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One of the things that President Trump seems to admire most about his embattled defense secretary is Pete Hegseth’s vision of warrior masculinity, a vision Hegseth has attempted to impose on the military, through the firing of qualified high-ranking female officers, the denigration of long-established rules of engagement, and even the proposed screening of service members’ testosterone levels. These efforts are taking place at a time when many young American men are facing a very real crisis, but they don’t seem to have landed among their target audience: Male voters younger than 30 swung 40 percent toward Democrats in the midterms, one of the election’s largest such demographic shifts.
In this episode of The Permanent Questions, David Brooks talks with Phil Klay, a Marine Corps veteran, National Book Award–winning novelist and story writer, and close observer of the effects that our 21st-century wars have had on American soldiers. Klay explains why Hegseth’s version of manhood is bad for men (and the military), why warfare can never be stripped of its moral meaning, and why love is the greatest masculine virtue.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
David Brooks: There are at least three important things going on in America right now. The first is that men are struggling. Lots of young men are out of the labor force entirely. Lots of young men are depressed. Suicide rates for young men are vastly higher than suicide rates for women.
So that’s one thing going on. Second, we’re living with the consequences of probably three failed wars in the 21st century. There was the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, and currently the war in Iran. That means there are a lot of young men—and women—who’ve been through those wars, who fought in those wars, who are trying to live with the consequences. This is a culture that is hurting in a lot of different ways. And along comes Donald Trump.
Sometimes I think the Trump administration is a big advertisement for a certain sort of masculinity. It purports to be a solution to our cultural problems—that we’re gonna have a bunch of manly men and womanly women and we’ll return to a kind of gender relations that, according to some people, were healthier.
Personally, I’m not particularly thrilled with what Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump are selling. I’d like a different social ideal, especially for guys. I’d like a different masculine ideal than the ones being offered today. To figure out how we could get to a healthier masculinity, I’m gonna hash it out with Phil Klay.
Phil is a Marine veteran of Iraq. He served as a public affairs officer in the Anbar Province between 2007 and 2008 during the surge. When he returned home, he became a writer. His collection of short stories called Redeployment won the National Book Award in 2014. His most recent book of nonfiction essays is Uncertain Ground: Citizenship in an Age of Endless, Invisible War. He was recently selected to become the president of PEN America.
It’s a real pleasure to welcome Phil Klay to this table.
Phil Klay: Thank you for having me.
Brooks: Manhood is in dispute. What should men be like? What should people be like? How do you be honorable? It seems to me there have been a series of social ideals that young men in particular were supposed to follow and this was held up as their social ideal. If you want to be a young man, be like this guy. You go back to ancient Greece, you got Achilles. He’s a rageful warrior. Then you got Pericles, who’s a magnanimous man. The magnanimous man serves his country. Magnanimous man is kind of aloof and standoffish. George Washington is our version of this. Then you go to Jesus and St. Francis. You get a very different masculine ideal, which is about compassion and peace. Jewish prophets and sages, which is like an intellectual ideal.
You go to the Renaissance, you’ve got the courtier. There was this book—I’ve always wanted to write a book like this—Castiglione.
Klay: I’ve read that. It’s quite something,
Brooks: How to be a courtier, how to be elegant and graceful.
Klay: Sprezzatura—you do everything effortlessly.
Brooks: Right. Chivalric knights like Lancelot, and that’s an ideal. Then you get the 18th-century Enlightenment. You got a Ben Franklin kinda guy who studies everything on the Earth. He’s curious about things.
Then you get my hero, the gentleman in Trollope, and Trollope novels always revolve around a gentleman who is not highborn necessarily, but who has a virtuous life.
And then in one of those interesting cases in American history, it’s the end of the 19th century. America seems to go through a moral panic every time a war generation starts dying. The Civil War generation starts dying in the 1880s, 1890s, and people decide: “We’re not tough enough anymore. We’re losing the best of us.” So they start football to train people. And then Teddy Roosevelt, who was part of this masculine revival, gets together with his friend Owen Wister, and Wister writes a novel called The Virginian, which invents the cowboy. The strong, silent type, and that’s another version, the Gary Cooper, John Wayne type.
Klay: Roosevelt thought that warfare was deeply important to the creation of American identity, right? I mean, this is his book about the West. How do you make one people out of all these different ethnicities from different regions? What is the heat for the melting pot to actually melt these people into one? And he thought it was warfare.
Brooks: William James writes The Moral Equivalent of War around this time. I think that view was harder to take after World War I because war became so horrible.
If you ask me what is our version of a masculine ideal today, I’m not sure I could point to one that would be—well, nothing’s universally accepted anymore—maybe Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, standing up with the bloody ear. But if I was a young kid, male or female, I’m not sure what I would look to.
