MILITARY PERSONNEL EXPERIENCE A TRIBAL-LIKE
SOCIETY
Any discussion of veterans and their common experience of alienation must address the fact that so many soldiers find themselves missing war when it's over. That troubling fact can be found in written accounts from war after war, country after country, century after century. As awkward as it is to say part of the trauma of war seems to be giving it up. "For the first time in our lives. . . we were in a tribal sort of situation where we could help each other without fear," a former gunner in the 62nd Coast Artillery named Win Stracke told oral historian Studs Terkel for his book The Good War. [ Stracke was also a well-known folk singer and labor organizer who was blacklisted during the McCarthy era for his political activity.] "There were fifteen men to a gun. You had fifteen guys who for the first time in their lives were not living in a competitive society. We had no hopes of becoming officers. I liked that feeling very much. . . It was the absence of competition and boundaries and all those phony standards that created the thing I loved about the Army."
Adversity often leads people to depend more on one another, and that closeness can produce a kind of nostalgia for the hard times that even civilians are susceptible to. After World War II, many Londoners claimed to miss the exciting and perilous days of the Blitz { "I wouldn't mind having an evening like it, say, once a week ----ordinarily there's no excitement," one man commented to Mass-Observer about the air raids }, and the war that is missed doesn't even have to be a shooting war : "I am a survivor of the AIDS epidemic," an American man wrote in 2014 on the comment board of an online lecture about war. "Now that AIDS is no longer a death sentence, I must admit that I miss those days of extreme brotherhood . . . which led to deep emotions and understandings that are above anything I have felt since the plague years."
What people miss presumably isn't danger or loss but the unity that these things often engender. There are obvious stresses on a person in a group, but there may be even greater stresses on a person in isolation, so during disasters there is a net gain in well-being. Most primates, including humans, are intensely social, and there are very few instances of lone primates surviving in the wild. A modern soldier soldier returning from combat foes from the kind of close-knit group that humans evolved for, back into a society where most people work outside the home, children are educated by strangers, families are isolated from wider communities, and PERSONAL GAIN COMPLETELY ECLIPSES COLLECTIVE GOOD. Even if he or she is part of a family, that is not the same as belonging to a group that shares resources and experiences almost everything collectively. Whatever the technological advances of mdern society-----and they're nearly miraculous--- the individualized lifestyles that those technologies spawn seem to be deeply brutalizing to the human spirit.
"You'll have to be prepared to say that we are not a good society ----that we are an ANTIHUMAN society, " anthropologist Sharon Abramowitz warned. Abramowitz was in Ivory Coast as a Peace Corps volunteer during the start of the civil war in 2002 and experienced firsthand the extremely close bonds created by hardship and danger. "We are not good to each other. Our tribalism is to an extremely narrow group of people : our children, our spouse, maybe our parents. OUR SOCIETY IS ALIENATING , TECHNICAL, COLD, AND MYSTIFYING. OUR FUNDAMENTAL DESIRE, AS HUMAN BEINGS, IS TO BE CLOSE TO OTHERS, AND OUR SOCIETY DOES NOT ALLOW FOR THAT. "
One of the most notable things abut life in the military, even in support units, is that you are almost never alone. Day after day, month after month, you are close enough to speak to, if not touch, a dozen or more people. When a correspondent was with American soldiers at a remote outpost in Afghanistan, they slept ten to a hut in bunks that were only a few feet apart. The correspondent could touch three other men with his outstretched hand from where he lay. They snored, they talked, they got up in the middle of the night to use the piss tubes, but they always felt safe because they were in a group. The outpost was attacked dozens of times, yet the correspondent slept better surrounded by those noisy, snoring men than he ever did camping alone in the woods of New England.
Any discussion of veterans and their common experience of alienation must address the fact that so many soldiers find themselves missing war when it's over. That troubling fact can be found in written accounts from war after war, country after country, century after century. As awkward as it is to say part of the trauma of war seems to be giving it up. "For the first time in our lives. . . we were in a tribal sort of situation where we could help each other without fear," a former gunner in the 62nd Coast Artillery named Win Stracke told oral historian Studs Terkel for his book The Good War. [ Stracke was also a well-known folk singer and labor organizer who was blacklisted during the McCarthy era for his political activity.] "There were fifteen men to a gun. You had fifteen guys who for the first time in their lives were not living in a competitive society. We had no hopes of becoming officers. I liked that feeling very much. . . It was the absence of competition and boundaries and all those phony standards that created the thing I loved about the Army."
Adversity often leads people to depend more on one another, and that closeness can produce a kind of nostalgia for the hard times that even civilians are susceptible to. After World War II, many Londoners claimed to miss the exciting and perilous days of the Blitz { "I wouldn't mind having an evening like it, say, once a week ----ordinarily there's no excitement," one man commented to Mass-Observer about the air raids }, and the war that is missed doesn't even have to be a shooting war : "I am a survivor of the AIDS epidemic," an American man wrote in 2014 on the comment board of an online lecture about war. "Now that AIDS is no longer a death sentence, I must admit that I miss those days of extreme brotherhood . . . which led to deep emotions and understandings that are above anything I have felt since the plague years."
What people miss presumably isn't danger or loss but the unity that these things often engender. There are obvious stresses on a person in a group, but there may be even greater stresses on a person in isolation, so during disasters there is a net gain in well-being. Most primates, including humans, are intensely social, and there are very few instances of lone primates surviving in the wild. A modern soldier soldier returning from combat foes from the kind of close-knit group that humans evolved for, back into a society where most people work outside the home, children are educated by strangers, families are isolated from wider communities, and PERSONAL GAIN COMPLETELY ECLIPSES COLLECTIVE GOOD. Even if he or she is part of a family, that is not the same as belonging to a group that shares resources and experiences almost everything collectively. Whatever the technological advances of mdern society-----and they're nearly miraculous--- the individualized lifestyles that those technologies spawn seem to be deeply brutalizing to the human spirit.
"You'll have to be prepared to say that we are not a good society ----that we are an ANTIHUMAN society, " anthropologist Sharon Abramowitz warned. Abramowitz was in Ivory Coast as a Peace Corps volunteer during the start of the civil war in 2002 and experienced firsthand the extremely close bonds created by hardship and danger. "We are not good to each other. Our tribalism is to an extremely narrow group of people : our children, our spouse, maybe our parents. OUR SOCIETY IS ALIENATING , TECHNICAL, COLD, AND MYSTIFYING. OUR FUNDAMENTAL DESIRE, AS HUMAN BEINGS, IS TO BE CLOSE TO OTHERS, AND OUR SOCIETY DOES NOT ALLOW FOR THAT. "
One of the most notable things abut life in the military, even in support units, is that you are almost never alone. Day after day, month after month, you are close enough to speak to, if not touch, a dozen or more people. When a correspondent was with American soldiers at a remote outpost in Afghanistan, they slept ten to a hut in bunks that were only a few feet apart. The correspondent could touch three other men with his outstretched hand from where he lay. They snored, they talked, they got up in the middle of the night to use the piss tubes, but they always felt safe because they were in a group. The outpost was attacked dozens of times, yet the correspondent slept better surrounded by those noisy, snoring men than he ever did camping alone in the woods of New England.
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