"Heroic Masochism: Masculine Privilege and the Uses of Pain"

 Paper by Steven L. Gardiner (Excerpt Below)

Steven Gardiner's writings on basic training are among the most profound I've read on this topic. The objective of basic training is to make the innocent recruit  into a man.
 Hammer was in the military when we first begam interacting, he conveyed his experience as follows: "I knew they were trying to kill me."

Basic training converts a young male into a man, that is,
someone who is able and willing to die for his country.

COMPLETE PAPER IS HERE (CLICK)

“Move, move, move! On the line, private!” The drill sergeant shouts. The recruits stand to attention, eyes forward, back straight, heels together, toes apart at a forty-five-degree angle. “Don’t lock your knees.”

The minutes drag on, standing in the hot sun. Most of us are not used to standing without locking our knees and it is tiring. Someone, inevitably, locks his knees. Sometime thereafter, his eyes roll back in his head and he falls, planting his face in the pavement. Sometimes he loses a tooth or two, and sometimes not.

I witnessed this on my own first day of basic training at Fort Sill, Oklahoma in 1982. A veteran informant from the Korean War era told me a nearly identical story from Biloxi, Mississippi and I collected similar stories from Vietnam War era veterans. Life imitates popular culture imitates life, round and round in a narrative circle that never quite closes.

What, then, is the meaning of such a scene? I submit that one meaning is entailed by the production of exemplary victims. Line up a random group of four hundred young men and insist they stand at attention and the results are predictable: someone will fall unconscious.

No one who participates in such an event can fail to take the point: everyone is vulnerable, and anyone could tire and collapse. Inculcating this sense of vulnerability and uncertainty is the trainer’s task. He punches a hole through the layers of psychic defenses—e.g. norms of conduct, decency and humane values, or alternatively rebellious or aggressive tendencies—with which the recruit defends his sense of self.

This process has never been better captured than in Stanley Kubrick’s Vietnam War film Full Metal Jacket (1987). Basic training is in all cases infused with theater, and Marine Corps boot camp is perhaps the most fulsomely dramatic in the American tradition. Lee Ermey’s character, Senior Drill Instructor Hartman—a paradigm of drill sergeants—makes explicit in a single speech what real world recruits become aware of only over time, often unconsciously. The verisimilitude of his speech, however, will be attested to by virtually any Marine Corps or US Army veteran.

Sergeant Hartman:

If you ladies leave my island, if you survive recruit training... you will be a weapon, you will be a minister of death, praying for war. But until that day you are pukes! You’re the lowest form of life on Earth. You are not even human-fucking-beings! You are nothing but unorganized grabasstic pieces of amphibian shit! Because I am hard, you will not like me.

But the more you hate me, the more you will learn: I am hard, but I am fair! There is no racial bigotry here! I do not look down on niggers, kikes, wops, or greasers; here you are all equally worthless! And my orders are to weed out all non-hackers who do not pack the gear to serve in my beloved Corps! Do you maggots understand that?

The mission, in Hartman’s words “to weed-out all non-hackers,” is one of classification, to produce in the embodied experience of the recruits visible signs of non-belonging, of being what Mary Douglas called “matter out of place” (Douglass 1966: 50). The “non-hackers” have to be identified, so that the drill sergeant can rip them out by the roots and throw them away. That is, recruits are interpolated as if they are abject—that which must be expelled from the body, or the social body: excrement, garbage, pus, rot—the dead (Kristeva 1982).