Klay: Right. Part of the thing, too, is that we have these cartoonish ideals. So Hegseth seems to be performing a kinda masculine role, and it is very sort of image-focused. He talks about how he’s going to restore warrior culture after supposedly wokeness has destroyed it.
It was bizarre to me, when in the midst of the Iran war not going well at all, Hegseth takes the time out to produce this high level of production video about how they’re gonna inject testosterone into troops and we’re gonna be the “High-T Department of War.” That’s quite different than, say, the speech in The Symposium, where we get Socrates as a masculine ideal, and warfare is a part of it, that he is a successful soldier, but also loves wisdom, and he’s a much fuller human being and man.
I don’t think it would be a good thing to have one narrow image of masculinity, any more than I think it would be good to have any one narrow image of what it means to be a good person. I’m a Catholic. I like the fact that the saints are a very bizarre and raucous group of people. So many of them seem to share almost no qualities with the others, except for love of God. But people do need models, and it does seem like the model that is on offer is not actually a kind of traditional model of masculinity, but a kind of cartoon amalgam of things.
Brooks: Does it even make sense to talk about a masculine ideal? Have we entered a world where—we used to say we’re beyond race; are we beyond gender? Should we just talk about a human ideal, or is it important to think, Well, men probably need some different role models than women?
Klay: I think we experience ourselves as bodies. The bodies that we’re in are the way in which we experience the world. We’re not just sort of abstracted intelligences that happen to be attached to particular types of meat.
So I do think it’s important for people growing up to think, How do I be a good man in this society? How do I be a good woman? It’s just that that needs to be a diverse range of things and not simply narrow, hidebound categories.
Brooks: There are some people who say, “I don’t see race,” and some people say, “I don’t see gender,” but I think those are both bad ideas. When you see somebody, their race or their gender are part of who they are.
Klay: It’s part of how they’re treated in society. It affects them.
Brooks: There are studies that show if you don’t see gender, you have a more dehumanized view of the person. You’re not seeing who they are as humans. And I think we would have common agreements about what honor is. For example, I think of honor as taking virtuous action under risk, including sort of confidence from command. How do you think about—well, let’s start with honor. How do you think about that? So presumably when you were in the Corps, honor was a big deal.
Klay: Honor is also about the role that you have. It’s not simply an abstract category. If you’re a Marine, there are certain types of virtues that you are meant to have. It’s perfectly fine to be somebody who’s physically cowardly but tries to exhibit virtues and honors in other ways. But then you probably shouldn’t join the Marine Corps. There are certain types of roles that demand certain things.
If you go into public office, there are certain ways that you should comport yourself and behave that are very different than if you’re a writer, if you’re a commentator. If you’re a general commanding troops, the way that you speak about military politics and policy needs to be very different than if you’re me, throwing spitballs from the sideline, and that’s because the role that you have imposes certain obligations upon you.
Especially in the current era, there’s a way in which everything becomes flattened. We’re not always attuned to the way that institutions have their own ethical codes that for people inside them to be honorable, they have to live up to.
I don’t think that the sort of apolitical institutional ethos of the military necessarily jives with your average person’s opinion of what the military’s supposed to do, what it’s supposed to achieve. There was this sort of perpetual—I think especially in the first Trump administration—“the generals will save us” kind of attitude. My issue with that is the generals are not supposed to save us. If we’re in a democracy and you’re relying on the generals to save us, then we’re not a democracy anymore.
And so there’s a kind of internal professional code which is very important that is importantly separate from the broader political conversation or broader sense of where we should be going as a nation and kind of what moral horrors we’re doing or what good things we’re doing. And someone understanding their obligations in that sense is, I think, a part of honor.
Brooks: There are certain institutions that are thick and certain that are thin, and thin institutions, people pass through, and they’re not affected. You meet a Marine, you know in five minutes. Somehow it comes up in conversation, or you can tell.
Klay: We have been accused of being a cult.
Brooks: It’s cult-like, but in a very admirable way. You’ve got all the things that you want in a thick institution. You’ve got an origin story. There’s that cabin where you guys were founded.
Klay: Tun Tavern.
Brooks: Yeah, Tun Tavern. Then there’s all the history, but then there’s sacred rituals. There’s a phrase, “semper fi.” There’s everything you would want. There’s ordeals people go through.
Klay: There are also models, a diverse set of models for you to look up to, right? When you’re going through training, you get told all these stories of Medal of Honor recipients and great Marines of the past who have done important things and that offer you a kind of guidepost of what you’re supposed to be like.
Brooks: And there’s a saying, it’s probably G.K. Chesterton or somebody like that, that every man who didn’t serve feels inferior.
Klay: Johnson: “… thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier.”
