Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power by Rachel Maddow Page B
Authors: Rachel Maddow
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concern for which side won or lost. “I have felt for sometime,” he wrote to his parents in May 1864, “that I didn’t any longer believe in this being a duty.”
But as he delivered “A Soldier’s Faith” thirty years later, Oliver Wendell Holmes had been enveloped by the practiced amnesia of a willful romantic. “It is not well for soldiers to think much about wounds,” he said that day. “Sooner or later we fall, but meantime it is for us to fix our eyes upon the point to be stormed, and to get there if we can.” After walking away from his own war when he lost his sense of its purpose, decades later, Holmes made that purpose war itself; war, regardless of itscause, as its own reward, its own sublime virtue, an inevitable consequence simply of life as man, and man’s need for a reason to need one another. He continued:
As long as man dwells upon the globe, his destiny is battle. I do not know what is true. I do not know the meaning of the universe. But in the midst of doubt, in the collapse of creeds, there is one thing I do not doubt, that no man who lives in the same world with most of us can doubt, and that is that the faith is true and adorable which leads a soldier to throw away his life in obedience to a blindly accepted duty, in a cause which he little understands, in a plan of campaign of which he has no notion, under tactics of which he does not see the use.…
Perhaps it is not vain for us to tell the new generation what we learned in our day, and what we still believe. That the joy of life is living, is to put out all one’s powers as far as they will go; that the measure of power is obstacles overcome; to ride boldly at what is in front of you, be it fence or enemy; to pray, not for comfort, but for combat; to keep the soldier’s faith against the doubts of civil life, more besetting and harder to overcome than all the misgivings of the battlefield, and to remember that duty is not to be proved in the evil day, but then to be obeyed unquestioning; to love glory more than the temptations of wallowing ease.…
We have shared the incommunicable experience of war; we have felt, we still feel, the passion of life to its top.
If the eighty years that followed Holmes’s ode to soldiering is any guide, Americans share his suspicion of peace and his conviction that battle can be a source of existential meaning and personal uplift. This country developed a serious war jones.Even a bookish and bespectacled Princeton professor named Woodrow Wilson cheered “the young men who prefer dying in the ditches of the Philippines to spending their lives behind the counters of a dry-goods store in our eastern cities. I think I should prefer that myself.” We’d got in the habit of being at war, and not against some economic crisis, but real war—big, small, hot, cold, air, sea, or ground—and against real enemies. Sometimes they’d attacked us, and sometimes we’d gone out of our way to find them. It had got to the point that being “at peace everywhere in the world, with unmatched economic power and military might” was a condition to be downplayed, a losing political message, as if being at peace, in our “snug, over-safe corner of the world,” made us edgy, as if we no longer knew, absent an armed conflict, how to be our best selves.
JOHN TRAVOLTA’S APPEARANCE IN AN ARMY PUBLIC SERVICE announcement—with production values on a par with early public-access cable television—is an oddly reassuring artifact from the ’70s, and a useful marker to show just how deeply Ronald Reagan changed the way Americans think about their military. Here was the not-yet-famous teenage Travolta, a fresh-faced if slightly confused-looking new recruit not long removed from the hallways of his New Jersey high school, pillow-lipped, goofily coiffed, weaponless, with his future star wattage tucked neatly into Army-issue olive drabs, receiving a ceremonial lei and a kiss on the cheek from a lovely and inviting
But as he delivered “A Soldier’s Faith” thirty years later, Oliver Wendell Holmes had been enveloped by the practiced amnesia of a willful romantic. “It is not well for soldiers to think much about wounds,” he said that day. “Sooner or later we fall, but meantime it is for us to fix our eyes upon the point to be stormed, and to get there if we can.” After walking away from his own war when he lost his sense of its purpose, decades later, Holmes made that purpose war itself; war, regardless of itscause, as its own reward, its own sublime virtue, an inevitable consequence simply of life as man, and man’s need for a reason to need one another. He continued:
As long as man dwells upon the globe, his destiny is battle. I do not know what is true. I do not know the meaning of the universe. But in the midst of doubt, in the collapse of creeds, there is one thing I do not doubt, that no man who lives in the same world with most of us can doubt, and that is that the faith is true and adorable which leads a soldier to throw away his life in obedience to a blindly accepted duty, in a cause which he little understands, in a plan of campaign of which he has no notion, under tactics of which he does not see the use.…
Perhaps it is not vain for us to tell the new generation what we learned in our day, and what we still believe. That the joy of life is living, is to put out all one’s powers as far as they will go; that the measure of power is obstacles overcome; to ride boldly at what is in front of you, be it fence or enemy; to pray, not for comfort, but for combat; to keep the soldier’s faith against the doubts of civil life, more besetting and harder to overcome than all the misgivings of the battlefield, and to remember that duty is not to be proved in the evil day, but then to be obeyed unquestioning; to love glory more than the temptations of wallowing ease.…
We have shared the incommunicable experience of war; we have felt, we still feel, the passion of life to its top.
If the eighty years that followed Holmes’s ode to soldiering is any guide, Americans share his suspicion of peace and his conviction that battle can be a source of existential meaning and personal uplift. This country developed a serious war jones.Even a bookish and bespectacled Princeton professor named Woodrow Wilson cheered “the young men who prefer dying in the ditches of the Philippines to spending their lives behind the counters of a dry-goods store in our eastern cities. I think I should prefer that myself.” We’d got in the habit of being at war, and not against some economic crisis, but real war—big, small, hot, cold, air, sea, or ground—and against real enemies. Sometimes they’d attacked us, and sometimes we’d gone out of our way to find them. It had got to the point that being “at peace everywhere in the world, with unmatched economic power and military might” was a condition to be downplayed, a losing political message, as if being at peace, in our “snug, over-safe corner of the world,” made us edgy, as if we no longer knew, absent an armed conflict, how to be our best selves.
JOHN TRAVOLTA’S APPEARANCE IN AN ARMY PUBLIC SERVICE announcement—with production values on a par with early public-access cable television—is an oddly reassuring artifact from the ’70s, and a useful marker to show just how deeply Ronald Reagan changed the way Americans think about their military. Here was the not-yet-famous teenage Travolta, a fresh-faced if slightly confused-looking new recruit not long removed from the hallways of his New Jersey high school, pillow-lipped, goofily coiffed, weaponless, with his future star wattage tucked neatly into Army-issue olive drabs, receiving a ceremonial lei and a kiss on the cheek from a lovely and inviting
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