How the Military Mindset Has Crushed Our Country’s Men |
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How the Military Mindset Has Crushed Our Country’s Men
I talked to soldiers and ROTC students about the kind of masculinity the military encourages. Its ripple effects on mental health are dire.
Carefully stored away in Jesse Holland’s condo in East Brunswick, New Jersey, are the totems of a culture that nearly killed him.
When I visited his place on a cold afternoon in December of 2023, it had been nearly four decades since Jesse first donned his dress blues as a first-year, or “plebe,” at the Valley Forge Military Academy, just north of Philadelphia. He showed me the uniform he was given at age 14, neatly folded, still hanging in his closet. Jesse’s old textbooks and academic records from the Forge were tucked away, too, as was a towel and laundry basket the school had issued him. Also, a brass badge depicting Gen. George Washington praying on the Pennsylvania Revolutionary War battleground for which the Forge is named.
As we settled on the couch, Jesse acknowledged that even most of his computer passwords play on the school’s name. “For so many years, I never left the Forge, even though I was physically removed from the property,” he explained. This insight, he added, stemmed from a passage he’d read in The Body Keeps the Score, a somewhat controversial 2014 bestseller that tries to explain how trauma can seemingly trap someone in time. Jesse and I were speaking now because he was on a journey to finally wriggle free. “The only way out,” he reasoned, “is through.”
Per his own harsh admission, Jesse was born a coward. “Apparently, as a baby, you couldn’t put me down without me crying,” he said, somewhat ashamed. “The stove was scary; trees were scary.” To me, these seemed like the typical behaviors of a newborn, though I understood why Jesse saw them differently. His father, Christian, was macho—and mean. He would become especially butch around his drinking buddies, many of them Vietnam War veterans. Today, Jesse reasons that his dad’s hypermasculine posturing was a response to his shame over the fact that he never served in the military himself—a shame, it seems, that also drove him to raise a son who might be able to do what he never did.
Jesse tried desperately to meet his fathers’s high bar for manliness. Once, after he won an arm-wrestling match in middle school, he rushed home and excitedly shared the good news. Not to be outmanned, Christian slapped a $100 bill on the table and told his son that it was his if Jesse could beat him in another match. Then he called Jesse’s mom into the room to bear witness. “Not only did he need to win, he had to pulverize me,” Jesse recalled. “I couldn’t move my arm for like a week.” Later, on a pheasant hunt, Jesse’s dad ordered him to strangle a bird he had clumsily wounded with buckshot. “The bird wasn’t dead—it just couldn’t fly,” Jesse said. “I’m wringing its neck, and it’s kicking me and making noises, and I’m doing my best not to burst into tears.”
On the handful of occasions when Christian physically beat him, Jesse felt deeply ashamed for not fighting back. It was in these moments that Jesse dreamed he would be able to “stand tall and be proud” like his fictional military hero, G.I. Joe, whom Jesse dressed up as for Halloween nearly every year. G.I. Joe had power, Jesse reasoned, but, unlike his dad, he wielded it “responsibly.”
When, in the summer of 1988, Jesse was first dropped off at the Forge, he was excited: The campus seemed like a well-honed masculine breeding ground where he might finally be made into the man his father always wanted him to be. Weeks later, he informed his folks in a letter that the campus environment had all been a mirage. “The minute you left they broke out the whips and chains,” he wrote, comparing his experience thus far to “a party in hell.” “It’s Rough! Rough! Rough!” he concluded.
As a plebe, Jesse was yelled at and dehumanized by roving packs of upperclassmen, some of whom were first-wave gym rats and, according to Jesse, were using steroids. “They were monsters,” he recalled. Adult supervision was scarce, empowering a cadet-run hierarchy that Jesse compared to Lord of the Flies. The older boys called him “scum puke” and “pussy” and put him through a gauntlet of intense hazing. Early in Jesse’s first semester, a couple of older cadets beat him up in the gym, though most of their bullying was psychological—they trashed his room, screamed at him, and refused to promote him within the hierarchy. At first, Jesse tried to make the best of his bad situation. In letters home, he reported getting “a lot skinnier” and “a lot stronger.” He was performing well academically, too. His teachers recognized his smarts with a red-star pin that declared him a “meritorious student.” On at least one occasion, he signed a letter home denoting his newfound identity: “Jesse Holland, the trooper.”
When he returned to New Jersey for the fall break, Jesse cut the........