Brooks: I feel that. I graduated from high school in 1979, and we were all watching M*A*S*H, and the military seemed absurd at that time, and it never occurred to me to serve. Now I regret that, and I feel a little less for it, actually. Not that I would’ve been a great soldier or anything.
But how would you say you were formed, going through this process, whether it’s officer candidate school or service abroad?
Klay: One of the funny things about the military is, in some ways, you think about it—it is the most practical, straightforward thing that we’re doing.
The military engages in hard power in the real world, and yet precisely because of that, because the stakes are so high and so immediate and so direct, military training is a lot of moral formation.
Yes, there’s a code of ethics. There are ways you are supposed to be as a Marine that will mean that other people can count on you. There’s a certain type of American individualism that needs to get broken down. Being called an individual by a sergeant instructor—
Brooks: It’s not a good thing.
Klay: It’s not a great thing in the military.
Samuel Huntington said, If modern man will find his monastery, it will be in the military. It is one of these anachronistic institutions which has not faced this relentless pruning of all of those things that don’t seem immediately utilitarian and practical, but it’s actually deeply interested in that kind of formation of people.
And some of that formation is more iffy than others. I remember we got history classes when I was in OCS [Officer Candidate School], and I remember the U.S. involvement in Cuba in the early 20th century was described to me by a sergeant like this: Cuba was a baby bird, and America was the mama bird helping it fly toward freedom.
Brooks: That’s exactly how the Cubans put it.
Klay: Is that how the history professors here at Yale describe the early 20th-century involvement in Cuba? I’m not sure.
Brooks: Sometimes when I’m embedded with troops or around any Marines or soldiers, sailors, whatever, I always think six months ago, these kids were hanging around the 7-Eleven parking lot. Somehow they are radically changed.
Would you say it was actually true that your individualism—we live in a pretty individualistic culture—was, I don’t know if I wanna use the word beaten out of you, but somehow formed out of you?
Klay: It’s not beaten out of you. And let me tell you, there are some individual characters in the Marine Corps. But it’s changed.
Your sense of yourself as being a lone individual capable of changing the world, the sort of Ayn Rand, John Galt kind of idea, it just doesn’t apply. A Marine alone is not a military unit. In a military order, a Marine alone executes the lost Marine plan.
You’ve got to get back to a unit to be meaningful in some sense, which is not to say that they’re not individuals who are especially valuable to the unit. So I do think there is something important that does shift in your sense of yourself and how you can impact the world.
It’s interesting that Marines, veterans as a whole—it’s not just that they come back and they vote more, but they also join civic groups more often. And I think that’s kind of a natural understanding. A lot of political life we tend to think of as me saying the things I believe. And that’s supposed to be meaningful. And self-expression is tremendously meaningful. It’s deeply important.
But I always, as a writer, feel a little bit shamed when I cover people who are doing the real work of change, you know? I’ve been involved in writing about people working on, say, Afghan resettlement, and I’ve gotten plaudits for writing about that.
It’s very easy to write about that. It’s another thing altogether to week by week, month by month, year by year, be working on that incredibly brutal and often really depressing issue, where you are constantly encountering human misery and trying to make it better, where you’re one of the people who is tracking legislation and what votes can be changed, and what is shifting with the status of people’s cases, and what leverage points you can use, and what people need when they get in, and what kind of groups can you reach out to.
And that’s a lot of work, steady work, that only gets achieved by people coming together in organizations over a long period of time.
Brooks: I wanna talk about that struggle to do change in groups. It seems to me it requires this weird balance between idealism and realism.
There was a moment that really pissed me off. This is not a political podcast, but JD Vance said that people don’t fight for abstractions. It was a Republican National Convention speech. People only fight for home.
I had read a book years ago called For Cause and Comrades by the Civil War historian James McPherson. He looked at 25,000 letters that Civil War soldiers wrote home. And these people were not bragging in public. They were just writing to their spouses. And the idea that they were not fighting for ideals would’ve been absurd to them.
Klay: It’s an insane thing to say. It’s not even something you need to argue at the level of ideas. You can point to examples.
Brooks: I’m looking at some of these letters. One of them, a Pennsylvania officer: “Sick as I am of this war and the bloodshed, as much as I want to be home with you, dear wife and children, every day I have a more religious feeling that this war is a crusade for the good of mankind.”
Another Union soldier’s wife asked him to come home: “You’ve fought enough.” And he writes back to her, “If you esteem me with a true woman’s love, you will not ask me to disgrace myself by deserting the flag of our union. Remember that thousands went forth and poured out their life’s blood in the Revolution to establish this government. It would be disgrace to the whole American people if we are not noble sons enough with the spirit of ’76 in their hearts.”
So there’s this idealism that I think is driving most people, and I think you would say in Iraq—most of the people enlisted, the complicated reasons, but you and others thought they were trying to do some good for the world.
