Chalk it up to human nature, I guess. The idiots will always, always be with us.

If you don’t know why the hell something is there, or done, don’t screw with it until you at least have a good, solid working hypothesis for what that particular thing does or influences.

I really think that one of the biggest problems with our modern era is that we don’t pay enough damn attention to the whys and wherefores of traditional customs and lifestyles. Everybody today is so damn smart, and sure that our ancestors were a bunch of dummies, especially since conditions have changed so much from those that once obtained.

However, there are still a lot of fundamentals that remain essentially unchanged, and the “new and improved” ain’t addressing the issues as well as the old values and mores.

You can color me as not being a huge fan of most of what we’ve done over the last hundred years, because I think they started out from false premises and assumptions, leading to some severe dysfunction in modern society. The reaction, which will come, is going to be epic, over-done, and entirely unnecessary.

I’m just wondering how far back it’s gonna go, to tell the truth. It’s always interesting to observe the blissninnies on the sidelines going “Oh, my Gawd! I had no idea that was going to happen!” Yep. ‘Cause you’re an idiot.

My first tour, ’75 and ’76, was with the 101st. It was a division in bad shape, in almost every way imaginable. A lot of it was officers who were, I am sure, very good at hunting VC, but really had no clue how to train troops. Some was societal, as in Co D, 2/502d had organized, chartered, dues-paying chapters of the Klan, the Panthers, and the American Nazi Party. Some was that the average troop quality, at the time, was pretty low.

I’d never have stuck it out except that I got sent to the 193rd — I think through the good offices of my Brigade CSM, Harvey Appleman; I was division soldier of the month for October ’75, so Harvey liked me. There were problems in the 193rd, sure, but they were trivial in comparison, while the Army life down there was everything a young man on testosterone overdose might want.

It was…just great.

I agree with you, and the same issue is at the heart of the hazing thing/ This stuff is a natural behavioral phenomenon, and if it isn’t present in your troops, well, it’s like Patton supposedly said “If they won’t f**k, they won’t fight.”

The key issue is, all this crap absolutely must be under the control of the commander, or his representatives lower in the command chain. If it goes on in the shadows, it’s just like that old deal with what makes the difference between the “peer leader” and the “ring leader”. On the one hand, the peer leader has been co-opted to use his influence for the good of the unit and under the commander’s guidance. A ring leader, on the other hand, is out of anyone’s control but his own, and is often inimical to the purpose of the command.

Troops are gonna do stupid, risky shit. That’s just a fact of life. That’s what they joined the military to do, to prove themselves and “have fun”, for a given value of “fun”. You can either turn that drive to serve the needs of the Army and the commander, or you can let it fester beneath the surface, and watch it come spouting forth when you need it least.

What strikes me as a bit of a waste is that it’s only now, about ten years after retirement, that a lot of this stuff is crystallizing for me, and I’m looking back over the years and seeing things I missed while I was “in the mix”. There’s a lot of stuff in the behavioral patterns of the typical young male that we use in motivation and indoctrination that I think we could be doing a much better job with, and we are just not doing it.

My opinion is that everything in the first two years or so of a soldier’s career is critical to what follows. Get him in with a good unit, with a bunch of good influences, and you’ll turn an average guy into a superior soldier. Same guy, bad units and bad influencers in terms of peers and junior leaders above him, and there’s not a damn thing you can do to really “fix” him, if he goes south.

Although, there is the phenomenon of “good soldiers” coming out of bad experiences, which I think could maybe describe my first few years in the Army. Stories I could tell… Sheesh. I still don’t know why the hell I re-enlisted that first time. Fortunately, I got to a good unit, and met with a better class of mentors than I’d had, or that would have been it, after my second term.

It took me a while to get what was really bugging me about your post on hazing…and it isn’t your post but the hazing.

If you dig back, or if you’re both curious and lazy and ask me to find it again, I did an article on safety that was published in Infantry Magazine circa 1985. The title was, most unimaginatively, “On Safety,” and it was a hit piece on the Army’s safety program. It was based largely on the ways things were done in the old 193rd, in Panama, in the 70s and 80s. Short version of that is that we were using more ammunition than the 82d, with essentially no safety constraints, and with no particular accident rate (unless we were running LFXs for the 75th, which is a whole ‘nother story).

When I say “more than the 82d, I don’t mean that the 193rd used more than a brigade of the 82d, nor even that a battalion in the 193rd used more (I speak of 4.2: and below, here) than a battalion of the 82d, but that each of the three line battalions in the 193rd used more ammunition (again, 4.2″ and below) than the entire 82d airborne division. Every company live fired at least 13 times a month with, again, no noticeable safety constraints. It was the only place I’ve ever served where you could tell range control to “fuck off” and make it stick.

One of the things I didn’t mention in it was an aspect of the safety program that was inherently unsafe. This was that training, safetied-down to the point on mind-numbing dullness, did not give young men the action they craved, hence drove them to behaviors off duty that were preposterously unsafe.

It hit me, just recently, that silly crap like the jaw injury you described is very likely precisely caused by the mind numbing dullness of what passes for training these days. By way of illustration, a fan recently wrote me that, in yet another of the freaking monthly suicide prevention briefings, he told the chaplain, “If I have to sit through one more of these things I WILL kill myself.”

So, too, the troops, bored to death with those and SHARP and mandatory training that has managed (not for the first time, by the way) to eat up the entire year, go find things on their own that are exciting, fun, and make them feel like men.

And the solution seems to me obvious; make training dangerous again. It transfers risk from what you can’t control at all to what you really can, and gives young men what they need to keep them from doing the incredibly dumb shit (BTDT) they’ll find to do on their own.