Show Notes
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Taps was shot at Valley Forge Military Academy, and this episode’s guest is the journalist whose exposé of that school’s hazing and abuse presaged its closing. Jasper Craven’s new book, God Forgives, Brothers Don’t, widens the lens to the whole machinery of American military education, and the echoes between film and reality are uncanny. In the movie, trustees sell the fictional Bunker Hill Academy out from under its cadets. This spring, Valley Forge graduated its final class, with Maryland Governor Wes Moore supplying the commencement platitudes to a school still dogged by abuse allegations. Harold Becker’s film is ferociously anti-war, which didn’t stop a young Van from watching it on repeat and absorbing the opposite lesson. And that misreading is the episode’s spine. George C. Scott hands his boys a creed. There are worse things than death, he teaches. Defeat. Dishonor. Timothy Hutton’s Moreland (the name is no accident) follows it to a bloody standoff with the National Guard, and by the end names the cost himself. “Honor doesn’t mean s**t when you’re looking at a dead little kid.” The conversation keeps finding the present inside 1981. Jasper reads out the press-tour quotes from his book. Hutton called military schools “a dangerous environment” built on “an abstract code of honor that has no specific meaning,” while Tom Cruise praised places that “break you down and build you up,” the boot-camp anthem verbatim. His Captain Shawn, grinning “It’s beautiful, man!” through the final firefight, is the true believer Cruise never stopped being. From there the talk turns to how honor further migrated after Vietnam from country to a variety of violent and provincial institutions. The inward-turned military among them, but also Christian nationalists and ICE. And why William James’s moral equivalent of war still points at the exit. Further Reading God Forgives, Brothers Don’t: The Long March of Military Education and the Making of American Manhood by Jasper Craven “Hazing, Fighting, Sexual Assaults: How Valley Forge Military Academy Devolved Into ‘Lord of the Flies’” by Jasper Craven Battle Borne, Jasper’s newsletter on veterans’ issues “The Moral Equivalent of War” by William James Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund by Molly Crabapple Making the Corps by Thomas E. Ricks Teaser from the Episode Taps Trailer
More from Bang-Bang Podcast
From the vault! Re-releasing one of our earliest and most popular episodes, with antiwar veteran and organizer Alexander McCoy. New episode coming next week. ✌️ “When I understand my enemy well enough to defeat him, then in that moment, I also love him.” So begins the 2013 film adaptation of Orson Scott Card’s classic sci-fi novel Ender’s Game. Neither achieving box office nor critical success, the movie still evokes a wide range of reactions. Especially when it comes to its ambiguous relationship to the original text. Van and Lyle have fellow vet and strategist Alexander McCoy on the show to debate their competing reads. Along the way, they come to agree that certain insights gleaned from the cinematic rendering might be at odds with Card’s politics. Ranging from the ultimate lovelessness of war to the emptiness of any strategy unharnessed from justice and peace. Alex on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/alexandermccoy.bsky.social Further Reading “A Primer on Orson Scott Card and the Ender’s Game Controversy,” by Anna Silman The Internationalists, by Alexander Ward “The Great Humbling,” by David Klion “Four Futures,” By Peter Frase Strategy and Conscience, by Anatol Rapaport Ender’s Game Trailer Teaser From The Episode
Ryan Miller, the next on the show’s fellow veteran lineup, was a Marine in Okinawa from 1998 to 2002, spent years in About Face: Veterans Against the War, helped Oakland decriminalize plant medicines in 2019, and now works as a therapist in psychedelic integration. He joins us to discuss Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk’s film documenting three special operators from SEAL training through Afghanistan to Iraq to a clinic in Mexico, where ibogaine and toad venom do what sixty pills a day could not. For Lyle the film’s real subject is a trauma apparatus built to repair faulty equipment rather than heal people (one SEAL is sent to the military’s brain-injury center, patched up, and returned for four more deployments). As the scholar Nadia Abu El-Haj has argued in Combat Trauma, PTSD was popularized by Vietnam Veterans Against the War in rap groups that turned pain into politics. As the decades followed, this promising origin story nonetheless raced toward an endpoint constituted—in Ryan’s words—by psychedelic-assisted stormtroopers. Van invokes Fanon’s French torturer, begging his psychiatrist for a way to sleep at night and keep his job. Then there is the narration itself, where the enemy appears only as bad guys, terra nullius in uniform. No Afghans, no Iraqis, not even Mexicans in a film set half in Mexico. The one line that breaks the frame, a SEAL wondering whether we’d have a military at all if we didn’t abuse children, lasts no more than a second. Further Reading and Listening Ryan Miller’s therapist profile Combat Trauma by Nadia Abu El-Haj “Can we heal wartime trauma without confronting the real causes of war?” by Lyle Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War by Samuel Moyn Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love by bell hooks “Colonial War and Mental Disorders” from Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth Bang-Bang’s Netflix’s Marines episode w/ Sam Carliner Bang-Bang’s Combat Obscura episode Teaser from the Episode In Waves and War Trailer
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.com
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.com
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.com