A Better Man Read online

  The two movies, featuring the same main character only three years apart, demonstrate a profound cultural shift. They’re both action films, but their attitudes regarding war feel markedly different. In the first, the hero is scarred by war, reflective, almost sensitive. The country he fought for is literally attacking him; he does not want to fight, resorting to violence only when every other option has failed. It’s a constrained, humble look at the pain men face in the service of their nation. In the second, the government gives Rambo a chance at redemption by returning to the country in which he once fought.

  In the opening scene, Rambo asks his commanding officer, “Sir, do we get to win this time?”

  “This time,” the officer says, “it’s up to you.”

  One man, the right man, can refight the entire Vietnam War all by himself. The violence now is triumphal, cartoonish, a dick-wagging macho revenge fantasy. The movie’s message echoed the message of Reaganism: America is back.

  And for a while, for some Americans, it felt good to be back. The Berlin Wall came down, the Soviet Union fell. Liberalism seemed to be on the rise everywhere. That’s the world you were born into, a world of unrivaled American dominance. People were fat and happy and making a lot of money. I got hired to play a sock puppet for TV commercials advertising a new way to buy dog food over the Internet. Mom and I bought our first house. We had a baby. It was 2001.

  Seven months later, you were in your bouncy chair watching morning TV with me as the second plane hit the World Trade Center. Even then you loved watching TV, a blessing because the last thing Mom and I wanted to do first thing in the morning was actually parent.

  One of the great things about seven-month-olds is that they are not particular about what they watch on TV. We’d gotten into the habit, you and I, of starting our day together with the news. When we turned it on that morning, the first plane had already hit. The early reports were all over the place. Local anchors relayed confused and conflicting information about what had just happened: Was it a small plane? A big plane? As they talked, they showed an image of the smoking building and I remember watching a small dot disappear behind the buildings, another plane. I don’t know why, but my eye fixated on the distant dot, and I remember thinking that it hadn’t reappeared on the other side of the buildings the way it should have. No part of me thought it was going to slam into the second World Trade Center building. No part of me believed that eighteen years later, we’d still be accounting for that morning. No part of me worried, in that moment, about sending my son to war.

  I remember how happy you were in your little chair, scooping fistfuls of Cheerios into your mouth. Bounce, bounce, bounce. I ran upstairs to wake up Mom. Another plane crashed into the Pentagon. Another into a Pennsylvania field. We watched the Twin Towers fall. The skies went quiet after that.

  You were born into a world of American peace, but have grown up in a world of American war. Now you’re at an age when boys like you are joining that war. They volunteer for all the reasons boys—and now girls—go to war. Honor, adventure, purpose, patriotism, money for college. You will almost certainly never serve because we are relatively wealthy, and the wealthy do not fight this nation’s wars. They do internships at software companies. They do gap years. Scoop ice cream for spending money.

  When I watched the First Gulf War unfold on TV, I could not foresee that I would one day have my own son, a daydreamer who has never raised a fist in anger (although you did crack the television screen with your Nintendo Switch controller once after getting pissed off at a videogame). I cannot bring myself to imagine you, even for an instant, in the terror of war. I know your heart too well. But I’ve known other parents who have waved goodbye to their own daydreaming sons, boys with hearts just the same as yours. Are those boys any less loving than you? Why should they go while you stay behind?

  I asked you if you’ve ever given thought to military service.

  “No,” you answered dismissively, as if I’d asked whether you’d like a punch in the nose.

  It’s the answer I would have given at your age, too, and it’s the answer I would probably still give now. But I’m less convinced in my answer.

  I remember hanging out with a bunch of combat vets once at a bar in New York. These were young guys, veterans of Afghanistan and the Second Persian Gulf War. One of them had lost a leg in combat. At one point in the evening, he took off his prosthetic leg and instructed everybody to drink beer from it. I took a swig of warm beer from his leg and received congratulatory pats on the shoulder from men who had no business congratulating me for anything.

  Over the years, I’ve met a lot of combat vets my age and younger. I like them. They’re generally thoughtful, reflective. But some of them are angry, and some of them adrift. When I’ve hung out with them, it’s immediately apparent that they belong to a world I can never enter. They are generous spirits, but their generosity extends only so far. I have found they welcome me right up to its borders but I can never get inside. They’re citizens of another country.

  There’s a book called What It Is Like to Go to War by a reporter and Vietnam veteran named Karl Marlantes. He describes war’s horror, but also the “deep savage joy in destruction.” He also talks about how “warriors, above all, must fundamentally be spiritual people.” If I understand his meaning correctly, he is differentiating between warriors and killers. The killer destroys without compunction. The warrior understands his power enough to mitigate its use and to understand its profound consequences. It’s the difference between the first Rambo and the second. The combat vets I’ve known are much more like the first.

