Category Archives: Military History

Hyman Strachman the Pirate AKA Troops Supporter

Hyman Strachman is a pirate. But he doesn’t fly the Jolly Roger, drink rum, hop around on a pegleg with a cutlass tucked neatly into a cummerbund, board ships while yelling “aarrr!” or call anyone a ‘scurvy bilge rat.’ Rather, he buys DVDs, makes multiple copies of them using a ‘duplicator’ and ships them to US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He has not kept an official count but estimates that he topped 80,000 discs a year during his heyday in 2007 and 2008, making his total more than 300,000 since he began in 2004….

That sounds like massive copyright infringement to me. And it is. But Mr. Strachman is not going to be brought to justice any time soon. Not even by the MPAA:

Howard Gantman, a spokesman for the Motion Picture Association of America said he did not believe its member studios were aware of Mr. Strachman’s operation. His sole comment dripped with the difficulty of going after a 92-year-old widower supporting the troops. “We are grateful that the entertainment we produce can bring some enjoyment to them while they are away from home,” Mr. Gantman said.

Mr. Strachman’s activity, if carried out by anyone else, for any other reason, would have brought the wrath of the Righteous Copyright Enforcers, sorry, the MPAA, on his head. But Mr. Strachman is doing it for ‘the boys over there,’ fighting for our freedom. So Mr. Gantman eases up, knowing well that if there is one line you do not cross, it is the one that would turn you into a non-supporter of the troops. (Except when you are going after retired generals speaking unfavorably about the conduct of wars overseas; then you load both barrels and fire.)

Of course, the studios have tried to help ‘our boys’ as well, ‘sending military bases reel-to-reel films…and projectors for the troops.’ The reason studios send ‘reel-to-reel films’  to military bases and not DVDs is that they are well aware that DVD-burners and laptops are a dime-a-dozen on bases, and that the young, just-above-teenaged soldiers who make up a sizable portion of the troops overseas are quite likely to respond to DVDs in precisely the same way that young, just-above-teenaged men and women in the US react to DVDs back home: They’d make copies of them or rip them and pass those on. The studios love ‘our boys,’ they just don’t trust them to observe the laws they are defending.

Note:  As expected, the New York Times article linked to above uncritically parrots an MPAA talking point:

Although the most costly piracy now takes place online through file-sharing Web sites, the illegal duplication of copyright DVDs — usually by organized crime in Eastern Europe and China, not by retirees in their 90s in the American suburbs — still siphons billions of dollars out of the industry every year.

It would be extremely useful for the Times to tell us how these staggering ‘billions and billions‘ numbers are calculated. For I have no idea. It would also be a useful enhancement of this debate if once, just once, the Times might talk about how movie attendance is enhanced by the word-of-mouth buzz created by the presence of ‘pirated’ DVDs and torrented versions of movies. Just once.

Buber, Eichmann, and the Death Penalty

As part of the discussion generated by my posts on the death penalty (prompted by the Anders Behring Breivik case; here and here), my colleague, the brilliant Noson Yanofsky, wrote in to say,

This reminds me of Martin Buber’s fight to keep Israel from executing Eichmann. His reasoning was not practical but moral. He lost the fight but generated a lot of discussion.

I’d like to thank Noson for pointing me to that episode in Buber’s life; its details are worth revisiting.

After his capture and kidnapping by Israeli agents in Argentina in 1961, Adolf Eichmann was brought to Israel and placed on trial.  The resultant high-profile prosecution by an Israeli court, needless to say, generated intense debate in both philosophical and legal registers (Hannah Arendt‘s memorable Eichmann in Jerusalem anyone?). Initially, Buber resisted the idea of trying Eichmann in an Israeli court rather than an international one; for him, the ‘victims’ had  mistakenly cast themselves as judges. While making it clear he was not advocating a pardon he suggested too that the idea that Eichmann had indulged in a unique evil was mistaken. Buber met David Ben-Gurion to ask the death sentence not be carried out, who replied that while he personally didn’t care about the sentence, the then Israeli President Yitzhak Ben-Zvi most assuredly did.