Klay: Yes. There is a host of reasons that people join the military. Some of them like money for college, to get ahead. And some of them: “I really, really believe in this war and want to fight in it.” Some of them, complicated.
I know a guy who protested the war in Iraq and then joined. He thought that he had an obligation as an American, and then he ended up going to Afghanistan, because you don’t choose where you go. But for most people, there’s a mixture of factors. And for most people, idealism is absolutely one of them.
If you’ve been a part of warfare—which is the most morally consequential thing that a nation can do—if you have been a part of killing and have had people that you know killed, the “why” of it matters. It matters a lot.
To bleach all talk of moral purpose and idealism out of that I think is quite awful. And again, I actually do think that this kind of talk is related to the fact that we lost.
Brooks: I hadn’t thought about it that way. I had thought this kind of talk is related to something another administration figure, Stephen Miller, said to Jake Tapper about a year ago, which is: You may believe in international cooperation and all those niceties, but war is about power.
Life is about power. And he’s basically summarized—Thucydides had it in the Peloponnesian War. The Athenians say, “The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.” And he’s like, “Deal with it.” And so it’s an amoral view of war, and it’s almost a super macho attitude. See how tough I am? I can see through all this bs that people have surrounded it with. I see into power.
Klay: I think that’s an unbelievably naive view. My maternal grandfather was a career diplomat. He actually accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of Henry Kissinger because he was the ambassador to Norway at the time, and it was such a contentious prize that Kissinger didn’t wanna receive it himself, so to kind of blunt the impact—
Brooks: So your grandfather pocketed the money, did he?
Klay: That would’ve been nice.
His next posting was Czechoslovakia in 1976. The fall of Saigon had been the year before. We’d had Watergate. You’d had America going through military defeat, moral crisis, political crisis, and there were a lot of things that were happening.
Czechoslovakia was an interesting country. It was a small arms powerhouse, actually provided about 10 percent of the small arms to the Viet Cong in the Vietnam War. It had a school for revolutionaries, was training people from all different continents in how to do revolution, had links with the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization], a lot of hard-power stuff.
But if you were to go back and ask what was the most important thing in terms of world history that happened while he was there from ’76 to ’78, you would say easily the most important thing was that a group of writers and intellectuals and former politicians put out a manifesto called “Charter 77,” arguing for human rights.
Essentially what had happened was there’d been a conference where the Soviets wanted the final borders in Europe sort of solidified, and the Europeans asked them to agree to the Helsinki Final Act, a commitment to human rights, which nobody who was a realist thought meant anything, because the Soviets aren’t gonna give people human rights. They’ll say, “Okay, we’ll sign this document.” George Kennan, the great diplomat, just said it was a bunch of wrangling. Kissinger dismissed it as a sop to the left. Within six months, there’s a group documenting abuses in Poland. Soon after that, the East Germans are asking the Soviets for support because East Germans are using the Helsinki Final Act to argue for human rights and other things.
Then in Czechoslovakia, similar thing, where they’re asking the Czech government to live up to their own promises. One of the authors of that document, Václav Havel, is the president 13 years later. You cannot write the history of the fall of communism without talking about that.
During that time, my grandfather met with the Vatican foreign minister, and he said, “You know, it’s really interesting that in the wake of all this, there’s been a sea change in foreign affairs, where Russia, which was accustomed to playing the role of judge in international relations, now stands in the position of the accused.”
I think you, in terms of geopolitics, ignore the moral factors at your peril. And if you think that the only thing that matters is power, hard power, you’re a fool. How many divisions has the Pope? asked Stalin. But the Catholic Church is still going strong, much better than Stalin’s project.
Brooks: I covered the end of apartheid in South Africa, and I went to ask somebody there—we had this big debate in the US about sanctions, and do you think they helped end apartheid? He said, “You know what really did it? It was not the economic sanctions; it was the sports sanctions. That our teams could not play, and we felt shame, like we are worthy of shame.” And the same in the Soviet Union. I covered that too.
But the question I wanted to ask you—and this is in the military, but also in you’re doing anything. You’re doing any kind of social change, and you’re driven by it and partly by ideals. But then life is just hard, and I think every soldier in every war thinks, These idiots are fighting this badly. They’re not protecting our lives right. Or you’re doing social change, you’re trying to tend to the homeless, and homeless people, like all humans, make stupid decisions some of the time.
So you win some and you lose some, and it’s easy to get ground down and lose your idealism, because the reality is so hard, and everything takes so much longer than you think it does. So how do you maintain idealism within circumstances that are almost tailor-made to disillusion you?
Klay: It’s quite a painful process. I do think it’s an important one.
Derek Walcott in his Nobel speech says, “Shatter a vase, and the love that pieces it back together is greater than the love that admired its symmetry when it was whole.”
