Earlier this year, President Donald Trump surveyed his top military brass on the prospect of making war in Iran. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine urged caution, presciently predicting that a ramped-up campaign against Iran could lead its leaders to close the Strait of Hormuz. However, Pete Hegseth, Trump’s self-styled “Secretary of War,” jumped at the prospect of such a conflict.

“Pete, I think you were the first one to speak up,” Trump recently recalled at a press event. “And you said, ‘Let’s do it, because you can’t let them have a nuclear weapon.’”

Americans join the military for any number of reasons: to serve their country, gain economic stability, or simply join a community. For Hegseth, a thirst for martial victory and a desire for a masculine metamorphosis seemed to surpass all else.

Much to Hegseth’s chagrin, however, his career as an Army officer corresponded to a series of distinctly failed military campaigns. After graduating from Princeton in 2003, he deployed to two doomed military locales—Afghanistan and Iraq—and then relentlessly defended the Pentagon’s occupation of parts of those places in essays, speeches, and, ultimately, as a weekend host on Fox News. While Hegseth’s rhetoric on those wars long reflected mainstream Republican talking points—papering over chaos and death in the Middle East and beyond with pledges that stable democracies were close at hand—his zeal indicated something deeper: a desperation, it seemed, to wring some sort of personal validation from his time in uniform.

“The rank and file, and even some of the officers, have accepted the gravity of the war’s failures,” Adam Weinstein, a Marine Corps veteran and deputy director for Middle East policy at the Quincy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank focused on peace and diplomacy, told me, speaking of Iraq and Afghanistan. “There’s a deep sense of sacrifice and loss for nothing. And that can lead to fatalistic beliefs, it can lead to Islamophobia. In its healthier form, it can lead to questioning the principles of interventionism and the U.S. foreign policy establishment.”

Hegseth, for his part, chose to totally avoid any personal or geopolitical reckoning. Once the Global War on Terror became politically untenable to defend, he cast about for excuses that wouldn’t implicate his own career in the military. Rather than zero in on tactical or intelligence failures, his rhetoric took a dark turn, increasingly inflected by Islamophobia, misogyny, and a distinctly toxic version of masculinity.

As his profile rose, Hegseth argued ever more forcefully that the Pentagon was weak-willed, insufficiently lethal, and overrun by incompetent and cowardly leaders, many of them women or minorities who (in his eyes) had been unfairly promoted. His proposed remedy was as blunt and dense as his diagnosis: America simply needed to fight harder in the Middle East until the mission was accomplished and “Islamic extremism” was eliminated. As one of his former co-workers told me, “I never got the feeling that he wanted to abandon the Middle East.”

I asked Weinstein if, during his own 2012 deployment to Afghanistan, he saw Islamophobia bubbling below the surface. “It was right on the surface,” he responded. “But what do you think the World War II generation was saying about the Japanese? Dehumanization is a natural outgrowth of war.”

“If You Want Something, You Go After It”

As a boy growing up in Minnesota, Hegseth appeared to be a perfect version of the American male. He was religious, athletic, well-spoken, and remarkably handsome. He was ashamed, however, of his self-perceived softness. “I didn’t get in fights as a kid and shied from confrontation because, frankly, I was scared of it,” he wrote in his 2016 book In the Arena, Good Citizens, a Great Republic, and How One Speech Can Reinvigorate America . In it, he went on to hail his father, Brian, for his “integrity” and “Scandinavian work ethic,” before evincing thinly veiled resentment for not having been reared effectively in the masculine art of aggression. “My father was—and is—an incredible man,” he reflected, “but confrontation isn’t necessarily his forte.”

Military service, Hegseth figured, would imbue him with some much needed and previously missing manliness. It was also his best path to class mobility and prestige. When it came time for college, he applied to West Point, America’s most prestigious service academy, and Princeton, where he was gunning for a ROTC scholarship. He got into both schools and chose the latter, touching down on its verdant New Jersey campus in 1999.

In deciding on Princeton, Hegseth launched himself on a path eerily paralleling that of another Minnesota native of a previous era, novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald. Both of them were working-class lads who attended Princeton, where they bristled at the elitism while craving its validation. Both developed a writing voice on campus and then joined the Army. Both also struggled with the bottle and with women, though Fitzgerald, unlike Hegseth, was somewhat reflective about his vices. He initially called his first novel The Romantic Egotist (later, This Side of Paradise). It followed a handsome, middle-class Princeton man whose greed and social ambition inhibited his ability to find true love. Hegseth himself expressed a similar ambition in a 2015 interview: “If you want something, you go after it—you’re willing to sleep a little less, put up with more, put up with a little insanity and do things you don’t want to do.”

In a widely read 1927 essay on his alma mater, Fitzgerald asserted that Princeton men “resent any attempt at analysis.” Hegseth also did his best to make such analysis impossible. At Princeton, he was deemed a man with “many faces,” loudly endorsing the Iraq war and attacking feminist groups on campus (even if, in quieter moments, he showed a capacity for nuance and kindness).

One of his former professors has pointed out that Hegseth’s current persona and his Princeton one “don’t fit.” Part of the disconnect stems from the fact that his puffed-up, bellicose military posturing in the Trump era doesn’t match either his Ivy League education or his actual service record. Hegseth came away from the war in Iraq with a Bronze Star that, it’s worth noting, was issued “without valor.” (It was, in short, a lesser version of the medal that, according to the Washington Post, was “issued somewhat liberally” during the War on Terror years. Some enlisted personnel joked that such a decoration was little more than a “participation trophy” for needy officers.)

Hegseth’s award citation was indeed dry and formulaic, chock-full of the soaring platitudes then used by the White House to sell the American public on the disastrous war in Iraq. It asserted (in what was, historically speaking, a fantasy) that he had “contributed immeasurably to the success of building a free and democratic nation for the citizens of Iraq.”

In reality, the supposed heroes of Hegseth’s war were generally not pedigreed Army National Guard officers like him, but door-busting, ass-kicking Green Berets and Navy SEALs. This was largely thanks to movies like American Sniper and Zero Dark Thirty that lionized their contributions.

After returning home, Hegseth made inroads with such operators via his advocacy work at a series of astro-turf veterans groups, including the “Concerned Veterans of America” (backed by the billionaire Koch brothers), which advocates for the privatization of the Veterans Administration. As part of his duties, he embarked on a 10-city “Defend Freedom” tour in 2014. Such events featured Madison Rising, billed as “America’s most patriotic rock band,” as well as speeches from decorated military heroes and family members.

On that tour, Hegseth connected with Karen Vaughn, a Gold Star mother whose son, Aaron, a SEAL Team Six member, had been killed in Afghanistan. Vaughn told me that she supports Hegseth mostly because he listens to those who have experienced........

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