Gung-ho to Whoa

New Warriors and Society’s Debt to Vets

Young men aren’t the only people who pay for war, but the cost is higher for them than it is for most others: trauma, injury, death. Gung-ho when their service starts, some warriors continue to pay for war when they are out of uniform. One measure of this cost is suicide.

Gung Ho!: The Story of Carlson's Makin Island Raiders. 1943 movie. Now a criticim, the term once pointed with admiration to high enthusiasm.

In 2021 the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University studied the cost of war for those who entered the service after September 11, 2001, and compared it to the costs paid by warriors who fought in previous conflicts (https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/ costs/human/military/killed).

By 2019, some 7,000 US troops had died in the “war on terror” wars, a conflict lasting then less than 20 years. That is about 350 deaths per year. The war in Vietnam was far more dangerous. Between 1965 and 1973, a period of less than 10 years, over 58,000 American troops died. That figure averages nearly 6,500 deaths each year, close to the total number of deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan.

However, when we look at veteran suicides, we see that the “war on terror” wars have taken a much higher toll. Between 1979 and 2019 there were about 23,000 suicides among those who had been stationed in Vietnam. Between 2001 and 2019, half that interval, the Institute estimates that approximately 30,000 troops committed suicide after deployment in Iraq or Afghanistan. This figure may be incomplete, given the various methods used for counting veterans’ deaths.

With the war in Vietnam, the number of suicides was about 40% of combat deaths (23,000 suicides / 58,000 deaths). With the “war on terror” wars, the number of suicides was over 400% of the number of combat deaths (30,000 suicides / 7,000 deaths; these figures compare combat deaths and suicides, not suicide rates within either group).

In both the Vietnam War and in the “war on terror” wars, between 96% and 99% of those who served were male. I was curious to know more about the connection between the way society views a given war and the way it views the men who fought it. I also wondered about society’s view of veterans when compared to society’s view of men in general. How does lack of interest in the wars pair with society’s judgments about the male warrior and the masculine man?

It is well known that suicide rates are rising in the general population. Moreover, men’s suicides are far more common than women’s suicides. According to the National Institutes of Health, the age-adjusted suicide rate increased 35% from 2000 to 2021, from 10.4 to 14.2 per 100,000. “In 2021, the suicide rate among males was 4 times higher (22.8 per 100,000) than among females (5.7 per 100,000).”

All studies show that veterans are twice as likely to commit suicide as members of the general population. Vietnam was an unpopular war that America lost. But the men who served in it were less likely to commit suicide than the men who served in the more recent wars. A “cohort study” conducted by JAMANetwork (published by the American Medical Association) “found no association between Vietnam War–era military service and increased risk of suicide between 1979 and 2019.”

The “war on terror” wars are, like the war in Vietnam, unpopular, and inconclusive, if not lost. But they have been more deadly for veterans who fought them.

More is involved here than the wars themselves. Causes of veteran suicide are generally related to combat experience and trauma. But the Watson study also claims that the public’s lack of interest in the “war on terror” wars has “greatly contributed to increased suicide rates.”

This is troubling. We pay more attention to men’s health today than we have in the past. But this increased attention has not helped recent vets. Is there anything we can do?

With wars in Ukraine and Israel so much in the news, the public is not now likely to take an interest in the “war on terror” wars. But it seems reasonable to ask if there is any way  in which civilians can help those who served and who are now at risk. One thing, surely, is to learn more about who they are, what they expected to find in military service, and what their service was like.

War has changed a lot since Vietnam. The Watson study identifies some causes of suicide as specific to what it calls the “the post-9/11 era.” They include the rise of improvised explosive devices (IEDs), the attendant rise in traumatic brain injuries (TBIs), and the protracted length of these conflicts, which has exposed warriors to greater risk but dulled public interest.