If your ideals can’t take a battering, then they’re not much. So forging a hard, realistic idealism—it’s the task of anybody who wants to take American citizenship seriously.
I love this country passionately. This is a complicated country with a complicated history that’s done a lot of evil and is doing evil, and also has done a lot of good and has the potential for doing a tremendous amount of good.
Taking that seriously and thinking it through, and also understanding that the evil that we do as a nation, even if I disagree with it, does reflect on me.
Brooks: I’ve always admired the way the Greeks, who did a lot of fighting, developed this tragic sensibility. They wrote a lot of tragedies, and they thought tragically that we’re all flawed, and we all do stupid stuff, and we are all tempted to do really savage stuff, and people around us are gonna do savage stuff.
It gave you a sense of humility, I think. It also gave you a sense of caution because, as Thucydides argued, in politics, the lows are lower than the highs are high, which means when you screw up, the pain is much worse than the benefit you get from when you do something right.
I’ve always been impressed that Albert Schweitzer was this—he was an organist in the 19th century. He decides to become a doctor and serve the poor in Africa and goes down there, and he says, We never hire anybody who thinks they’re doing something wonderful. We only hire people who think this is a job that has to be done the way you have to do the dishes.
And I’ve always admired that. That sensibility is a sturdy form of idealism that can survive contact with reality.
Klay: I remember talking to a veteran teacher who was, like, 30 years in a very difficult public school in New York City, with very disadvantaged students, lot of issues within the school. She hated those movies where some new young teacher goes in—
Brooks: Hero teacher, yeah.
Klay: —and saves everybody. And she’s like, “I never saved anyone.” She goes, “I’m creating a space. Think of it as my porch. And sometimes there’s a student who’s all the way on the other side of the road, and it’s not even like a normal road. It’s like an eight-lane highway. And I’m just like, ‘Come over to the other side of the road.’” You hear that from a lot of people: This is no work for messiahs.
Brooks: I want to get a little back into your autobiography, because there are decisions you made and conditions you now live with that I want to ask you about.
The first is when you enlisted to go to join the Marines. And the Iraq War starts in 2003.
And I was a supporter and wrote columns about why it was a good idea. I lived through democracy in Europe, Soviet Union, and South Africa, and I thought, Why should the Arab world not get to enjoy what the rest of the world is going through?
And that was my basic rationale.
I wrote in April 2004 a column confessing I was wrong. And this—I mean, I can’t complain. It was hard, even for me. I’m not over there serving, I’m not doing anything, but I’m just writing. But it was really hard to admit that I’d made a mistake on this big issue in which people really did suffer. So that was 2004 April.
You joined May 2005. You joined at the bottom of the war. I want you to talk about that. But then you come home after service, and you have this moving passage, I think in one of the essays here in Uncertain Ground, where you walk through Arlington Cemetery, and you go through the Civil War graves and you think, Oh, they ended slavery. You go through the World War II graves, you think, Oh, they defeated fascism.
But then you go to some of our more recent wars, and it’s more problematic—complicated, let’s put it that way. So first, what drove you to enlist at the bottom of the war? And second, when you come out of a war that we lost, how do you live with that?
Klay: The feeling was anger. Anger looking at those graves.
Brooks: Because of the way the country had treated—
Klay: Because of waste.
You know, it’s very funny. Probably at that time, I thought of those people as like my peers. I have three kids now, so I think of them as children now. A lot of them are so young. And some of them died in efforts that, you know …
I remember there was a journalist who was with a Marine unit in Afghanistan during the surge in Afghanistan, and one of the Marines there says to him, “This war is stupid. So what? Our country’s in it.” That’s a guy who thinks, The second we leave, the second we leave, this is going back to the Taliban.
And they’re out there walking over ground where there could be an IED any day, and they’re losing friends. That’s not the failure of that young Marine. That’s a collective failure, and that’s a failure of leadership.
So, yeah, what do you have after a failed war except regrets and rage at the waste and suffering caused?
But you asked about why I joined. So I never wanted to join the military as a kid. I was never one of those kids. I wanted to be a diplomat like my grandfather. But family has a big respect for service. Mentioned my grandfather. My dad had been in the Peace Corps, which is not quite the Marine Corps. My mother worked in international medical aid for a long time. And actually I’m one of five boys, and three of us ended up joining the military—two Marines and one Army.
I go to college September 2001. So 9/11 happens, and I’m actually in the woods. So while all of America is experiencing this kind of in real time as this horrific media event—we have these images on repeat, and you’re waiting to see what happened—and I’m in the woods.
And then we meet people who are like, “Somebody flew a plane into the World Trade Center.” And we’re like, “You can’t fool us just ’cause we’re out in the woods.” So I come out and the world has changed, and very quickly we’re at war in Afghanistan, and very soon we’re gonna be heading into war in Iraq.
