative of what was going on was the fact that almost all the crew-served weapons had been fired. Every man had been trained to kill and knew it was his duty to kill, and so long as he was in the presence of other soldiers who could see his actions, he went ahead and did it. But the great majority of the riflemen, each unobserved by the others in his individual foxhole, had chosen not to kill, even though it increased the likelihood of his own death…
But the question naturally arises: if the great majority of men are not instinctive killers, and if most military killing these days is in any case done by weapons operating from a distance at which the question of killing scarcely troubles the operators-then why is combat an exclusively male occupation?
The great majority of women, everyone would agree, are not instinctive killers either, but so what? If the remote circumstances in which the killing is done or the deliberate conditioning supplied by the military enable most men to kill, why should it be any different for women?
My own guess would be that it probably wouldn’t be different; it just hasn’t been tried very extensively. But it is an important question, because it has to do with the causes and possible cure of war. If men fight wars because that is an intrinsic part of the male character, then nothing can abolish the institution of warfare short of abolishing the male half of the human race (or at least, as one feminist suggested, disfranchising it for a hundred years).
If, on the other hand, wars are a means of allocating power between civilized human groups, in which the actual soldiers have a.1ways been male simply because men were more suited to it by their greater physical strength and their freedom from the burden of childbearing, then what we are discussing is not Original Sin, but simply a mode of social behavior.
The fact that almost every living male for thousands of generations has imbibed some of the warrior mystique is no proof of a genetic predisposition to be warlike. The cultural continuity is quite enough to transmit such attitudes, and men were specialized in the hunting and warrior functions for the same physical reasons long before civilized war was invented.
It was undoubtedly men, the “hunting” specialists, who invented civilized war, just as it was probably women, specializing in the “gathering” part of the primitive economy, who invented agriculture. That has no necessary relevance today: we all eat vegetables, and we can all die in war. It is a more serious allegation against males to say that all existing forms of political power have been shaped predominantly by men, so that even if wars are about power and not about the darker side of the masculine psyche, war is still a male problem. That has unquestionably been true through all of history (although it remains to be proven that women exercising power respond very differently to its temptations and obsessions). But there is no need to settle that argument: if war and masculinity are not inseparable, then we have already moved onto negotiable ground. For the forms of political power, unlike psyches, are always negotiable.
Unfortunately there is little direct support for this optimistic hypothesis in the prevailing current of opinion among soldiers generally, where war and maleness are indeed seen as inseparable. To say that the combat branches of the armed forces are sexist is like remarking that gravity generally pulls downward, and nowhere is the contempt for women greater than at a recruit training base like Parris Island.
The DIs are quite ruthless in exploiting every prejudice and pushing every button that will persuade the recruits to accept the value system they are selling, and one of those buttons (quite a large one) is the conviction of young males - or at least the desire to be convinced - that are superior to young females. (After all, even recruits want to feel superior to somebody, and it certainly isn’t going to be anybody in their immediate, vicinity at Parris Island.)
When it’s all boys together, especially among the younger men, Marine Corps slang for any woman who isn’t the wife, mother, or daughter of anyone present is “Suzie.” It is short for “Suzie Rottencrotch” - and Suzie crops up a lot in basic training. Even when the topic of instruction is hand and arm signals in combat.
Privates, if you don’t have a little Suzie now, maybe you’re going to find one when you get home. You bet. You’ll find the first cheap slut you can get back home. What do you mean, “No”? You’re a Marine, you’re going to do it.
If we get home with little Suzie … we’re in a nice companionship with little Suzie and here you are getting hot and heavy and then you’re getting ready to go down there and make that dive, privates, and Suzie says … Suzie says it’s the wrong time of the month. Privates, if you don’t want to get back home and indulge in this little adventure, you can show your girlfriend the hand and arm signal for “close it up.”
And you want her to close up those nasty little thighs of hers, do you not, privates? The hand and arm signal: the arms are laterally shoulder height, the fingers are extended, and the palms are facing toward the front. This is the starting position for “close it up” [tighten up the formation]: just like closing it up, bring the arms together just like that.
Privates, in addition, I want you to dedicate all this training to one very special person. Can anyone tell me who that is, privates?
(Voice) The Senior Drill Instructor, sir?
No, not your Senior Drill Instructor. You’re going to dedicate all this training, privates, to your enemy … to your enemy. To your enemy: the reason being, so he can die for his country. So who are we going to dedicate all this training to, privates?
– lecture on hand and arm signals,
Parris Island, 1982
And they shouted enthusiastically,: “The enemy, sir! The enemy, sir!” It would not be instantly clear to the disinterested observer from Mars, however, why these spotty-faced male eighteen-year-olds are uniquely qualified to kill the enemy, while their equally spotty-faced female counterparts get to admire them from afar (or so the supposition goes), and get called Suzie Rottencrotch for their trouble.
Interestingly, it isn’t entirely clear either to the senior military and civilian officials whose responsibility it is to keep the organization filled up with warm bodies capable of doing the job. Women are not employed in combat roles in the regular armed forces of any country (though increasing numbers of women have been admitted to the noncombat military jobs in the course of this century).
