What does the Bible have to say about serving in the military?

As an aside, I think quite a bit of the non-combat immorality often associated with soldiers (drugs, sex, profanity, alcohol, rape, pillaging) is also partially explained by the unspoken definition of army as the camaraderie of those living by an intimately understood different set of rules. That would help to explain what my pastor told me before I left for basic training: a large percentage of Christian young men suspend their Christian morality and life- style during the 2 or 3 years they are in the army, and then revert back to it when they return. I anticipate your skepticism on all of this. Come on, you may ssy. Don’t try to tell us that 20 years of nurture can be upended by a few months of army training. So in anticipation of our discussion (which, of course, will expose more nuance than my starkly one-sided analysis), let me give you just a few examples of how the alternative values begin to supplant or at least co-exist with traditional ones. I’ll do it in bullet form if you’ll allow that pun.

Bullet: When I began basic training most of us were draftees—not volunteers. They didn’t want to be there. Nevertheless, within weeks they had us singing and marching to songs that glorified military camaraderie and disdained civilians. We were mainly unaware of the irony. Bullet: Later I was in officer candidate school. Of all people in the army, surely the leaders need to know and obey the rules. Surely they would teach us not to flout them. So one rule was that we must be in bed from 10 PM to 5:30AM. But every minute during the day was regimented. When could we polish boots, get equipment and clothes ready for inspection, do the academic study, and any thing personal like reading and writing letters? If we were naïve enough to ask, or even worse, try to use the impossibility of he rules as an excuse for not accomplishing all that, the sarcastic response was, “Ask the good fairy to do it.” So we went for months getting 2-4 hours of sleep per night, doing our work by flashlight, ready to hop into bed at a moment’s notice if our lookout spotted an officer coming. What’s the message in this? Live by the real rules; watch out for the official ones. bullet: Part of the time during that same officer training we were systematically underfed. One solution was to arrange to smuggle in a large quantity of fast food. But that was strictly forbidden, extremely difficult to arrange, and punished severely if we were caught. But periodically we were coyly asked if we had had a pogey run yet. That created an additional dilemma. Lying meant immediate dismissal from the program. Now in case your non-military minds are still reeling, wondering what is the unspoken message underneath this and between the lines, it’s this: at least one successful pogey run is virtually a graduation requirement. If you 50 guys are too dumb to muster the collective ability to evade the rules by organizing a pogey run when you are starving, how could you ever lead men in battle? That is the micro message. The macro message is this: it’s all about mission-win. Little impediments like rules are no excuse for failing in your mission. That’s the real rule, part of that alternate set of game rules, the unspoken one: accomplish your mission; win. So in almost any situation you do the calculus. Which set of rules apply? The official ones or the real ones? They exist uneasily side-by-side. And if I go by the real ones, what is the likelihood of getting caught? What are the consequences if I get caught? And how do those consequences compare with the consequences of following the official rules? In all of this I know, of course, that if I get caught, the official rules apply. The very existence of the real rules-- which were only unofficially taught-- will be plausibly denied. All of those considerations arise whether I am contemplating burning the village where the shots came from that killed my buddy, keeping a string of dead enemy fingers on my belt, doing an energetic interrogation, or just arranging a pogey run. So far in considering how to make ordinary people into killers, we talked about demonization, and depersonalization at one level. At a little deeper level there are psychological considerations which we don’t have time now to discuss. They include(more now than 40 years ago when I was there), the preparatory desensitizing effects of media and game violence before one even enters the military. There is also the effect of technology like bombs, missiles and drones allowing easier remote killing. Then, at a still deeper and more sophisticated level we looked at the ambivalence of the rules. But we need to return to that still deeper question of whether military training and war itself tend to mess with our very DNA. Let’s start with psychologist and retired U.S. Army Lt Col David Grossman’s description of basic training in an article titled “Killology” in Christianity Today. Brutalization and desensitization is what happens at boot camp. From the moment you step off the bus you are physically and verbally abused. Countless pushups, endless hours at attention or running with heavy loads, while carefully trained professionals take turns screaming at you. Your head is shaved, you are herded together naked, and dressed alike, losing all vestiges of individuality. This brutalization is designed to break down your existing mores and norms and to accept a new set of values which embrace destruction, violence, and death as a way of life. In the end you are desensitized to violence and accept it as a normal and essential survival skill in your brutal new world. Let me read you too a few snippets from the US Army website a few years ago. Again in bullet form. Note particularly the underlining I have added.

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