Class Warfare

It may be laid down as a primary position, and the basis of our system, that every
Citizen who enjoys the protection of a free Government, owes not only a proportion
of his property, but even of his personal services to the defence of it.
—George Washington, “Sentiments on a Peace Establishment”

For some years I worked as headmaster of a large boarding school. By that time, the late 1980s and early ’90s, “chapel” had become a weekly, not a daily, ritual—although the usages of custom and of a certain civic religion sometimes brought the school together in chapel on other days. Sunday chapel rites were mainly Anglican in tone, despite the school’s Presbyterian heritage: lordly preludes and processionals, antique calls to worship, lessons that concluded with “endeths,” hymns from a confident epoch in British history. The ambience remained very much that of the nineteenth-century school, redolent with the communicated sense of duty to the less fortunate and less privileged—the nave hung with banners and heraldic flags, its walls studded with bronze plaques offering the Loyola Prayer for Generosity and tributes to deceased masters and alumni. Among them there was a testimonial to a master who had given his life to the school and who had lived “a life of Christian self-forgetfulness.” I remember phrases and verses from certain favored hymns: “Noble mirth.” What was that? “Who follows in his train?” “Faint not, nor fear!”—the exclamation mark communicating to the congregant It’s all right, you’ll be fine! “By the light of burning martyrs, Christ, Thy bleeding feet I track.” And from Scripture: “Where moths and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal.” Most particularly I remember four flags of scarlet, white, and gold, rectangular in shape, that hung before us, on either side of the altar. These were memorial flags that commemorated graduates of the school who had died in four wars: 1917–1918; 1941–1945; 1950–1953; 1965–1973. They framed a great gold altar cross on which was inscribed: I WILL LIFT UP MY EYES UNTO THE HILLS.

Lifting my eyes up to the flags and their rows of stars, one star for each child of the school who had been killed Fighting For Our Country, I used to consider not only what the stars signified but also what they meant: what the young men thought they might have to die for, what they gave up in losing their lives, and what the shattered families learning of their deaths felt. These were boys (all in the school then were boys) who had sat where my wife and I were sitting now, who had sung the same hymns and recited the same comforting creeds, who had dispersed out onto the virid Frederick Olmsted Circle and come to our house for coffee and singing—songs from Gilbert and Sullivan, Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hammerstein. Chapel itself always ended with a brisk, triumphant postlude, a Handel or a Widor anthem. Once, I remember, it ended with “Stout-Hearted Men.” The intention and the consequence were to uplift us.

The business of war was fully remote from these proceedings, and remote increasingly from a particular segment of the American people. For the memorial flags told another story, a kind of second lead. In World War I, some forty sons of the school, which then enrolled about four hundred students, had been killed. Pershing’s army had fought only one really large campaign, the Meuse-Argonne offensive, and that was late in the war. Its butcher’s bill, combined with our losses earlier in places with such names as Cantigny, Belleau Wood, St. Mihiel, exceeded 150,000 killed and wounded.

For World War II there were sixty stars on the flag. United States forces were engaged for about forty-five months, not counting the service of those who had volunteered and gone off to fight for Canada or Britain. For Korea, ten stars: three years’ fighting, but a much smaller American force serving in a much smaller theater. Finally, Vietnam: only five stars for eight years of war; at its height the American force “in country” was about 550,000. I do not know how many graduates of the school died in Desert Storm, or have died to date in the present fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. None, I hope; very few, I imagine—even as I ponder the ageless fact of war: that overwhelmingly those we send off to die are but a year or two, perhaps five, from the ages of the children who sat with my wife and me in the Lawrenceville Chapel singing “I sing a song of the saints of God.”

The flags commemorate terrible but noble deaths. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. That is some recompense, I suppose. But there is, as I say, a second story here. The diminishing numbers of war dead disclose another phenomenon: the withdrawal of the American clerisy (I will call it, after Coleridge), the privileged intellectual and professional and commercial classes, and their novitiates and children, from the active military service of our country. It is dangerous, it is unworthy, it is wrong. When I hear U.S. Representative Charles Rangel, his voice passionate and cracking, demand that the country begin drafting young people for the armed forces, I know exactly what he means.

“I no longer take the cigarette out of my mouth when I write ‘deceased’ over their names,” wrote the English poet and lieutenant Wilfred Owen near the end of World War I. Owen was himself killed a few days afterward. He had become, almost, inured to such deaths, just as we are inured to, and so terribly removed from, the deaths of our soldiers in Iraq. But few, very few indeed, of these are the deaths of children of those who lead our country, who control its resources and institutions, direct and inflect its tastes and opinions, batten most avidly upon its treasures and most lavishly upon its expensive entertainments. No one wants any American to die in a war. But if there is harm’s way to tread, should not all who are our national bounty’s beneficiaries tread it together or, at least, be liable to be asked by their country to do so?

