Is This All We Can Be?: The military culture and its cheapening

You may have seen the following TV spot: A soldier is running alone across the desert, carrying a backpack but no rifle. Helicopters swoop overhead. A squad of soldiers runs past, moving in the direction opposite that of the lone runner. Voiceover: "Even though there are 1,045,690 soldiers like me, I am my own force. . . . The might of the U.S. Army doesn't lie in numbers. It lies in me. I am an Army of One."

To anyone with the slightest acquaintance with military life, this recruiting ad is very peculiar indeed. One of the most fundamental truths about soldiering is that, with a few partial exceptions like snipers, a single warrior acting alone is of very little use to the cause he is fighting for. Ground warfare is carried on by units, of which the smallest that has much practical value is the platoon.

A great deal of military training is directed towards creating and maintaining unit cohesion. Parade-ground drill, for example-marching, turning, and manipulating weapons in formation-which seems very pointless when you first have to do it, is designed to make you understand that the very movements of your body belong to a larger organism: the squad, the platoon, the company. An Army of One? How is that supposed to work? Seeing that solitary soldier being an "army of one" out on his own in the desert, I could hear the voice of my own sergeant-instructor roaring: "GET BACK TO YOUR UNIT, SOLDIER!" (I have omitted an adjective or two.)

For more than 20 years, the principal recruiting slogan of the U.S. Army was "Be all you can be," which the trade journal Advertising Age ranked as second on its list of "Top Ten Jingles of the Century," after the McDonald's line "You deserve a break today." I had always thought "Be all you can be" about as far as military recruiters could reasonably go to accommodate the sensibilities of a narcissistic age without completely taking leave of reality. The slogan tells you that you can develop yourself-your skills, your character-while not excluding the possibility that you might do this by submerging your individual personality in something larger. Why drop this successful slogan?

I headed off to my local Army recruiting office to ask them. Hearing that I was a magazine writer, the desk sergeant laughed nervously, broke eye contact, and told me the Army had an excellent press office to handle that sort of thing. He commenced to write down their phone number for me. But I nagged him about "Army of One." Did he, obviously a soldier of many years' service-he was in his mid-thirties-really think it an honest message to put out for the purpose of attracting recruits into what is, after all, by definition and necessity, an extremely regimented organization? The sergeant allowed that he might not have chosen the slogan himself, if asked, but added: "It's addressed to young people, people a lot younger than me. I don't know how they think. The service depends on professionals to tell them that kind of stuff. You know, Madison Avenue types. They do surveys, they do focus groups, they come up with a slogan. They give it to me, I work with it." Fair enough.

The other services are revamping their recruiting material, too. The Navy wants to "Accelerate Your Life," having dropped its four-year-old slogan: "Let the journey begin" as being too wounding to the self- esteem of prospective sailors, who feel, at age 17 or so, that their journey is already well begun. The Air Force is still taking presentations from advertising agencies, hoping to roll out its own new campaign this summer. The Marines have long since stopped asking for "a few good men." That, of course, was "exclusionary"-what about women? So now young people are invited to join: "The few. The proud. The Marines."

As that recruiting sergeant explained, the armed services of today get their slogans the same way our political parties get their platforms: surveys, focus groups. In the Army's case the research work was done by a Chicago agency, Leo Burnett U.S.A. They learned that young people aged 14 to 24 see military culture as a threat to their own individuality, and military training-hollering drill instructors, push- ups in the mud, jumping out of planes-as scary. Now, you may say that you could have told the ad people this for nothing. You might add that military culture exists precisely to mold youngsters to its norms, not to adapt itself to theirs. You might further observe that it is precisely the fear and challenge of arduous training that lures many young people into the military life.

That last observation, while true, is unfortunately not true enough for a modern society. If you identify all those young Americans who thrill at the idea of organized combat-of killing people, blowing things up, and facing great bodily risks in the service of their country-you will find that you have about half a million of them, practically all young men. You are then faced with three problems: One, this is not enough to supply the country's defense needs, as currently defined; two, not many of your recruits are willing to do the ancillary tasks an army depends on (cooking, construction, dentistry, accounting, recruiting, and so on); and three, politically powerful lobbies-feminists, homosexuals, even the disabled-will be enraged that the force you have assembled does not look sufficiently like America.