  The hours and days that followed that September morning when we watched the little dot disappear in the second tower were horrendous and brutal and sad. But they were also compelling and unifying. I’d never experienced that kind of national unity before, that kind of collective, national outrage, and the nearly unanimous call for vengeance. It felt, perversely, awesome. I mean “awesome” in the literal sense of the word: of being swept up in something enormous beyond the control of any one person. It’s that feeling I think Marlantes is trying to capture in his book, a primal, male appreciation for the inherent wonderment of power, and the ability to bring that power to bear against our enemies. What does it mean to have that power at your disposal? Marlantes says it feels “godlike.”

  I would be lying if I said part of me does not want to know what that’s like. This dueling instinct to create and destroy feels like an essential component of being male. Or, at least, it feels like an essential component of how I understand being male. How many young men have wanted to blow stuff up and to come out on the other side, have dreamed of this “godlike” feeling as they marched off to fulfill what they believe to be their manly destiny? Goldstein quotes Mussolini: “War is to man what maternity is to women.”

  How much of who we are as men is rooted in our need to make war and how much of our need to make war is rooted in the way we make men? War and Gender devotes 500 pages to that very question. Goldstein’s conclusion is that the way we raise men and the way we go to war are two mutually reinforcing systems, endless feedback loops.

  We raise boys to go to war; we go to war because of the way we raise boys.

  You finally filled out the Selective Service form a couple days ago and mailed it off. It’s nothing. A postcard. A transaction. I don’t think you will ever be called to serve; there hasn’t been a draft in forty-five years and I do not think there will be another. We are still making war, but technology allows us to do so with fewer bodies. Your card will most likely be digitized and stored in some electronic file cabinet somewhere, forgotten.

  As a boy, did you lie in bed and dream of your own bravery as I did? Did you think, as I did, that you could be counted on in times of conflict? What does each of us owe our nation? I do not think the answer is nothing; I do not think the answer is everything. I don’t know what we owe, but I know that I would happily surrender myself to my country before I surrendered
you or your sister. Probably every parent feels the same and yet, generation after generation, it sends its boys to war. Would I do the same? I don’t know. I would hate myself for sending you and hate myself for keeping you home. I might grow to hate my country for asking. But it wouldn’t be my choice, would it? It would be yours. You would be the one choosing to step onto that airplane taking you God knows where to fight a war not of your making.

  What promises and lies did those boys at Gettysburg make to their loved ones before they left home? What promises and lies did they tell themselves? You can wander that battlefield today, as I did when I was a kid, looking for some evidence of those three blood-soaked days. There are thousands of old battlefields just like it all over the world. Places where men have fallen—at different times, in the service of different kings and causes, mostly forgotten now. The men are mostly forgotten, too, as we all will be.

  The wars we fight come in many forms, although most do not risk the loss of life and limb. Mostly we fight these battles alone, and they will be no less real to us than the ones to which we attach noble names. There are as many ways to be brave as there are things to fear. I have no idea where your own bravery will inspire you to march. Walk into it the best that you can. Trust yourself. Support the people around you. In the end, I think bravery is just being strong for others when you doubt you can be strong for yourself. The more fiercely you love, the braver you will have to be.

  eight

  Smoke Signals

  Violence Is (Almost) Never the Answer

  Every now and again, Mom will hear a noise in the middle of the night.

  “I heard something downstairs,” she’ll say, waking me.

  I strain my ears to listen.

  “Did you hear it? ”

  “No,” I’ll say. I never hear it, but then again, my hearing is ruined from my high school punk rock band, and I know that my ears are not a reliable indicator of anything. I already dread the question I know is coming.

  “Will you go downstairs and check?”

  Oh, God. I really don’t want to go downstairs because it’s the middle of the night and I’m comfortable and, most importantly, because even though I didn’t hear anything, I’m suddenly terrified. What if, this time, somebody actually is in the house? Why is she sending me downstairs to confront my murderer? What I want to say is, “You go downstairs,” but I can’t say that because it would violate the ancient contract between man and woman, the one that says men will be the first to face danger. And because it would be such a dick move.

  So then I have to get out of bed and creep downstairs and wander around in the dark praying that nobody’s there. Left unanswered is the question of what I’m supposed to do if I should come face-to-face with an intruder. In theory, I guess I’m supposed to kick his ass. In practice, we would most likely have a very awkward conversation.

  “Excuse me.”

  “Oh, hey.”

  “So . . . are you robbing us or what?”

  “Yeah. Would you mind giving me a hand with the flat screen?”

  And I would help him. What else could I do? The options are violence or nonviolence. In that situation, I would much rather take the nonviolent route. On the other hand, if the situation should turn more menacing, I would be forced to defend myself and my family to the best of my limited (nonexistent) abilities.

  Ultimately, when Mom sends me downstairs, she’s relying on my willingness to use violence if the need should arise even though I am ill-equipped to do so. When things go bump in the night, my only real utility is having the honor of being the first one killed. Which seems unfair. I ask her about it.

  “You’d be killed, yeah,” Mom says, “but that’s your job.”

  “Getting killed is my job?”