Representative Rangel’s message might be communicated in a twenty-first-century adaptation of the peppery, flag-snapping Victorian jingle:

1895

We don’t want to fight by Jingo
But by Jingo if we do
We’ve got the men, and we’ve got the ships
And we’ve got the money too!

2005

We don’t want to fight by Jingo,
But by Jingo if we do
The smart and privileged people,
They’d better join us too!

I mean “smart” not in the sense of the social éclat of places like San Francisco or New York, but as the easy synonym Americans use for academic success: intelligence as it is measured in rankings and grades, acceptances and advancement to, and within, these nurseries for the most privileged young people, the great boarding schools and revered public high schools (say, New Trier or Bronx Science) and the famous private universities and colleges of the coasts. For it is in these places, and the culture that nourishes them, that ignorance of military service is so deep-seated as to be, almost, unconscious. He went where? Into the marines? These places, once the veriest source of eager and idealistic young military leaders and volunteers in 1889, 1917, and 1941, are fully settled in 2004 in their contempt or condescension for the profession of arms. And it has been so since the mid-1960s for reasons that are perfectly obvious.

You may not be interested in war, observed Trotsky, but war is interested in you. The issue of military conscription is deeply controversial, of course; and it is one of a family of public policy questions, recurrent and vexed, upon whose difficulties people advance, make nervous reconnaissances, and then withdraw, unwilling to engage them fully. It is also an issue that excites a multiplicity of opinions that seem unhinged from regular political affiliations, parties, and philosophies. I have never met anyone able to consider the question with anything approaching disinterestedness. There are, of course, many approaches to it, not the least of them, in 2005, the fact that the armed force is far too small to do what is being asked of it. And it is not certain, in a world of competing sovereignties—many of them hostile to us, some close to being able to deploy nuclear weapons—what may be asked, or required, of it in the future.

What is certain is how distant all things military, all the appurtenances and actions and needs of war and warriors, have become from the informed and thoughtful consideration of those to whom our commerce and culture have given the most. When a successful National Football League athlete, having left his sport and its gigantic emoluments to enlist in the army and serve in the active theater of operations, is killed in combat, his death is not only mourned. That he went off to serve at all strikes people as flat-out astounding. How could a young American abandon the pursuit of those two things Americans most deeply venerate, money and celebrity, to join the army? Not very long ago, the Northwestern University sociologist Charles Moskos reminds us, a Princeton graduating class, his own, sent 400 of its number (of 900) into the military, some volunteers, some drafted, within a year or two of graduation. That was in 1956. Thus far in 2004 the same university has sent, of a class of 1,100, nine.

The continuing allure of the generations that led and served in the Second World War testifies to our national uneasiness about the profoundly unequal sharing of the military burden in the early years of the twenty-first century. A veteran of the landings on Normandy or Tarawa is about eighty years old today. His generation, modest and reticent about its time in uniform, refers to that period of their lives simply as the service. “I was in the service.” The consequent phrase is omitted: “ . . . of my country.”

Of the enduring cultural testimonials to that service—novels, plays, movies, most of them celebratory— the universal expression of the American experience is the polyglot infantry squad: by honest happenstance, eight or ten Americans, eighteen or twenty years old, are thrown together in basic training. The tired melting-pot metaphor is for once apt. Birth, creed, color, and wealth are no longer the criteria of judgment, acceptance, or advancement. The student of architecture and the Navajo, the college boy and the Italian American from Oakland are wonderfully commingled in a transcending mission. The survivors—most survive—are immensely the better for their service together. All have won through to a new quality—moral, intellectual, temperamental all at once— which is judgment, a kind of canny wisdom, that will make them better citizens for the rest of their lives. (Of that sense of national commonality, we in our turn experienced a frisson in the week or so after 9/11. It has not lasted.)

The point is that many went into the military and learned from the experience. Today when we watch a dusty squad of nineteen-year-old marines moving along a street in Fallujah, windswept and sere, and we hear a chirping MSNBC voice-over use language like “The artillery has already softened up” the area, we know we are listening to someone mouthing words whose meaning he cannot possibly guess. He doesn’t really know, nor can he really communicate to us, what is happening, but he feels obliged to try. The young marines are of the same métier as their World War II grandfathers— but now the college boy and the senator’s kid are missing.