So I decide that if I wanna serve my country, the thing to do is to join the military. So I do my training in the junior summer, so 2004. And then when I graduate, you can either accept a commission or turn it down.
And I supported the war in Iraq for actually much of the same reasons. I was sort of compelled by the humanitarian case for war. This is an evil dictator. There’s only gonna be continued suffering under him, and even after he dies, there’s no good option, and ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, right? And so therefore, the evils of war are gonna be weighed against the evils of the perpetuation of this regime, which is not just bad for its own people but for the surrounding region, and so on and so on and so on. I found that compelling at the time.
Then of course we go in and very rapidly becomes clear that this was not well thought through, that I think—Donald Rumsfeld’s a pretty disastrous secretary of defense who never really seriously grappled with or tried to source resources for dealing with the kinds of issues that were foreseen. And so we have an escalating insurgency.
In a way, that made things easier for me, because when I joined, it wasn’t like: Should we be at war or not? It was: What do we do now? And I thought I could make things better or be a part of an effort to make things better. I certainly felt that we had a clear obligation to Iraq to try and bring down the level of violence. So that’s what I thought at the time.
Brooks: You were in Anbar, which is where the surge was happening, and if anything was successful in that war, I would say the surge was a success.
Klay: Right. So we left feeling like we were winning. We went into a very violent place, and I was not doing anything. I was a public affairs officer. I was a staff officer, so I was doing a very safe job in a very dangerous place, would probably be the way to put it. But I saw a lot of the region. I saw certain range of things.
When we came in, Anbar was the lost province. And the unit that was doing base security for us, which was this National Guard unit, I remember they arranged like a video teleconference to a town hall back home with their families back home.
The families are all excited. And I remember the battalion had handpicked guys to represent the battalion to their community. So these are not your worst sergeant, or whatever. And they were all just like, “What do we tell them?” ’Cause these guys have been through all 2006, and they’re like, “What lies do we tell them? Because we can’t tell them the truth.”
And then they start like, “Well, we’ll tell them the truth when we get home. Will we tell them the truth when we get home? How long?”
And then the unit that replaced them came in mid-2007, so violence was just dropping off a cliff in Anbar, and they left feeling like rock stars. I left feeling like we’re winning and we’ve cracked the code, and we’ve got the data scientists to show, and the strategy is sophisticated.
And I remember in 2009 talking to a Marine who was heading over to Helmand Province, Afghanistan, and I asked him, “How are you gonna be successful in Helmand Province?” And he said, “Through cultural effectiveness,” which is of course what he was being taught. It’s like a young kid. And of course he goes into a very violent deployment.
Brooks: You come out of that and you’ve mentioned the rage you feel, which I assume is rage not only for the leadership, but there’s some disillusionment that you go through.
One of the things that struck me is that this disillusionment, the sense of bitterness—and I’ve encountered it in many veterans of that war, both those wars—is somehow overlapping with a larger male disillusionment.
You look at the male statistics, they’re not great. And I mentioned some of them, but the number of young men who are committing suicide, the number of young men who are out of labor force, the number of young men who are graduating from college is much lower than women.
So there’s a general sense of disillusionment, which in some ways, if you went through the war, that’s a different and stronger form, but it is grappling with a country that has let you down. Let’s put it that way. How have you experienced that? When you talk about the rage, I imagine it’s not only Donald Rumsfeld and George Bush, but you talk a lot about just the whole system, the way the military is so divorced from civilian life these days.
Klay: So I think there’s alienation, which is a little bit different than disillusion. Alienation is just part of that divide between soldier and citizen that people can sometimes feel, which is important, I think, which happens after every war.
And also, I think alienation from the person you used to be and the community that you’re from. I mean, Odysseus comes back to Ithaca and doesn’t look like he remembers, and the only person who remembers him is his dog. So this is not unique to modern warfare.
But the dissolution, it does come from being offered the most meaningful thing, and then having it mean nothing.
Brooks: What do you mean by that?
Klay: I have a friend who’s talking about—everybody wants purpose, right? You don’t just want states of hedonistic pleasure. That’s not a life. You want a meaningful, purposeful life and a sense of identity, and the Marine Corps offers you that.
It offers you an identity, and it offers you a war that is supposed to achieve grand things. And when you are overseas, the stakes are life and death. What could be more meaningful?
I have a friend, he’s a novelist and essayist, Elliot Ackerman, who served in the Second Battle of Fallujah in Special Operations, and he talks about war as like freebasing on purpose. It’s the pure, raw, uncut heroin of purpose. The decisions you make could mean somebody alive or dead.