  “Yeah. You’re the strongest person in the house, so you should go downstairs. That’s just common sense.”

  At this point, you’re the strongest person in the house. I ask Mom if we should start sending you downstairs in the middle of the night instead of me, but that suggestion doesn’t go over well.

  Look, I’m certainly willing to do whatever I can to protect all of you, but if it’s true that I should learn the craft of violence to do so, it follows that all men should do the same, and then we are back where we started, with men being trained for general mayhem because any one of us may decide, at any moment, to start throwing barstools around. This is the paradox of modern manhood: the culture simultaneously demands men’s “civilization” while asking us to retain our capacity for manly violence at the squeak of a floorboard.

  We despise violence and revere it. Of course, we are a (cough) civilized society, a society in which violence—except in times of war—is officially condemned but unofficially celebrated. Even today, violence sometimes carries a certain nobility. Watch any video of a neo-Nazi getting punched in the face and you’ll see what I mean. People love it. Hell, I love it.

  Violence is, and always has been, one of our chief forms of entertainment. We pay eighty bucks through pay-per-view to watch UFC guys wallop each other into literal submission. The biggest movies are about (mostly male) superheroes throwing planetary hay­makers at the galaxy’s evildoers, then dusting themselves off and having a good laugh about it. You, my son, have personally spent a good deal of your childhood playing Super Smash Bros., a videogame about otherwise friendly Nintendo characters dropkicking each other into another dimension.

  When you guys were kids, Mom and I struggled a lot about how to limit your exposure to violence. We did our best to police your media consumption; forbade you from playing violent videogames, especially first-person shooter games; and installed a “kid-friendly” Internet browser on the computer, which was supposed to filter out words like “boobs” and prevent you from seeing anything more traumatizing than what you might find on America’s Funniest Home Videos. Then you went to a friend’s house and watched his favorite movie, an ultraviolent revenge thriller called Max Payne, so basically what I’m saying is it was impossible.

  When women talk about “guy stuff,” they often mean exactly this sort of violent entertainment. Whether it’s sports or movies or videogames, it’s understood that guys thrill to violence. Some women obviously do, too, but the majority of the audience for this stuff has always been male.

  Why? What do we get out of it?

  Several studies have shown that animals are similarly drawn to violence. One study, from Vanderbilt University, concludes that violence in mice activates the same “reward pathways” in the brain as sex. Mice pick fights with each other for no other reason than they just want to rumble. Aggression appears to be a primal need in mammals.

  But that doesn’t exactly explain why people want to watch other people inflict violence. If violence triggers the same brain regions as sex, then maybe, as with watching porn, it literally turns us on.

  As boys, we grow up understanding that, at some point, we will almost certainly have to confront violence. Whether it’s wrestling or play fighting or actual punches being thrown in the parking lot after school, boys know that violence, in some form, will play a part in our childhood. It did in mine. Once, a boy I knew pulled a switchblade on me and called me a kike. Once a high school classmate jumped me in the hallway because I wouldn’t let a joke go. In camp, a bigger kid told me I was on his “hit list” and that he would be coming for me in the night. He never did, but I didn’t sleep the rest of the week. Once, as a young adult on a New York City street, I got coldcocked in the face because I stepped between a tourist with limited English skills and the three-card monte dealer who was trying to rip him off. I haven’t had many fights in my life, but I’ve had some, and I don’t think it will shock you to learn I lost them all.

  Those incidents startled me, scared me, hurt me. After I got punched in the face, I couldn’t fully close my mouth for two weeks. Violence, and the threat of violence, deflates you. Not, I think, because it causes physical pain but because it steals part of your soul. Worse than the times I rec
eived violence, though, are the times I inflicted it. Three times from my childhood trouble me to this day.

  The first was when I was about five. My brother had just come from home from the hospital after a surgery to correct his cleft palate. His mouth was swollen and tender; he had stitches in his lip. He must have been in pain. Your uncle and I rarely argued, even as kids, but for whatever reason we got into it that day, and before I knew it, I’d punched him as hard as I could in the mouth, exactly where he’d just had surgery. I remember how satisfying it was to hit him, and how that satisfaction immediately turned to horror when he recoiled from the punch, howling.

  The second time was when I was maybe nine. My dad and Beth had just bought their first house together. It was in a new development in an old cornfield torn up for spec houses. All that upturned soil had left rocks everywhere. Right after they moved in, Uncle Eric and I were visiting, wandering the new neighborhood sidewalks, when we ran into a group of kids around our age on the other side of the street, maybe three or four of them. I don’t know why, but we started taunting each other. Insults flew back and forth across the road. Before I knew what I was doing, I’d bent down and reached for one of the ubiquitous rocks, grabbed one, and threw it as hard as I could at one of the kids. It hit him square in the head. I can’t remember if he fell or not. Eric and I ran away. Later, the boy’s father came to my dad’s door with his son. Thankfully, he was okay, but they wanted an apology. They got one.