Buber’s opposition to the death penalty for Eichmann, unsurprisingly, was grounded in his reading of the Scriptures. In particular, that the Commandment, ‘Thou Shalt not Kill’ applied to the state just as much as it did to the individual. As Buber said, ‘I do not accept the state’s right to take the life of any man.’ He noted that though observance of the Commandments could often be intractable, ‘as far as it depends on us, we should not kill, neither as individuals nor as a society.’ Later, after Time would quote Buber as quoting Rabbi Mendel of Kotsk, “What the Torah teaches us is this: none but God can command us to destroy a man”, Buber wrote in response that the sequel to these words was even more significant: ‘And if the very smallest angel comes after the command has been given and cautions us: Lay not thy hand upon…, we should obey him.’ Buber would also say to Newsweek, ’The death sentence has not diminished crime–on the contrary, all this exasperates men…Killing awakens killing.’

Notably, Buber believed that executing Eichmann could lead German youth to believe that by this ‘symbolic justice’ they had been relieved of the guilt for the Holocaust. Presumably, this would also relieve them of the need to engage in moral reflection about the larger German role in it, over and above the actions of the National Socialists.

(Source: Maurice Friedman, Martin Buber’s Life and Work, Wayne State University Press, 1988, pp 355-359)

Buber’s opposition, then to the death penalty, invokes theological, practical and moral considerations, the same ones that continue to inform all thoughtful opposition to the death penalty today. While this case is an unusually high-profile one, and the magnitude of Eichmann’s crimes throws Buber’s opposition into particularly sharp focus, the same issues recur in every dramatic, supposedly singular instance of human wrongdoing thought to be punishable by the death penalty.

Update: Noson has pointed me to a very interesting paper by Erica Weiss titled ‘Finding Neo-Israelite Justice for Adolph Eichmann‘. (Journal of Hebraic Studies, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Spring 2009), pp 169–188)

We Robot 2012 – UAVs and a Pilot-Free World

Day Two at the We Robot 2012 conference at the University of Miami Law School.

Amir Rahmani‘s presentation Micro Aerial Vehicles: Opportunity or Liability? prompted a set of thoughts sparked by the idea of planes not flown by human beings, and in turn, the idea of an aviator-free world.  It has been some 109 years since Kitty Hawk, and in that time we have come to the point that we might seriously consider the idea of all aircraft being exclusively robotic (I should hasten to add that I doubt man will ever stop flying but at the least, a very significant attenuation of the role of the pilot looks likely. Peter W. Singer’s Wired for War notes, for instance, that UAV operations in Afghanistan, which account for a significant percentage of all aerial operations in that theater of operations, are carried out by desk-pilots working from home bases in the US. The culture that has sprung up around that community is interestingly different from that of pilots who fly combat aircraft from front-line bases.) While I generally welcome the idea of a ‘robotic uprising,’ i.e., a  greater role for robots in our society as a means of spurring greater introspection about ourselves and our place in this world, in this domain I find the idea of a pilot-free world curiously melancholic. And it is entirely unsurprising that such a thought is sparked by a set of deeply personal interests: After all, I did grow up on air force bases, watching jets take off, and admiring, like only young boys can, all those impossibly dashing, crew-cut, sunglasses-wearing aviators (then, they were exclusively men; now, women have joined the ranks of armed forces aviators as well).

The twentieth-century might have been the century of the pilot, and all the imaginative possibilities associated with the image of man borne aloft on wings, above this grubby world, into the skies, placed in a position, as John Gillespie Magee put it, to ‘reach out and touch the face of God.’  It was a century that saw the rich flowering of  a literature born from  the radically different viewpoint of man that aviation  afforded its practitioners (and those who admired them).  Antoine Saint-Exupery was a product of that century, as was Michael Collins (whose Carrying The Fire still remains one of most literate and passionate books about aviation and manned space flight).