World War II is called a good war. No war is a good war, though some, patently, are more necessary than others. The war in Iraq, terribly controversial like the police action in Korea and the war in Vietnam, has splintered away from the conscious concern of most of those in whose behalf it is said to be prosecuted; and since such wars, not to say the “war on terror,” are the template for future conflict, it seems unlikely that this will change. “The abuse of greatness is when it disjoins remorse from power”; the line from Julius Caesar makes the predicament plain. Those for whom the war is being waged are disjoined from its costs.

In another Shakespeare play, Henry V, the physical and moral devastation of France has led, a speaker remarks, to a terrible coarsening of its life and landscape. Things now grow “as soldiers will, that nothing do but meditate on blood.” My sense of the generation that led the soldiers of World War II, particularly of that generation’s professional soldiers, is very different. Its most senior officers, most born between 1875 and 1890, nowadays subsist in the common memory as awkward clusters of attendant lords, gathered about the seated icons of Allied leadership, Churchill, Stalin, Roosevelt, and later Atlee and Truman. They appear preternaturally calm and self-possessed, anything but warlike in appearance; dutiful, forbearing, wise and weary. These leaders are models of a certain kind of disinterestedness, their counsel offered (as U.S. Grant’s was provided Lincoln) without reference to themselves or their advancement. With a couple of famous exceptions, they were uneasy in a celebrity they had certainly not sought. They embodied a kind of mature civic wisdom, not measurable in the ways our age defines “leadership ability” or cleverness, and they were far from the caricature of militarism and its punctilios the clerisy imputes to today’s soldiers.

We see men like George Marshall, Hap Arnold, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Admirals Ernest King and William Leahy as heirs to the tradition of U. S. Grant and Robert E. Lee: functional soldiers, noble and dutiful, devoted only to the mission, leaders to whom citizens might safely entrust the services of their children, men for whom the attractions of money and fame were nonexistent. (It was not proper, Marshall believed, for him to write his memoirs; these would invariably give pain to those he would be obliged to mention. Nor indeed was it proper for him to allow himself to receive any American decoration during the course of the war, because the soldiers he led were having a far harder, more dangerous time of it than he.)

Such leaders in their day defined civil society’s expectations of wartime military commanders. They were themselves distant cousins of our clerisy. Most were products of the American heartland, of villages and farms. But their families did venerate learning, strong exemplary tutelage, and advancement to secure professional careers. No brassy vocation to soldier had called them to West Point. They went to the academies because the academies were free and provided a good education. These leaders seemed the best expressions of a moral democracy; they weren’t commanders coarsened and insensitive to the value of what they had been called upon to destroy. They were fatherly in their concern, in their love, for their soldiers. Their commitment to their profession, too, their allegiance to the principle embodied in such commitment, had kept them in uniform through the long, bleak winter of the 1920s and 1930s: unpromoted, ill paid, often in assignments that seemed far beneath their talents.

That generation is gone, tone and tint, and those who served in the ranks, 1941–1945, are leaving us each month by the tens of thousands. But a citizen who sees and acknowledges the deepening chasm that is separating those who serve from those whom they serve (which no number of eyewitness news teams and Veterans Day editorials can usefully bridge) can only deplore a civic culture that removes the burdens of military service from those it has blessed most abundantly. We may be grateful, we may even rejoice, when we see fewer and fewer stars on the memorial flags that hang from the walls of the chapels and halls of the nurseries of the American clerisy, of the schools of privilege earned and unearned. But our own education in these places, moral, liberal, civic, has failed us terribly if we do not also remember that such stars are accumulating somewhere: only somewhere else. Fifty-one Americans died in Fallujah in eleven days. More than four hundred were wounded. Those are mounting numbers, and each number, each star, is a devastation—but each is a devastation out there, just not where we are.

Twenty years ago a young woman named Wendy Kopp graduated from Princeton. By passionate and focused effort she founded and has led a remarkable program called Teach for America. Idealistic and bright graduates of universities like Princeton and Stanford and Brown are recruited to teach, for two years and for a small stipend, in public schools that badly need teachers: most of them in difficult places, hardscrabble, sometimes in violent neighborhoods. At a meeting, a questioner wondered whether Kopp expected her young volunteers to make careers of teaching in such places. No, she said, probably not. But someday they will be forty or fifty years old. They will serve on school boards. They will be appointed or elected to offices. They will carry the inestimable benefit of having themselves done what they will be asking another young generation to do; they will know the costs and difficulties and sometimes dangers of such duties. So it should be with—to use a word that has gone utterly out of fashion—soldiering in behalf of the American republic. It is not idle of us to remind a new generation of undergraduates and those educating them, not to say their own families, that this generation in its turn will ask young men and women to wear the uniform of our country, to serve in harm’s way, and that it is—there is no other word for it—better that they themselves have something to remember about what it is that a private or a second lieutenant does in a war. In the service.    ❖