A book is not the only way to learn more about young warriors, but a good book is a sure path to knowledge. For learning about warriors today, I recommend Ben Kesling’s Bravo Company: An Afghan Deployment and Its Aftermath, a book written to bring the cost of war for the veteran to the reading public. Kesling reports on veterans’ affairs for the Wall Street Journal. In 2019 he attended a suicide-prevention workshop for soldiers who had served in Afghanistan. He wrote an article about the workshop and followed it with the book, which sketches a troubled vision of the young warrior’s self.

Kesling’s book broadens the picture of veterans created by the Watson Institute’s research. The Watson study notes that some of the causes of veteran suicide have factored into many wars. They include high exposure to trauma and stress; military culture and training; continued access to guns; and the difficulty veterans have reintegrating into civilian life, into life as we know it.

Reintegration is difficult because military culture, however woke it has become in some ways,  differs sharply from feminized contemporary American culture. The Watson study points to “the dominant masculine identity that pervades the military,” a culture that “overwhelmingly favors machismo and toughness. Asking for help during trauma or suicidal ideation, then, is necessarily at odds with military culture.” The reluctance to ask for help in most any situation is seen as typically male.

Asking for help puts the burden on the veteran. He may be a victim, but chances are good that he sees himself as a man who is too manly to ask for help. Then too, in asking for help, he has reason to feel that he will find forces inclined to skepticism and indifference, both inside the military and outside it, rather than allies. Outside the military, he is in a culture that puts women first and that disdains “machismo and toughness.” In such an atmosphere, the place for the male veteran is by no means clear.

“Machismo and toughness” define the young men Kesling writes about. They were a self-selected group, not basic infantrymen but Rangers and paratroopers, the proud first line of offense.

In 2008-2009, Bravo Company was part of the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division’s 2-508th Infantry stationed in Afghanistan. In an interview with the Army Historical Center Foundation, Kesling says that he wrote Bravo Company to tell the “soup to nuts” story of the men in this detachment (2023; YouTube includes a complete transcript). Since he introduced the dining metaphor, I will extend it. After soup and nuts, which once ended the so-called “complete” meal, we should expect a bill, in this case, an itemized account of the costs for the men who fight.

Why does the current generation of warriors seems to be more prone to suicide than the generation before it? Kesling shows that the gap between a new warrior’s enthusiasm for war and his combat experience is vast. We get some idea of the young warrior’s viewpoint from the first section of the book, which concerns training. The second section is about deployment, the third about what Kesling calls “the aftermath.”

Bravo Company is not a novel, but its three parts map the master convention of war fiction, whether on the page or on the screen, which is the education of the enthusiastic, idealistic young warrior in the ways of war. The touchstone is Eric Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1928). The warrior’s education comes when his preconceptions are shattered by the reality of combat, which includes not only death and injury but also tedium and frustration. Men who seem to have no philosophy about war or death or duty are suddenly forced to size up their fates.

Part 1: Training

How do today’s young warriors compare to those of previous generations? Like them, today’s fighters are enthusiastic. “The young guys of Bravo Company longed for war,” Kesling writes. They wanted to be “part of the club,” part of the group that sees combat and wears the coveted Combat Infantryman Badge. That seems to be their goal, to earn a badge, to join a club. Having become one of the boys, they now want to become one of the men.

Kesling does not write about these men with the empathy I had expected. He argues that their training intensifies their hunger for war. Training focuses on developing “an animal desire to kill another human being, shoot him right in the chest or, better yet, in the face. That gets to the heart of what’s taught in those months of training for deployment” (p. 61). Kesling has more harsh things to say about how elite troops are conditioned.

Hunger for war is common “across much of the military, part of the zeitgeist of units that thrive on combat like Army paratroopers or Marines,” he writes. “In fact, the Marine Corps makes a big deal about praying for war.” He claims that the Marines have a prayer “actually imploring the Almighty to allow for the worst shit imaginable to happen so they can take part in it.” No support is offered for this claim about a pro-war Marine prayer, which supports his belief that all the training and qualification “boils down to one thing: Kill” (p. 61).