So my concern here is not so much the loss of employment for pilots, a rather mundane economic worry. Rather, it is the idea that a whole domain of creative imagination might be lost. Hopefully, new creative possibilities might spring into being. Perhaps the little flying that will be done by humans in the future will generate a new form of literature, one that sees the aviator’s role not as a ‘worker’ flying airlines or as a ‘soldier’ flying combat aircraft, but returns perhaps to the original role of the aviator as an adventurer trying out and flying radically new craft. Perhaps. More on this possibility later.

‘A Ramble of Banalities’: Hitler’s Table-Talk

In his review of Heike B. Görtemaker’s biography of Eva Braun (Eva Braun: Life with Hitler, Knopf, translated by Damion Searls, reviewed in The New York Review of Books, April 26 2012, Vol LIX, Number 7), Anthony Beevor notes:

Hitler’s “table-talk,” a ramble of banalities and crassly sweeping judgments on history and art, recorded as if he were a latter-day Goethe by a would-be Eckermann, revealed his hatreds quite plainly.

Two notes:

1. The Goethe-Eckermann reference is, of course, to Conversations with Goethe by Johann Peter Eckermann, the book famously referred to by Nietzsche in the following section (#109) from The Wanderer and his Shadow:

The Treasure of German Prose.  Apart from Goethe’s writings and especially Goethe’s conversations with Eckermann (the best German book in existence), what German prose literature remains that is worth reading over and over again?  Lichtenberg’s Aphorisms, the first book of Jung Stilling’s Story of My Life, Adalbert Stifter’s St.  Martin’s Summer and Gottfried Keller’s People of Seldwyla — and there, for the time being, it comes to an end.

2. I’ve never read anything by Hitler, but I have seen videos of his speeches, where he does not seem to ramble.  But in The Mask of Command, John Keegan does us all a service by providing us a sample of Hitler’s “table-talk.” As Keegan notes, these transcripts were recorded by a note-maker, Heinrich Heim, who was ordered to do so by Martin Bormann. Here is an excerpt:

When all’s said, we should be grateful to the Jesuits. Who knows if, but for them, we might have abandoned Gothic architecture for the light, airy, bright architecture of the Counter-Reformation? In the face of Luther’s efforts to lead an upper clergy that had acquired profane habits back to mysticism, the Jesuits restored to the world the joy of the senses….Fanaticism is a matter of climate—for Protestantism, too, has burnt its witches. Nothing of that sort in Italy, The Southerner has a lighter attitude towards matters of faith….It’s remarkable to observe the resemblances between the evolution of Germany and that of Italy. The creators of the language, Dante and Luther, rose against the ecumenical desires of the papacy….I must say, I always enjoy meeting the Duce. He’s a great personality. It’s curious to think that, at the same period as myself, he was working in the building trade in Germany. Our programme was worked out in 1919, and at that time I knew nothing about him….If the Duce were to die, it would be a great misfortune for Italy. As I walked with him in the gardens of the Villa Borghese, I could easily compare his profile with that of the Roman busts, and I realised he was one of the Caesars….Italy is the country where intelligence created the notion of the State. The Roman Empire is a great political creation, the greatest of all. The Italian people’s musical sense, its liking for harmonious proportions, the beauty of its race! The Renaissance was the dawn of a new era, in which Aryan man found himself anew.

And on and on and on. Albert Speer notes, ‘[T]he collection includes only those thought significant. Complete transcripts would reinforce the sense of stifling boredom’. Phew.

Incidentally, I’ve only just discovered Hitler’s Table-Talk 1941-44: His Private Conversations (Translated by Norman Cameron and R.H. Stevens, Introduced and with a new Preface by H.R. Trevor-Roper, Enigma Books 2000). I certainly don’t have the time or the inclination to read the whole thing, but there is plenty of material in there to strike us numb.

Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will: Still Scary After All These Years

I have a confession to make: I had not seen Leni Riefenstahl‘s Triumph of the Will till Friday evening. I’ve talked about it, seen clips from it, read critical essays on it, and even seen a biographical film–The Wonderful, Horrible, Life of Leni Riefenstahl–about its director, but never seen Triumph Des Willens itself. On Friday night, thanks to its availability on Netflix, I fixed this gap in my movie viewing.

