The military's hazing hell

Chants are used for various reasons -- to keep time while marching, to let off steam. But some are pretty ugly.

A kind of sinister cast came over a lot of marching chants during the Vietnam era and post-Vietnam. Probably the most famous Vietnam chant that has a chorus of "Napalm sticks to kids, napalm sticks to ribs." It's a macabre chant about the sadistic American killing everything in its way, including civilians and particularly children. The way I read that is as a kind of response to protesters stateside who were chanting at their rallies, "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today," and calling the soldiers baby killers. The soldiers are saying back, Oh you want us to be baby killers, we'll be baby killers. One doesn't perform these on the battlefield. They're performed in training rituals in this transition from civilian to soldier in order to desensitize civilians -- who've been raised not to kill anyone -- to be able to kill on demand in the name of the state.

And a lot of these chants alienate women.

That's really important. When you have an institution that exists in part to inscribe manhood on its members, you have this very intricate process of doing that by separating men from the civilian world, which includes [separating them from] mothers, sisters, girlfriends. When you take that rich tradition of separating men from the women back home, and then introduce women into the military, you're saying to the female soldiers, "You're not quite a part of this elite membership."

The military before racial integration had a history of staging things like minstrel shows. Those completely went by the wayside because you can't try to form this group cohesion and do it in ways that clearly alienate and scapegoat one portion of your group. Unfortunately, the misogynist practices have been much slower to be relinquished.

How much pressure are women under to fit in then?

An extraordinary amount of pressure. When new members enter the military, if you're successful, the last thing in the world you want to do is to draw any attention to yourself as different or unique in any way. And already if they're females, they're different. There's incredible pressure to suppress femininity and be one of the guys. When I asked women who've been in the military about the sexist jokes, many of them will say, Well, although I don't like them, I'm just not going to put myself out and say I don't like them because that will look like I'm not one of the group. And so they go along. Slowly, this is changing.

You found in your research that male initiation rituals still go on in the military.

Yes, it's something that's in the shadows. Typically, military rituals -- like fraternity rituals -- take the initiate into this dark underworld where they're deprived of sleep, infantilized and feminized. Often there's a good deal of homoeroticism. Simulated sex is not unusual. The problem is, what we're talking about are secret practices in a very closed institution and there's typically not a lot of scrutiny.

I write about one special forces unit in the Canadian military that staged an initiation practice in which the one African-American initiate was pulled around by a leash and a dog collar. Similarly, Lynndie England in Abu Ghraib was holding a leash attached to a crawling Iraqi prisoner. These practices, though horrifying, are unfortunately not that uncommon.

Some apologists for the administration have argued these [actions] are like the hazing that goes on in fraternities. The difference is that although the same thing might be enacted in a frat initiation, eventually and finally, the frat member is free to get in his car and go home if things get too tough. When an individual isn't free, that very act becomes torture.

I saw "Control Room" recently, the documentary about Al Jazeera. The director shows interviews with a few young American soldiers in which they're asked why they came to Iraq. Every soldier says, "I follow orders." How programmed are soldiers? How free are they to have their own mind?

While the institution of the military certainly says you are free to disobey an unlawful order, the lower down you go on the hierarchy the more premium is placed on absolute obedience as opposed to independent question of orders. The place I found it most troubling is when you look at the [advancement] of officers. One would think that if there's any place you would want to encourage questioning it would be at the officer level. Now, I'm not sure if it's still performed today, but just a couple of years ago, midshipmen (students training to be Naval officers) at the Naval Academy, as part of their summer basic training, were led into a prison interrogation system. The upperclassmen played the interrogators and dramatized a mock interrogation to frighten the neophytes. The plebes were psychologically abused and interrogated. It inscribes this idea that to be a good leader you must be a good follower. If you're going to get ahead you need to not get out of place in the chain of command.

The sexual undercurrent at Abu Ghraib and in these initiation rituals -- where does that come from?

The military is a kind of brotherhood. I would call aspects of these initiation rituals "cultic." Within that brotherhood, there's male love. It's not surprising that an erotic element is involved. But in this enactment of eroticism, there is also punishment.

I did quite a bit of work in Australia at the defense force academy. There, pranks went like this: A freshman would be charged with something bogus. It might be something as simple as, "The person you went out with this weekend was a dog. She didn't meet standards of acceptable beauty." There would be a fake trial. The end of the trial was always conviction. All of this existed for ritual punishment and it took various homoerotic forms. For example, they sprayed whip cream on a freshman's genitals and another freshman would have to lick the cream off him.

In Colorado Springs, at the Air Force Academy -- and this did reach the light of day and it was discontinued -- one guy would tightly hold an apple in his rear end and another guy had to eat the apple out of his rear end.

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