This language compels me to ask how the young men’ naïve view of combat relates to their combat training. What is said by the experienced men who train the newcomers? Combat is about discipline as well as determination, not about animal desire. Being in the middle of the worst violence imaginable means that you are a target, exposed to extreme danger. Animal desire to kill does not protect the killer from bullets, or from Improvised Explosive Devices or other weapons. Taking part in that violence might well mean being taken apart. One hardly needs an instructor to know this much.

Or maybe one does.

The basic facts do not seem to sink in. Kesling believes that young warriors don’t think about PTSD or other “consequences of war.” He describes various tradeoffs these men ponder as they weigh loss of their lives against loss of arms, legs, or genitals (p. 205, which he reads in the YouTube interview). For example, if you lose a leg, you could, in civilian life, expect to be treated to drinks in a bar or offered free appetizers. “All those free Bud Lights and tater skins” would be part of “that holy grail” of an Army pension and VA care. “Now, that would be living” (p. 206). However, “a blown-off dick and balls” would not be “a good trade-off for the appetizers” (p. 207).

As Kesling sketches him, the new warrior is immature and shortsighted. What kind of awareness or good sense can be attributed to warriors who think this way? Who could imagine that VA care, alcohol, and sodium constitute a “holy grail”? More like a tin cup, if you ask me—a life of dependence, or worse, given the suicide rates, a short life of dependence.

Kesling shows young warriors to be cocksure, macho, and prone to bravado. These energies are one of the ways they pump themselves up for combat. Once in uniform, they are inside an educational apparatus that, in the words of Thomas Howard Suitt III (author of the Watson study cited above), “simultaneously prepares service members for participation in violence and the rigors of military life with protective resources while also making it easier, even instinctive, for them to cause harm.”

Part 2: Deployment

The second section of Bravo Company contrasts what the company learned before it arrived in Afghanistan with what happened to the men once there. Their tour of duty begins with a successful operation. The Taliban attack an Afghan National Army (ANA) truck convoy, unaware that the convoy is being followed by Bravo Company. The Bravo unit, well-armed, unleashes its power with minimal resistance. The men return “just glowing, beaming in ecstasy, knowing that all their training had actually worked” (pp. 97-99). That buoyant description—“glowing,” “beaming”—points to men who have realized the goal that every warrior prizes, which is victory.

But what has “actually worked”? Was joining Bravo Company to the ANA convoy part of a plan? Or was it a lucky coincidence that, by following the ANA, Bravo Company was in the right place at the right time? Perhaps “all their training” worked because circumstances were highly favorable to them. “All their training” should have included a reminder that sometimes warriors win because they are lucky.

Things change for Bravo Company when they have to cut off a Taliban supply route in Kandahar (southeastern province, marked below). Now the Taliban is in a strongly-defended position. The company’s attack in the fertile Arghandab territory proves dangerous. One of the soldiers realizes that things are changing: “We’re in the fight now,” he thinks. “I got my wish” (pp. 111-12). Dreams of warrior glory, fueled by the easy earlier win, are about to be tested by real combat conditions.

What follows is harrowing (pp. 113-42). The Americans attempt to take the walled compound and then realize that “the full weight of their new area of operations was on top of them” (p. 130). They have been lured into a trap. The cost of life and limb is high. The mission fails. Kesling tells the story through the experience of several men who survived. Sgt. Allen Thomas, the squad leader, seems to be Kesling’s main source. We learn that the men were trained to deal with a kind of IED used in Iraq, not the kind used in Afghanistan. The warriors learn their lesson.: “It was the first time they realized they weren’t invincible” (p. 135).

There is a further defeat, the explosion of a truck bomb at Command Outpost Ware. This event shows that the Army has once again let its warriors down. After the truck bomb, the company’s commanders realize that better intelligence and more cautious defensive procedures would have reduced the damage (pp. 243-46).

Kesling captures a significant moment. A soldier from the Ware outpost, injured in the blast, comes to the base hospital. The fatherly brigade commander is seen “nearly whispering” to this man. He gets impatient because the soldier is not answering his questions. When the soldier, who has “bleeding ears,” shouts that he cannot hear what the colonel is saying, the officer “promptly halted his questioning and left” (pp. 245-46).