An unavoidable response to a cinematic document that is so beautifully constructed but that has such malignant associations is to experience violence done to our vocabulary of aesthetic predicates: Which parts of our language of critical appraisal can we bring to bear in describing the movie without feeling they have been tainted by such association? This question, explored almost endlessly in all scholarship on Riefenstahl’s masterpiece, is not going to find any particularly perspicuous answers being mounted here, other than for me to note that I am now familiar with the visceral nature of the dilemma it poses for anyone perplexed by his appreciation of the movie.

More chillingly, when noting the date of the movie, and its location in the series of denouements that culminated in VE Day, the viewer cannot but wonder if there are records of our age that will be viewed in the future with the same mixture of fascinated horror; we too, like the ecstatic crowds that greet Hitler in Nuremberg, do not know what lies ahead.  Hitler’s joyous reception in Nuremberg, with its images of smiling, laughing, exulting, women and children, running toward the Führer to welcome him to their city, also makes us wonder how many of those same citizens died in the war to come, how many of them realized this visit by the Nazis to their city was the foreshadowing of a death sentence as the Nazis took Germany, Europe, and the rest of the world into war. The pictures of massed Seig-Heiling crowds are by now passe, but there is still a curiosity to them, to witness the orchestrated maneuvers that made the raised arm the most famous and enduring symbol of fascist power.

Riefenstahl, having mastered the grammar of propaganda, utilizes much else to establish the Nazi vision of collective power. Her shots of virile young men engaged in eating, bathing, and wrestling, are as important in this project as any of the more well-known massed parade or marching shots.  Ironically, so sensitive has the viewer become to the racial politics of Nazi Germany that it is with a slight shock that one realizes, all over again, just how little so many of its party functionaries resembled the blond, blue-eyed robust Teutonic ideal, and how many instead, appear pale, sweaty, obese, undistinguished specimens of mankind. (We are also relentlessly, inevitably, reminded of the clichéd banality of evil as these officials issue boring party progress reports at the Nazi Congress.)

Perhaps I can best sum up my response to TOTW by noting a little moment of heightened sensitivity that it had created in me. At the twenty-one-minute mark, as Hitler inspects the Youth brigades of the Nazis, I noticed a young man, standing in the ranks for inspection as the Führer walks by them, who seemed to possess the semitic features that Nazis were so keen to isolate. With bated breath, I wondered if the Führer would notice. But he does not. I exhaled, feeling slightly ridiculous; the carnage to follow would still claim its terrible toll.

Workplace Coercion, the Military, and Resisting Superiors

Corey Robin’s post on Arizona’s new anti-birth control legislation centers on a recurring concern of his: coercion in the private sector work-place, which remains largely impervious to constitutional circumscriptions of state power. I want to use this opportunity to talk about coercion in a very particular workplace: the military.

The coercion of subordinates by superiors in the military workplace is pretty much a constitutive aspect of it; there is a  ’chain-of-command’ structure to be internalized, and the constant reminder that failure to obey orders–speedily and effectively–can be a matter of life and death. In terms of its sheer ruthlessness, its pure, unadulterated veneration of the superior, its near-perfect integration into the very concept of uniformed service, and in the sense of futility it can induce in a junior, there is nothing quite like a military hierarchy. Obey, conform, or hit the brig.

To run up against an obnoxious manager in any workplace is bad luck indeed; if it happens in the military, it can bring about career ruination. There is seemingly no recourse, nowhere to turn; very few juniors in the military complain about their superiors, for very little can be done. Nothing is more common in the tales that servicemen tell about their times in the services than the story of the sergeant, the captain, the lieutenant, the air marshal, who was the “biggest bastard that walked the face of the earth.” The stories of career trajectories derailed by the malign intervention of a superior are legendary among those who serve in the military; if a retired veteran ever urges his children to not bother emulating him, in all likelihood it is because he cannot bear the thought of his children going through the same agonizing repression he did.