Then you come back. And it’s not just that civilian life feels not that freighted in every interaction, though that is a problem. I think that there is a kind of thing where sometimes in the military, and it’s a dangerous temptation, there’s this contempt for civilian life.
It’s almost like you come back to civilian life and—if you just put a mountain of salt on everything that you ate, I could take you to the greatest restaurant in the world, and you would take a bite and you would say, “It needs more salt.” But it’s not that it needs more salt; it’s that your palate’s messed up.
So there’s this sort of thing of: All right, civilian life is really important, and also it’s really hard in different ways. One of my friends, his hardest leadership challenge was when National Guard unit’s deployment to Afghanistan was canceled. Because there were a bunch of guys who were like, “I was really looking forward to putting all the issues of regular life on hold and being like, ‘Sorry, babe, I’m in Afghanistan.’”
So there’s that, which is the way in which you can sort of alienate yourself from civilian life—can lead to a kind of dissolution or an inability to see the fact that the only reason that you fight in the first place is because a normal, boring, unexceptional civilian life is a beautiful thing of infinite value.
We used to say in the military like, “America’s at the mall, but we’re at war.” And I remember being in a Buy Buy Baby not far from Walt Whitman’s house, trying to figure out the difference between like 6M and 3 to 6M onesies and thinking like, “Huh, we’re at war and I’m at the mall. But my baby needs clothes.”
So there’s that. And then the broader question is: You’re in war, you’re making decisions over life and death, you know people who died, and then it failed. So even though it felt like the most important thing, none of it mattered in terms of that higher purpose that you were supposed to be fighting for. That was the only reason to send you there.
Brooks: I would say you had purpose and then sort of had it taken away. And I would say a lot of young guys never had a sense of purpose. If you know why you’re here, then you can handle whatever setbacks. But if you don’t know your “why,” then you really don’t know.
Klay: It’s purposeless suffering that’s unendurable.
Brooks: Fifty-eight percent of college students say they have no sense of meaning in their life.
Klay: At a broader level, I think that there’s a kind of general question, but America has always been a project toward the future, toward a more perfect union.
There’s this sort of question of what America is in terms of the sum total of its parts is not what America is. What America is is that collective effort toward something. And I feel like that is an undernourished idea in American political life. This idea of these founding ideals, abstractions, feels less present for us. What kind of nation are we trying to achieve at the broadest level? And then there’s the questions of individual purpose within our lives and in modern America.
Brooks: It’s famously said that what is true of America, that we’re incredibly cheerful and optimistic and upbeat—and that is no longer true, maybe because of the defeats we’ve suffered. But I think that sense of pessimism and alienation, which is quite widespread—
Klay: I’ll say another thing about education. There is a kind of relentless utilitarian pressure on education, which of course makes sense because it’s a tough world out there. You gotta get a job, you gotta make a living, right? If you go to college, you gotta pay for it. College is unbelievably expensive these days.
But for a young person, it’s like: All right, there’s this somewhat meritocratic system that you’re gonna put an unbelievable amount of effort into, right? And the education that we’re giving you bleaches out the sort of humanistic disciplines day by day which are the ones that are all about what life is actually for, that are trying to attune you to notions of meaning, purpose, and beauty.
That kind of division is only more intense. Education has become more utilitarian, has had more of that pressure put on it. And yet, it is the human, humanistic disciplines that are ultimately so important for giving us a reason to wanna do any of that stuff.
Brooks: I think that’s why I admire the Marines or soldiers, sailors, whatever. For a young person today, I think they need—we all need this at no matter what age—the kind of moral seriousness that you mentioned, that if you’re in the Marines or whatever service and somebody’s getting killed, you have to know: Will this person risk their life for me?
That is the core of integrity, and that’s the core of courage, and that’s the core of honor. If you don’t put that in front of young people, and I think especially young guys, that the society may be screwed up in a million ways, but today you can behave honorably or not honorably, courageously or not courageously, compassionately or not compassionately. And so everything is a moral test.
It seems to me a lot of the alienation we see among young men is not knowing what virtue should I shoot for, what’s relevant in my life.
I have this argument all the time with people. What’s the key virtue? We all have our own recipe of virtues. I know a lot of people who say courage. If you don’t have the courage to overcome risks, you’re not going to take chances in life.
You’re probably not going to ask somebody out on a date. Courage is really important. My own personal favorite is humility. I think that’s the core virtue around which all others are based. To me, humility is not thinking lowly of yourself. It’s having radical self-awareness from a position of other centeredness. It’s the ability to step outside yourself and say, “Well, I’m actually kind of strong in this realm, but I’m actually kind of weak in that realm.”
So you know yourself accurately, and you know what you need to work on, you know what you can do, and how should you devote your life. Abraham Lincoln was a humble man, but he also knew he was kinda special in some ways.