Part 3: Aftermath

Kesling’s description of the aftermath—the treatment of wounded veterans, their lives after deployment—has begun in Part 2, with an episode that involves Sgt. Thomas, whom we have already met. Badly injured, he is sent to various Warrior Transition Units stateside. Thomas’s goal is clear: he needs to regain good health to the extent that he can. What kind of help does he get?

First, Thomas is put into a unit headed by a female staff sergeant. She wears her uniform incorrectly and rides him hard, even though she had never seen combat. She makes it difficult for Thomas to get to prenatal appointments with his wife; when his wife goes into labor, she makes it difficult for him to be with her (pp. 235-36). Perhaps she had a problem reconciling her idea of Thomas as a warrior with her idea of his role as husband and father. She looks ignorant, sexist, even envious.

Then Thomas, who has “irreparably damaged” lungs and brain, encounters a major who takes him aside and tells him “to stop being a pussy” (p. 237). The major’s behavior is even more offensive than the staff sergeant’s. Patronizing and disrespectful, the major ignores Thomas’s pain and discounts his experience of defeat. He overrides Thomas’s experience by asserting his own need to present himself as a manly leader. That surely is his only reason for calling a wounded warrior “a pussy.” Kesling again does not comment on the major’s insecurity and unmanly behavior, leaving the reader to imagine what the episode meant to Thomas.

Am I the only reader who wondered how he replied to the major? Here, as with the soldier with the bleeding ears, Kesling presents provocative evidence but does not share details, much less his own views of these accounts. The reader expects that much at least.

Thomas’s subsequent experiences in the post-army environment are appalling. Forced to rely on health-care insurance sponsored by the military, and on the Veterans Administration, he becomes mired in inefficiency and depression. He is not alone. Another member of the unit, Jared Lemon, loses an arm. His wife leaves him one month after he returns. These men’s experiences could be multiplied to show what happens when the vulnerable and wounded are returned to unprepared families or partners and are dumped into a massive bureaucracy, with its deadlines, guidelines, and career-savvy government employees.

What might be done for the warrior, both as he serves in the military and as he transitions to civilian life as a veteran?

It is painfully clear in Kesling’s book that the military does not do enough to close the chasm between formal training and practical application. The aim of a good education is to narrow that gap by transmitting knowledge from those who have it to those who need it—in this case, from seasoned men of battle to the young men who want to go to war.

What do warriors learn? Kesling writes about the things warriors are taught; about the things “nobody ever teaches” them; and also about the things that cannot be taught. The things that are taught include the history found in books about war and how it affects body and mind. Warriors also learn how to be empathetic to civilians who caught up in war. They are taught to be ready to “sacrifice everything for the man next to them” and to be responsible for those they lead (p. 250).

Kesling’s list of things not taught is longer. What it feels like to walk though a minefield day after day. What it means to dehumanize the enemy or care for wounded civilians. How combat experiences “keep bouncing around, gaining momentum year after year.” Also: That there is a debt to other warriors “that lasts for life.” That, once a civilian, the warrior will miss his uniform “every single day of his life.” Such things have to be experienced, Kesling writes. They have to be “learned on the job” (p. 250), or, in the latter case, when the job is over.

That looks like the traditional divide between theory and practice. But practice—that is, experience—is what counts. There are many things that the Army could teach the gung-ho new soldier about what he is letting himself in for. The military could let age speak to  youth. New warriors could visit disabled veterans. They could ask men who were once young warriors themselves how they imagined life when the job would be over. Would this dose of reality dampen the fervor of young warriors? Or would it perhaps test the depth of their enthusiasm for war, for—for instance—shooting the enemy in the face, as Kesling puts it? It would certainly deepen their awareness of military history and the consequences of combat more effectively than a textbook.