But in the last decade the final barrier has come under serious consideration. It was, unsurprisingly, in the United States, where the problems of getting enough recruits for the all-volunteer armed forces converged with the changes of attitude flowing from the women’s liberation movement, that the first serious proposals to send women into combat were entertained, during the latter years of the Carter administration.
There is no question but that women could do a lot of things in the military. So could men in wheelchairs. But you couldn’t expect the services to want a whole company of people in wheelchairs.
– Gen. Lewis B. Hershey,
former director, Selective Service System, 1978
If for no other reason than because women are the bearers of children, they should not be in combat. Imagine your daughter as a ground soldier sleeping in the fields and expected to do all the things that soldiers do. It represents to me an absolute horror.
– Gen. Jacqueline Cochran, U.S. Air Force
Despite the anguished cries of military conservatives, both male and female, the reaction of younger officers in the combat branches (all male, of course) was cautious but not entirely negative.
The more intelligent ones dismissed at once arguments about strength and stamina -the average American woman, one pointed out, is bigger than the average Vietnamese man - and were as little impressed by the alleged special problems arising from the fact that female soldiers may become pregnant. In the noncombat branches, the army loses less time from its women soldiers due to pregnancy than it loses from desertion, drug abuse, and alcoholism in its male soldiers.
More important, few of the male officers involved in the experimental programs giving combat training to women recruits in the late 1970s had any doubt that the women would function effectively in combat. Neither did the women themselves. Despite their lack of the traditional male notions about the warrior stereotype, the training did its job.
As one female trainee remarked: “I don’t like the idea of killing anything … [and] I may not at this moment go into combat. But knowing that I can fire as well as I can fire now, knowing that today, I’d go in. I believe in my country … I’d fight to keep it.”
The one major reservation the male officers training the “infantrywomen” had was about how the presence of women in combat would affect the men. The basic combat unit, a small group of men bound together by strong male ties of loyalty and trust, was a time-tested s,.-stem that worked, and they were reluctant to tamper with it by adding an additional, unknown factor to the equation.
In the end a more conservative administration canceled the idea of introducing women to American combat units, and it may be some years yet before there are female soldiers in the infantry of any regular army. But it is manifestly sheer social conservatism that is retarding this development.
Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of women have fought in combat as irregular infantry in the past half-century, from the Yugoslav and Soviet partisans of World War II to Nicaragua in 1978-79. They performed quite satisfactorily, and so did the mixed units of which they were members. There are numerous differences of detail between guerrilla and regular army units, but none of them is of the sort to suggest that women would not fight just as well in a regular infantry battalion, or that the battalion would function less well if women were present.
The point of all this is not that women should be allowed (or indeed compelled) to take their fair share of the risks in combat. It is rather that war has moved a very long way from its undeniably warrior male origins, and that human behavior, male or female, is extremely malleable.
Combat of the sort we know today, even at the infantryman’s level let alone the fighter pilot’s- simply could not occur unless military organizations put immense effort into reshaping the behavior of individuals to fit their unusual and exacting requirements.
The military institution, for all its imposing presence, is a highly artificial structure that is maintained only by constant endeavor. And if ordinary people’s behavior is malleable in the direction the armed forces require, it is equally open to change in other directions…
Know yourself.
When you know what you want, figure out how to get there and do the work.
Evolve.
Don’t ever stop. Put one foot in front of the other no matter how small the step.
If you fall down, get back up.
Choose your mate wisely - this is probably the most important decision you will ever make.
BE the person that a man/woman of quality would want to be with.
If you are serious about lifting and/or being physically active, start doing pre-hab work NOW (or you’ll be doing a LOT of it later - take care of your back).
As was mentioned before, start saving NOW - figure out what compound interest is and take advantage of the one commodity that you can never get back: TIME. It is most valuable asset in your control. Don’t waste it. Outsource menial tasks once you have the means.
If you discover that you are wrong, apologize immediately and change course. Don’t be pigheaded. Leave your ego on the shelf.
Play to win, but play fairly. Be prepared. Winners go home and fuck the prom queen.
Don’t lie.
Use condoms. If she says she’s on the pill, use condoms anyway. Seriously.
If you ever have to fight and you know that there is no other way out, hit first and hit hard (learn what the “Scottish kiss” is)
Don’t be afraid to test limits. Challenge yourself. Raise the bar.
If you do something with enough authority, you will often times get away with it.
Believe in yourself 100%. You have the capacity to ANYTHING you want, but you can’t do EVERYTHING you want.
Fear and Failure are both self limiting constructs of your mind - get over it.
As long as you are breathing you are not defeated.
YOU are responsible for YOUR life. Don’t ever be a “victim”.
If you learn these five areas you will make a lot of money: English, Communication, Sales, Marketing, Public speaking.
You become who you spend your time with. Seek out successful people to be around. Allow them to mentor you. When it is your turn, pass the wisdom along.
Don’t forget where you came from. No matter how successful you become, it is still you. Your problems won’t magically “disappear”.
Leave the world better than when you got here. You can make a difference. What will your legacy be?
[quote]Vicomte wrote:
Never, ever, ever, EVER, EVER!, trust ANYONE, who says they don’t like dogs.
[/quote]
Hey now! I’m not evil just because I prefer cats!! 