Drift

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If the eighty years that followed Holmes’s ode to soldiering is any guide, Americans share his suspicion of peace and his conviction that battle can be a source of existential meaning and personal uplift. This country developed a serious war jones. Even a bookish and bespectacled Princeton professor named Woodrow Wilson cheered “the young men who prefer dying in the ditches of the Philippines to spending their lives behind the counters of a dry-goods store in our eastern cities. I think I should prefer that myself.” We’d got in the habit of being at war, and not against some economic crisis, but real war—big, small, hot, cold, air, sea, or ground—and against real enemies. Sometimes they’d attacked us, and sometimes we’d gone out of our way to find them. It had got to the point that being “at peace everywhere in the world, with unmatched economic power and military might” was a condition to be downplayed, a losing political message, as if being at peace, in our “snug, over-safe corner of the world,” made us edgy, as if we no longer knew, absent an armed conflict, how to be our best selves.

CHAPTER 3 Let ’Er Fly

JOHN TRAVOLTA’S APPEARANCE IN AN ARMY PUBLIC SERVICE announcement—with production values on a par with early public-access cable television—is an oddly reassuring artifact from the ’70s, and a useful marker to show just how deeply Ronald Reagan changed the way Americans think about their military. Here was the not- yet-famous teenage Travolta, a fresh-faced if slightly confused-looking new recruit not long removed from the hallways of his New Jersey high school, pillow-lipped, goofily coiffed, weaponless, with his future star wattage tucked neatly into Army-issue olive drabs, receiving a ceremonial lei and a kiss on the cheek from a lovely and inviting Asian American woman. He was all smiles at the bargain the Army was offering him: free housing, thirty days of paid vacation (could be Hawaii!), a starting salary of $288 a month (“every month”), and, with so much paid for, enough cash left over to finance a new car.

The military marketers had started retooling their sales pitch when the unspooling Vietnam disaster had convinced politicians the time had come to end the draft. The Army brass had to get people to volunteer for military service, and they found themselves thrown into the business of devising new ways to improve its sagging public image and to showcase its most alluring features to potential recruits—give it “some romantic appeal,” as old Hap Arnold used to say. The good news was that recruiters no longer had to trundle their reels of film around to high schools and colleges; they could get to the boys right in their own living rooms while they watched popular TV shows like Laugh-In, Bonanza, Mannix, and—“Here come da Judge! Here come da Judge!”—The Flip Wilson Show.

“To achieve the goal of voluntary accessions, it will be necessary to greatly increase the reach and frequency of our advertising delivery, particularly against the prime target audience of young men,” the Army’s director of advertising and information confessed. “We must follow the lead of the razor blades, shaving creams, and automobiles, and buy the time necessary to deliver the audiences we need to reach.” Recruiting specialists found $10 million in the Army’s annual budget to begin selling itself in this mod new way, and handed the account to the venerable old agency N. W. Ayer & Son, who convinced the generals that they knew just how to talk to civilians. The officers in charge, however, were less than pleased when the admen pitched them the slogan “Today’s Army Wants to Join You.”

“Do you have to say it that way?” said the Army chief of staff. The retired general in charge of the Defense Manpower Commission was more blunt: “God, I just wanted to vomit.” But they grudgingly signed off, surprising even some of the ad executives at Ayer.

The “Today’s Army Wants to Join You” campaign flipped on its head the old ethos. The message was no longer about what you could do for Uncle Sam. Honor, Duty, Country? The fire from your guns is the fire of freedom? Whatever. Gunnery wasn’t a big part of the pitch. The Army was now selling all the wonderful ways Uncle Sam and the military could improve your life. And he wouldn’t even make you cut your hair that short. “We care more about how you think than how you cut your hair,” the Army reassured potential recruits. The initial test run of paid television advertising turned out to be a success— recruitment in the period jumped by four thousand over the previous year—but the ads also induced nausea in the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. He cut off funding for the advertising campaign, and the Army fell back to its mainstays: public service announcements and print ads.

Still, those print ads were stylish four-color magazine deals, featuring shirtless young men playing touch football on the beach, promising the opportunity to enlist with your buddies and go through basic training together… guaranteed in writing. “The Army wants to accommodate you. And the guys.” There were ads featuring the exotic emoluments of an extended European vacation: here you are in a green velvet jacket, high collar, long sideburns, sitting intime in a fashionable Parisian cafe with a beautiful blonde (could she be Swedish?), sporting a comely crocheted beret. This could be available to you from your posting with “one of seven crack outfits stationed in Germany… within easy reach of any free weekend, Italy and the Riviera are just a few hours away…. If you want to live and work where tourists only visit, drop us the coupon.”

For teenagers less enticed by continental savoir faire, like the guys who might have gone in for the old G.I. Joe Adventure Team, there were the ads in Field & Stream (“You get 12 matches, a knife, some twine, and 3 days to enjoy yourself”) that made military service appear to be a minimally weaponized Boy Scout troop where you could design your own special training mission. “And if your unit commander likes the idea,” promised the Army, “we’ll even supply the equipment.”

The Army’s new pitch was simple. Good pay, good benefits, a manageable amount of adventure… but don’t worry, we’re not looking to pick fights these days. For a country that had paid so dear a price for its recent military buccaneering, the message was comforting. We still had the largest and most technologically advanced standing army in the world, the most nuclear weapons, the best and most powerful conventional weapons systems, the biggest navy. At the same time, to the average recruit the promise wasn’t some imminent and dangerous combat deployment; it was 288 bucks a month (every month), training, travel, and experience. Selling the post-Vietnam military as a career choice meant selling the idea of peacetime service. It meant selling the idea of peacetime. Barf.

Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 changed all that in a hurry. Although it’s laughable enough in retrospect to have been deliberately forgotten by a Reagan-worshipping country only one thin generation later, “Reagan did not forget the impact, especially among conservatives, of his stand on the Panama Canal,” William F. Buckley would write in The Reagan I Knew. Reagan knew provocations to American strength and pride (“Uncle Sam putting his tail between his legs and creeping away rather than face trouble”) could easily mow down commonsense arguments where national security was concerned. Revving the American fighting machine into high idle, he’d discovered by the time he entered the Oval Office, made very good politics. And he was trained to be good at it.

During World War II, the Army Air Corps film unit had not only shown the Gipper the importance of public relations, it had made him a practiced hand at stirring America’s martial moxie. That had been his part to play, and he was proud of it. He’d starred in the Fum-Poo training short Jap Zero (“How soon do I get a chance to knock one of ’em down?”). He’d narrated Target Tokyo, the film story of the bomber crews who flew, as he intoned, “almost halfway around the world, to return a visit that had been paid to Pearl Harbor three years before. Pearl Harbor was on their minds now: the two thousand American men dead. Hickam Field in flames… there were other things on their minds. There was a triumphant feeling of being first, the advance guard of a long procession of superforts that would smash Tokyo.” Here was a spokesman who could utter, without betraying a hint of self-consciousness, lines such as “It’s shooting like this that will knock them on their axis” or “The Japanese—a people we used to think of as small, dainty, polite, concerning themselves only with floral arrangements and rock gardens, and the cultivation of silk worms.”

In his inaugural address in 1981, President Reagan got up and thrummed for all it was worth that old tried-