For society outside the military, one way to remedy “lack of interest” in warrior’s condition is to focus on him as a whole man, not as a victim. Kesling focuses on the costs and does not refer to the benefits that warriors bring to, or draw from, military service. For many, military service is a form of education and advancement; most of those who serve use skills that are needed in civilian life. When in uniform, veterans did many kinds of work, and most of those occupations were unrelated to killing. It helps to think of them as women and men with identities formed in part by what they do, or what they did, every day, or most days.

When you see a veteran, remember that he or she is, or was, a model of fitness. Veterans are among the minority of young people who have the mental and physical fitness required for service. The Department of Defense says that 77% of young adult women and men in the United States are “unqualified to serve.” That’s three out of four. What excludes them? According to the DOD, their problems include “obesity, drugs, physical and mental health problems, misconduct, and [low] aptitude.” Veterans are, before service, in an upper echelon.

Those who qualify for military service come from different backgrounds and react to combat stress differently. Some have tools for dealing with stress; others do not. One sees advertisements from veteran-assistance groups seeking contributions for their programs to help traumatized or disabled veterans. It’s not clear that these projects break through public indifference to the cost of war. Their success in projecting the image of the veteran as damaged and needy, however, is beyond question. This identity does not necessarily help the veterans integrate into civilian life.

Where do veterans come from? In 2020, five states supplied 40% of those in service. Two states dominated, with Texas and California each contributing about 12% of enlistments, with Florida (8%), Georgia, and New York (each 4%) filling out the top five. California and New York are deep blue states, Florida a swing state, George and Texas red states. Men and women find the military in many different cultures, red or blue or in between. Chances are good that those who serve return to their home states when they leave the service. Veterans can be found anywhere.

My generation of veteran is nearly gone. We were the last to be eligible for the draft, and our service was often not voluntary. Men must still register for selective service at the age of 18, but these days nobody is drafted. Women, it seems, are too precious to be required to do this. Today’s veterans chose to enlist. They go against the grain, an important and positive attribute. Yet they probably grew up in cultures in which military service was not recognized. There once were forms of recognition that identified warriors and military service, such as the small-town Memorial Day parade, or a memorial service on November 11. But those rituals have largely disappeared. Most young people, taught by teachers who themselves know nothing of civics except women’s and trans rights, have no idea what either of those days stands for.

Veterans today also deal with a condition unknown to previous generations of warriors. Like the rest of us, they are influenced by social media. Social media, paradoxically, promote isolation, not socialization. They are responsible for a decline in well-being in the general population, as many sources report, with addictive features built in to monopolize viewer time.

Meta, among the most progressive of all corporations, has been a leader in this kind of exploitation of its customer base. The social media culture has contributed to increased isolation and anxiety. Numerous studies have emphasized the increase in depression and anxiety among girls, many of whom spend four to six hours each day on their phone apps, which show them styles of living and consumption that are unattainable for most of them. Boys average about an hour less, but the effect is the same for them. In our misandrist culture, however, boys are not a concern.

The isolation of screen culture has affected those who served in Iraq and Afghanistan as well, although no study I have seen makes this connection. Social media connect them but simultaneously isolate them. Social media substitute virtual company for physical experience. The personal contact that creates social bonds is now something we look at or read about, flattened, two-dimensional. Isolated people are more likely to be suicidal people.

What can veterans do for themselves? Connect.

Veterans should be visible, not so that they can be thanked for their service—nothing wrong with that, to be sure—but so that they can remind others that the military exists and works for us. It is not some anonymous power remote from our own lives.

Veterans should remember that veterans are outstanding. They have a history of being fit, taking care of themselves, showing initiative, and pursuing their goals. Veterans need to be seen. People won’t remember the work of the armed forces if those who served in them remain invisible. Small gestures work. Kesling has brought groups of veterans to the boxing gym to work out with a demanding and creative leader, Coach Izzy, the boxing coach. He presses them hard. That’s what veterans need more of, group experience, activities that remind them of military service, what they gave to it, and what they get from it. The vets always leave the gym smiling.

The Baba Wali Shrine, Kandahar, near the Arghanham River. Built by Gul Agha Sherzai, former Governor of Kandahar and mujahideen commander; to honor one of his tribesmen.