Magic Hours by Bissell Tom

Author:Bissell, Tom [Bissell, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: McSweeney's
Published: 2012-04-16T20:00:00+00:00

Imperial Grunts, Kaplan’s gritty account of life among America’s front-line soldiers in the War on Terror, is the first of what he promises will be several books. Kaplan had the full cooperation of the Department of Defense while researching this alpha volume, and despite being treated by the military like “an oddity, a threat, and a VIP all at once” Kaplan grew close to the soldiers. He tells us how this was possible: “When the battalion found out there would be a journalist among them, there were rude complaints, another fucking left-wing journalist. Then an 18 Delta medic... used the NIPRNET to check me out online. He downloaded some of my articles and pronounced me ‘okay’ to the others.”

Kaplan describes receiving a “command briefing” that began with an Orwell quote: “People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.” Imperial Grunts is that peaceable sleep’s lullaby. The book is not merely an account of twenty-first-century soldiering; it is also Kaplan’s attempt to define, defend, and justify American “imperialism.” On this point Grunts is a thesaurus of incoherencies.

“Indeed,” he writes, “by the turn of the twenty-first century the United States military had already appropriated the entire earth, and was ready to flood the most obscure areas of it with troops at a moment’s notice.” To say the least, the notion that the United States effectively rules the planet is an emaciated one. Does Kaplan not remember the endless haggling the United States was forced to do on the eve of the Iraq War to enable its use of other nations’ airfields? Do other nations’ desires and integrity really mean so little to Kaplan? But at the Pentagon, we learn, Kaplan gazed upon a Mercator Projection of the U.S. military’s areas of responsibility and saw a planet chopped up into jagged rectangles of supposed command (CENTCOM, EUCOM, PACOM, and so forth). He “stared at it for days on and off, transfixed. How could the U.S. not constitute a global military empire?”

In an interview, Kaplan has said, “our challenges abroad are exactly like those of other empires in history.... You don’t like the world ‘imperial’ for America? Tough luck.” So what is Kaplan’s understanding of imperialism? “Imperialism is but a form of isolationism, in which the demand for absolute, undefiled security at home leads one to conquer the world.” Okay. But then: “The grunts I met saw themselves as American nationalists, even if the role they performed was imperial.” Got that? And: “America’s imperial destiny was to grapple with countries that weren’t really countries.” It is? They aren’t? “Imperialism was less about conquest than about the training of local armies.” Oh. “All America could do was insert its armed forces here and there, as unobtrusively as possible, to alleviate perceived threats to its own security when they became particularly acute.” But didn’t you just say that—oh, wait. He’s still going: “The Americans wanted clean end-states and victory parades. Imperialism, though, is a never-ending involvement.

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