Given this, it should have come as no surprise to me that in the many interviews I conducted with veterans–for the two books I have written on military aviation history–the most vivid conflicts recounted, even by those men that had fought in wars, were not against their ostensible enemies, but against their superiors on their own sides. The same man who could brush past, in a minute or two, the story of how he had carried out a rocket attack on tanks in the face of raging anti-aircraft fire, would take a leisurely ten minutes or so to describe to me how, back on the ground, he had bucked the trend, stood up for himself, and asserted common-sense, or perhaps just a little bit of the contrarian, in the face of a superior’s thickheadedness. This clash would be described in great detail, with every contour of the conflict mapped out with great precision: this is where I was sought to be oppressed, and this is where I resisted.

Sometimes, I wonder, if this reaction of theirs was revelatory of an insight worth transferring to other workplaces: that sometimes, resistance to an insidiously planted and constantly reinforced regime of power and regulation can be harder than summoning up the courage to face up to sudden, even-if-prepared-for, danger.

This Summer I Hear The Drumming, Sixteen Dead in Panjwai

It seems a peculiarly American destiny, hovering over the heads of this nation and its people, to keep on reading, in the morning papers, news paragraphs like the following:

Any accelerated withdrawal would face stiff opposition from military commanders, who want to keep the bulk of the remaining American troops in Afghanistan until the end of 2014, when the NATO mission in Afghanistan is supposed to end. Their resistance puts Mr. Obama in a quandary, as he balances how to hasten what is increasingly becoming a messy withdrawal while still painting a portrait of success for NATO allies and the American people.

A military presence in a foreign land; a seemingly endless, intractable, formless conflict; a political establishment confused about war objectives, tactics, and strategy; military and political commanders at loggerheads; the calculus of troop withdrawal, as always, juggling with face-saving devices as the original provenance of war’s declaration and continued execution fades into a remote past; these are all familiar components of wars persecuted overseas.

And now, it seems, another more gruesomely familiar piece can be fitted into this emerging puzzle: the cold-massacre of innocents, carried out by a member of the military. US Army Sergeant X (we do not know his name as yet), coldly, deliberately, kills sixteen civilians in Panjwai District in the province of Kandahar.  He goes on a deadly walkabout a mile from base, hunting door to door for prey, breaking in to kill at three separate locations. At the end, he collects the bodies of eleven victims, which include four girls, and cremates them.

Assessment of Sergeant X as psychopathic is likely; he is in custody and presumably, the wheels of justice, military and civil will now grind to dispense the appropriate punishment. Well, one can hope; let us not forget that the gentleman whose name sprang to some folks’ lips when they first heard the news of the Panjwai massacre, Second Lieutenant William Calley, was convicted, found guilty of killing twenty-two villagers, given a life sentence, but only served three and a half years under house arrest.

But the policies, mechanisms, and machinery, both political and military that brought Sergeant X to Panjwai, that kept him there, along with thousands of other US troops (and their Afghan henchmen) will not be on trial along with him. Sergeant X will be tried as isolated singularity, as exception, the lens narrowly focused on him and his deeds. Synoptic perspectives on his presence in the midst of his victims will be in short supply; laser-like precision of diagnosis and prescription, discarding broader political views, will be much more popular.

Of course, what makes Panjwai genuinely tragic is that it was foretold: dirty wars like Afghanistan inevitably dehumanize and produce these moral catastrophes. The question was when, how often, where; the genuine curiosity was only directed, perhaps, at the eventual body count. Sergeant X has had a small, walk-on part to play; he has performed it with gruesome efficiency. The rest of the accompanying charade can now be kicked off.

Why Write and All That – I: Bargains Struck

Two recent articles about writing, writers, and writing as a job–Tim Parks in the New York Review of Books blog and Seth Godin’s interview at Digital Book World–prompt me to take on the insufferably self-indulgent business of being self-referential. The issues covered in the pieces linked above should be familiar: Why write? Is writing a career? Should you get paid for it? Do you have a right to get paid for the work you make available to your readers? And of course, the modern favorite: In today’s ‘digital economy’ where readers supposedly ‘expect content for free’ how is a writer to be paid?