I don’t know how you would think about the virtues in your life or the virtues you saw around you or the virtues you see celebrated in civilian society, which you are now a member of.
Klay: Love.
Brooks: Oh, interesting. Why do you say that?
Klay: I think that’s what everything decent flows from.
Brooks: Now I realize I have to update my answer.
Klay: And by the way, I mentioned Elliot Ackerman earlier. He was talking to me about courage, which you mentioned as a primary virtue. Elliot’s got a Silver Star and a Bronze Star, and he’s done outrageous things. And he was talking about in the Second Battle of Fallujah a Marine has to cross this highway, right? And it’s very dangerous ’cause it’s open, there’s a lot of places, and he gets shot. And another Marine goes out to pull him, and that Marine gets shot too.
So now it’s pretty obvious what’s gonna happen if you try and rescue those guys. There’s this enemy sniper waiting for you. And another Marine goes out and pulls those guys back.
Elliot was saying like, “Why do people do that?” Because there’s fear on the one hand. And then, because on the other hand, there’s courage. And he says, “I’ve never felt the emotion courage. That’s not a thing. I’m never feeling brave today.”
He says, “Why did somebody do that?” Because they love each other, right? When you are in this tight-knit unit that’s trained together and been through these things, you develop this intense bond and love for one another. And that for him was the opposite of fear.
Brooks: It’s so interesting you say that. Again, my head is full of studies. It’s not a good way to live. But there was a famous study called the Grant Study, which was done at Harvard, and they took young men—in those days, Harvard was all male—and they followed them through their lives. Among those Harvard underclassmen were people like John F. Kennedy, Ben Bradlee, who edited the Washington Post. Because they graduated into the war, a lot of them entered the Army, and they wanted to figure out what traits correlate to promotion in the military.
They think, “Well, is it IQ?” Nope. “Physical strength?” Nope. “Is it courage to the extent that they can measure this?”
Nope. The number one factor that correlates with promotion in the military in World War II for these men was love of mother, warmth of family home.
Klay: That’s amazing.
Brooks: And basically, the guys who had learned love from mom knew how to extend love to their men. And when you talked about the utilitarianism of our educational system, it seems to me we’ve downplayed that school should be about helping students find things to fall in love with.
That by itself would, especially people who are adrift, give them direction—’cause, you know: Yeah, this is what I love. I don’t know. Is it too probing or intimate to ask you if you had to come up with your own list of the things?
Klay: Things that I love? Family. My wife and kids and broader family. My friends, my country, books, novels, a good sentence.
I’m coaching two soccer teams right now—two Little League soccer teams.
And I’m loving that. Yeah. With my mother-in-law as my assistant coach.
Brooks: Oh really? Wow.
I think over the last 26 years, we’ve been in this century, or maybe since 9/11, when the 21st century really started—we have taken some blows as a country. And we’ve become more alienated and disillusioned.
But I do think these eternal verities apply, and that human nature hasn’t changed. And the seeking of these kind of moral virtues, but just plain old love, falling in love with things, that would go a long way to making young men and young women live in a better society. I don’t know if you’re hopeful.
Klay: I’m sort of short-term pessimistic, long-term optimistic, you know? I say that. I’ve been writing about warfare for my entire career, and nobody’s taken my advice yet.
Maybe my kids will figure it out. They’re pretty smart.
Brooks: Phil Klay, thank you for being at our table at The Permanent Questions.
Klay: Thank you so much.
Brooks: There was a moment in the middle of this conversation that I will not soon forget. I was talking to Phil about what he felt when he thought about how the lives of him and the men and women he fought with in Iraq were treated, and the word that came out of his mouth was rage. And if you’re listening to this without visuals, you may have heard long silences, and that was Phil trying to collect his emotions.
It’s been a long time since he’s been in Iraq, and very clearly, those emotions were still on the surface and very raw. Phil once wrote that when you enlist in the military, it’s an act of faith toward your country, an act of faith that your country will guard your life and protect you and treat you as the precious thing you are.
I think for Phil and for a lot of people—the veterans of that war, Afghanistan, maybe some of the others—that act of faith has been broken by a country that was not careful in protecting and caring for the men and women who enlisted in these battles. And you can see the rage at this betrayal still close to the surface in his mind, and I think in a lot of people’s minds.
And I was also struck by when I asked what his core virtue is, and he did not respond with bitterness, he did not respond with alienation, he just said “love.” I take that to be a very hard-headed rejoinder to what happens when you begin to lose faith. You find things to love, and you remind yourself why, despite it all, you love your country. I found it very moving, that mixture of rage and love.
So thanks so much for joining us for this week’s conversation with Phil Klay.
The Permanent Questions is produced and edited by The Atlantic in partnership with Yale University.
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