American Tough Guys

>"He had a lot of frustration with what an insurgency is--that we are fighting a bunch of cowards who won't fight us man to man, who hide amongst women and children, who don't wear uniforms."
American soldier describing his sergeant in the 101st Airborne in Afghanistan, from Raffi Khatchadourian, the New Yorker July 6&13, 2009.

>"They wouldn't fight us like men. They wouldn't wear uniforms. They'd shoot at us from the fields and run away.They should have stood and fought, like men."
Former German soldier explaining why it was necessary to shoot villagers who lived near the scene of an attack against German troops, The Sorrow and The Pity.

>"In 2005, he forced nearly seven hundred prisoners, wearing nothing but pink underwear and flip flips, to shuffle four blocks through the Arizona heat, pink handcuffed together, to a new jail...The men were strip-searched both before and after the march...Arpaio also told reporters, 'I put them on the street so everybody could see them.' He marched another nine hundred this April."
William Finnegan, The New Yorker July 20, 2009.

>"This is not us. This is not America," President George W. Bush, in a televised speech about Abu Garib prison photographs showing naked, blindfolded prisoners forced to form human pyramids.



So what is a tough guy? Who is Us? Are these guys, Sheriff Arpaio in Arizona, the officers of the 101st Airborne, the jailers at Abu Garib not Americans?

I think they are very American. They are American Tough Guys. Our home grown phony Tough Guys.

To my mind, a real tough guy is the little kid who faces an apparently physically superior opponent and goes right at him, as if being smaller, weaker in body meant nothing. It's the old, "It's not the size of the dog in the fight; it's the size of the fight in the dog," thing.

David might have been considered a tough guy, conquering his fear of the giant. From the giant's perspective, however, David should have been forced to fight with a sword and from Goliath's point of view, David's use of technology which allowed him to strike from a distance and to run if he missed, might make David a coward who should have stood and fought like a man.

One question: Is it possible to be "brave" in the asymmetric warfare of the American army vs the Afghani insurgents? Is the sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona a tough guy only as long as he is surrounded by armed deputies?

From where do American males get their notions of bravery and toughness?

There's a great Second City line, "You ain't gonna become a great basketball player working moves against your father in the driveway. You got to play inner city on the playgrounds with no referees."

At some level, white American males like Sheriff Joe Arpaio, and like Colonel Michael Dane Steele and his murderous sergeant Eric Geressy,of the 101st Airborne in Afghanistan, all know they have been playing in the driveway their whole lives, protected and supported by the Man. And they know, deep down, they are wusses.

Overcompensating wusses.

In my white suburban high school, members of the wrestling team could look across from their locker room into the locker room of the basketball team. After practice, the wrestlers were always pretty beat up, dehydrated, mauled really; it was all they could do to pull on their clothes over the battered shoulders and necks and hips. They look across the hall to the basketball players in their dressing room, trying to get all inner city in-your-face with each other, doing the male displays of pseudo ferocity.

And the wrestlers would shake their heads and look at each other from under their brows and smile. "Tough guys," someone would say, and everyone would laugh. The wrestlers knew what tough meant.

Tough meant stepping out on the mat with nobody but yourself on your team. Tough meant when the whistle blew you had to step toward your opponent, never take a step back, and there was nobody to pass the ball to, no heavy artillery or helicopters to call in to help.

Anyone who has watched The Wire from start to finish knows what tough is. Those inner city Baltimore kids on The Wire are tough guys, heaven help them, and not because they really want to be. They have to be. They are as tough as any one in Mogadishu. And they are not imagined characters, they are not fiction. Nobody could make those kids up. Those are kids who David Simon and Ed Burns know. They have no parents, no homes beyond what they can scrounge in a vacant building, no support beyond the drug organizations for which they work as hoppers on the corners, which treat them as dispensable pawns. Those kids exist on the corners of every American inner city. They are tougher than Col. Steele and certainly they are tougher than Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

So who is tough?

Let's examine the American tough guy, Colonel Steele. (Great name for a tough guy.)

"We give the enemy the maximum opportunity to give his life for his country."

Cute, huh?

How about, "The guy that is going to win on the far end is the one who gets violent the fastest." Steele exhorts his guys to "whip somebody's ass." His soldiers are going to go after the enemy and, "Kick their feet out from under them...bring them back and put them in a room...give them an open-mouth kiss and tell '''em we love 'em...If you mess with me, I will eat you. You're the hunter. You're the predator. You're looking for prey."
(Khatchadourian, New Yorker)

Steele walked on to the University of Georgia and made the team as an unrecruited offensive lineman. That's how tough he was. Of course, that is only one step away from playing in the driveway with your father.

It's not exactly surviving on the corner in Baltimore.

So he gets to Mogadishu and he tries to be all tough with a helicopter and all the firepower of the United States Army and he gets his ass handed to him and loses eighteen soldiers. Those corner boys in Mogadishu didn't have to make tough talk and hang a sign above their office door, "Carnivore." They were looking across into Steele's locker room and laughing at him.

Of course it's frustrating when the other guys don't get dressed up for game day in their uniforms and they see your guns and your airships and they decide they can hurt you by being smarter than you.

It's no surprise there are people like Sheriff Joe in Maricopa, Arizona. He's real tough, as long as he's got the attack dogs on his side.

When he builds his tent prison he says, "I put them next to the dump, the dog pound, the waste disposal plant." He creates chain gangs. He gets himself a tank, paints the howitzer muzzle with flames and paints "Sheriff Arpaio's War on Drugs," on the sides. He has his jailers overpower prisoners, fourteen to one (real brave guys these jailers) has them strap the prisoner in a restraint chair and Taser them with stun guns. Got to be tough to do that.

That men like Sheriff Joe exist, is no surprise. He runs his own little Abu Garib right out in the Arizona desert.

But what is really interesting is President Bush's remark that this sort of sadism is not what America is like, at its core. Americans are not like this. This is not us.

Or is it? Sheriff Joe has been elected to five four year terms in Maricopa County.

For twenty years he's been parading prisoners and everyone in Maricopa County knows what he is doing. The good people of Maricopa County cannot even claim, as the Germans claimed when the concentration camps were opened, "We were unaware of this evil."

There's a great scene in Band of Brothers (the HBO adaptation of the true story of Easy Company) where the 101st Airborne liberates a concentration camp just outside a picturesque German village and the soldiers of the 101st airborne in 1945 are sputtering with rage and they storm into the village and confront the villagers who claim they had no idea.

"No idea? That camp is less than half a mile from here: On a hot day, when the wind shifts, you had to smell it from here."

I'm not sure any of the soldiers from the 101st Airborne which liberated those camps would recognize much more than the screaming eagle patch about the current 101st Airborne.

On the other hand, there were soldiers of the 101st who refused to shoot Afghani men who were simply digging in fields, farming, when the soldiers arrived.

Ordered to shoot, the soldiers refused.

Now that was tough.