This set of issues, despite its familiarity, is extraordinarily rich, and I can only make some preliminary remarks here. (I expect to write follow-up posts.) In so doing, I hope I can offer some insight into why it is people write, and why, I think, writing will persist as an ‘occupation’ understood broadly, even if no one is getting ‘paid’ for it.

I write from a curious position in this discussion. I’m an academic and I don’t expect to make money from my writing. Or rather, I do not write for the direct income of royalties, but–initially at least–for the financial security of tenure and promotion, and now, to secure my academic reputation and to circulate my ideas. My two academic books thus far have secured for me a quasi-permanent job in the academy and I am now free to write for the rest of my career on those topics that interest me. As I do so, perhaps I will learn a bit myself and engage in the pursuit of ‘knowledge’ in a way that is of use to others.

My first book was non-academic, and while it neither secured my reputation in the academy nor helped me circulate any particularly significant intellectual ‘ideas,’ it did do a great deal for me. First, I performed an act of personal archaeology by writing about a war in which my father had fought; in so doing, I learned a great deal about him, the times he lived in, and the men who worked with him. Second, I did justice to an older self of mine, one that was obsessed about aircraft and the men who flew them. Third, I learned a bit of history. Thus, I was edified in the emotional, intellectual, and personal dimensions. Fourth, I also made several friends; many of the veterans I interviewed for one, and my co-author. (We did not meet in the flesh until after the book had been published!) Lastly, my writing improved: I learned how to organize chapters, construct a narrative, edit, revise, ruthlessly delete redundancy and irrelevance, all skills that would help me later in writing my academic books.

I made very little money from the sales of the book, but it seemed not to matter, for I hadn’t set out to. When I started work on the book, I was a post-doctoral fellow; when I completed it, I was in a tenure-track position. The two checks I have received thus far have paid for an airfare–for one person–to India, and some books.

So I wrote a book, and got in exchange: Learning, the making of friendships, the honing of a useful skill, the engagement with self-discovery, an airfare, some books. All this seems to add up to a very good bargain.

Surfaces scratched. More later.

Labor Relations in Low Earth Orbit: The Skylab Strike

Three weeks ago,  the world celebrated the twenty-eighth anniversary of the end of the manned portion of the Skylab mission. Well, not really. Enthusiasts of manned space exploration certainly did; others had to be reminded. Students of the history of science can edify us about the scientific value of the three Skylab missions (meant to replace Apollo 18, 19, and 20). My interest here is to note the significance of Skylab for labor relations in space: the crew of the third Skylab mission, which lasted eighty-four days–Gerald Carr, William Pogue, and Edward Gibson–went on strike for a day during their stay before relenting and going back to work.

Their story remains a fascinating one, one illuminative of the dynamics between a rigid, controlling, science-regulating administration and a group of workers ostensibly selected for their discipline and the psychological wherewithal to resist the stresses of space. (By noting this incident, I do not mean to diminish the crew’s activities, and to reduce their twelve-week stint in space to this story.)

From the moment the crew went into orbit, their lives were a blur of experiment and regulation, tightly controlled by NASA at Houston. For every single second of their waking days the crew was prodded, poked, telemetered, scanned, and required to work through long, tedious check-lists of activities; every bodily function had to be recorded and regulated; this was, after all, a mission whose primary objectives included the study of the effects of long-term habitation in space. The interior of the Skylab space station might have been 350 cubic meters but there was nowhere to hide from Ground Control. This was a scientific experiment, on taxpayer expense, and NASA intended to get its money’s worth.

The trend of excessive, panopticon-like control of the crew had been set from the very beginning, when Bill Pogue had vomited shortly after arriving at the station, and decided, in collusion with the other members of the crew, to not  report the incident back to Houston. But the crew were being monitored and eavesdropped on, and soon they were being castigated like a triplet of hand-in-cookie-jar-schoolboys and being warned that all such incidents had to be recorded and reported. That early ‘eavesdropping’ incident was by far the most trust-destroying interaction between the crew and Ground Control.

Faced with remote discipline at its extreme, the crew asserted resistance. The crew acquired notoriety for ‘complaining’; they certainly had the most combative, unvarnished conversations ever with Houston, a far remove from the usual, sanitized excerpts that read, ‘Houston, all systems go, we are ready to go spacewalk and provide wonderful visuals’. Finally, matters came to a head, as Pogue, Carr and Gibson ‘took a day off’. I do not remember what Pogue and Carr did on their self-enforced furlough but Ed Gibson, the Caltech solar physicist, retired to the solar observation station and spent the entire workday recording images on his own sweet time, not bothering to make any detailed entries in his lab handbooks. ‘Negotiations’ followed; work schedules were altered; expectations adjusted, and work went on.

The Skylab story prompted much discussion about the regulation of work in space including suggestions the ’revolt’ really wasn’t one. But these do not discount the contentious, irritable, edgy relationship between Houston and Skylab-IV, and they certainly do not refute the notion that even highly motivated, highly trained, military types and scientists, fully convinced of the value of their work, when placed in an artificially controlled, too-tightly-regulated environment, are likely to find conditions oppressive and push back.

Barbells for America? Crossfit, the Military and War

On any given day, if you were to click over to the Crossfit ‘mainsite’,  the chances are you will find a reference to the military  in the daily entry. Today, on February 25th, the blog prescribes a ‘Hero workout’ named ‘Zimmermann‘ named after U.S. Marine Corps First Lieutenant James R. Zimmerman, who died in action in Afghanistan. (The  ‘Hero’ workouts are almost invariably named after men; recently, one of them, ‘White’, was named after a woman, U.S. Army First Lieutenant Ashley White, who, like Zimmermann, died in action in Afghanistan.) The ‘mainsite’ often features photographs of members of the military working out at US bases all over the world, service members frequently write in the comments space, and occasionally articles with a military or national security orientation are linked to on the blog; Crossfit affiliate gyms all over the country offer discounts to the military; the annual fund-raising event Fight Gone Bad raises money for wounded servicemen; and many affiliates celebrate Memorial Day by performing the ‘Murph’ Hero workout (named after Navy Lieutenant Michael Murphy, killed in action in Afghanistan).

There is, it appears, something of the military in Crossfit’s genes. (This is partially explained by the fact that service members were among the first to adopt Crossfit training routines and that much military physical training already incorporated aspects of the Crossfit training methodology.)

So, is Crossfit ‘militaristic’, ‘pro-war’, ‘jingoistic’, ‘right-wing’, ‘cheerleaders for US imperialism and expansionism’, or whatever else? The answer, like that to any interesting question, is complicated. The flavor of the ‘mainsite’–moreso in the past–often seemed to indicate a facile ‘yes’ answer to those questions. (When I was first directed to the ‘mainsite’ by a Crossfitting friend, he warned me to ‘stay away from their frightening right-wing politics’; when I got to the site, I found an article by Charles Krauthammer just below the daily workout entry.)

But as Crossfit’s popularity has grown, and as the demographic associated with Crossfit has diversified from a core population made up of  servicemen, law-enforcers and firemen–the three groups that until recently, were the only ones to receive membership discounts; my affiliate now offers discounts to teachers–the ‘orientation’, such as it is, of Crossfit, has become more ambiguous. Crossfit doesn’t just mean Air Force crewmen working out in hangars; it also means Berkeley grads sprinting on beaches in North California; it doesn’t only conjure up images of crewcut privates working out in remote mountain outposts, but also those of post-natal soccer moms discussing paleo recipes (and perhaps even skinny-jean clad hipsters riding gearless bikes to the daily WOD).

The Crossfit world is made up of thousands of affiliates each with its own particular flavor, style, demographic, geographic location, and culture. And many of those who Crossfit now don’t like wars in general, they don’t like the wars the US wages, they think the best way to ‘support our boys over there’ is to bring them right back home so that they don’t get killed in action (and stop killing others), to stop spending money on drones or stealth bombers, and to spend it on public schools, infrastructure, and basic scientific research instead. Their membership, enthusiastic participation, and responses to Crossfit’s connections with the military complicate any easy answers to those questions.

Many Crossfitters disdain the political implications of a workout regime: ‘I workout, move the weight, sweat the work, and I’m done. I stay away from the politics.’ This apolitical response works most of the time. But at times like Fight Gone Bad, or at the Memorial Day ‘commemorations’, as one performs ‘Murph’, it is hard not to have to face up to the question of what affiliation with, or participation in, a perhaps-militaristic culture might entail for one’s own political commitments. (This complication is especially enhanced by that all-too-common exhortation, ‘Even if you don’t support US foreign policy, you should be behind the brave servicemen and women, out there, doing their jobs’).

I cannot–and will not–attempt an answer for anyone else that Crossfits. (I do hope that by writing this post, I can raise questions for any Crossfitter to consider. ) All I can do is offer a few thoughts about my personally complicated implication in all of this.

I’m a naturalized US citizen, I have marched in anti-war marches, I find the culture of masculine violence veneration obnoxious. But, I also write books on military aviation history; more particularly, air wars in the Indian subcontinent; members of my family–my father and my brother–have served in the military (the Indian Air Force); my father fought in two wars–the 1965 and 1971 wars with Pakistan–and picked up a gallantry medal. Some of my most enjoyable childhood memories are those of watching jets–afterburners on–take off; some of my most pleasurable adult experiences have been of interviewing war veterans for my books.

Pro-military? Anti-military? For the ‘boys’? Or against them? Comfortable with Crossfit’s connections with the military, or not?

The answer, I think, is a mishmash of many competing impulses. The comfort-seeking apolitical part of me disdains a conceptual connection between a workout regime and a political orientation; another part, the one that thinks ‘the personal is political’, is made uncomfortable by my association with a ‘culture’ or ‘institution’ that is so passionately pro-military and perhaps militaristic. These responses are made ambiguous by my personal identification with members of the military; I find myself striking up conversations about service life with servicemen quite easily; I think of myself as a ‘military brat’ and find empathy with the children of service members. And somehow, I still cannot bring myself to think that when I do a ‘Hero’ workout I am honoring the memory of the fallen. To do that, it seems to me that I should work to ensure no more children are ever orphaned by war, that no more families ever have to confront the sight of a funeral casket. My father, someone that actually fought in a war, as opposed to those who merely cheer for it from the sidelines, described it as ’90 percent boredom, 10 percent confusion’; he refused to glamorize war and disdained the telling of tall war tales; he urged me to think about careers other than that of a fighter pilot; and by making sure I read more than just war comics, made me think about the politics that makes war possible.

The sum total of these competing impulses is ultimately determined, as it is for most people, by their own personal connections with Crossfit culture. I don’t ‘do Crossfit’; rather I work out with a group of folks that I can best describe as my friends, at a highly particular, specific location: Crossfit South Brooklyn. This, for me, isn’t Crossfit so much as it is ‘The House That David Built.’ It might utilize Crossfit training methodology but its deployment is uniquely personal and idiosyncratic. If there is an ideology on display here, it is that of working hard, and accepting as much diversity–in fitness yes, but in every other dimension as well–as possible. Fitting in here is easy just because the space accommodates so many in all their variety.

When I interviewed veterans for my books, to a man, they said their most important motivation in any display of courage was invariably personal; they fought not so much for flag or country but for the men, their friends, who worked with and alongside them; quite simply, they didn’t want to let them down. In my participation in Crossfit ‘culture’ a decidedly less martial variant holds true; I work out with my friends in a space that is accepting of my political stance, and in the end that is all that seems to matter. Last year, I dedicated my ‘Murph’ to my father and my brother. And even though I do not think performing a ‘Hero’ workout will honor the memory of the fallen as much as working to end wars will, if performing it helps someone think about war and its cost, then I’m all for it. In the end, it’s perhaps best to find– within this particular space–my personal orientation to the questions it raises and to answer them in my own way. What that way is, is something I’m still figuring out as I move on. (That is, when I’m not performing a workout or recovering from one; at those times, my mind is fixated, almost exclusively, on the demands my body is making on me!)

I remain, as always, deeply curious about what other Crossfitters think about the questions raised in this post, and would love to engage with their answers to it.