American Way of War (25 page)

Think of the week after the secretary of defense flew home, for instance, as
Seven Days in January
.

After all, if Gates was blindsided in Pakistan, he already knew that a $626 billion Pentagon budget, including more than $128 billion in war funds, had passed Congress in December and that his next budget for fiscal year 2011 would likely cross the $700 billion mark. He probably also knew that, in the upcoming State of the Union Address, President Obama was going to announce a three-year freeze on discretionary domestic spending starting in 2011, but leave national security expenditures of any sort unfrozen. He undoubtedly knew as well that, in the week after his return, news would come out about the president’s plans to ask Congress for $14.2 billion extra, most for 2011, to train and massively bulk up the Afghan security forces, more than doubling the 2010 funds already approved by Congress for that task.

Or consider that only days after his plane landed, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office released its latest “budget outlook” indicating
that the Iraq and Afghan Wars had already cost the American taxpayer more than one trillion congressionally approved dollars, with no end in sight. Just as the non-freeze on defense spending in the State of the Union Address caused next to no mainstream comment, so there would be no significant media response to these budget figures. And bear in mind that these costs don’t even include the massive projected societal price of the two wars, including future care for wounded soldiers and the replacement of worn-out or destroyed equipment, which will run so much higher.

Each of these announcements could be considered another little coup for the Pentagon and the U.S. military to count. Each was part of Pentagon blank-check-ism in Washington. Each represented a national security establishment ascendant in a way that the makers of
Seven Days in May
might have found hard to grasp.

To put just the president’s domestic cost-cutting plan in a Pentagon context: If his freeze on domestic programs goes through Congress intact (an unlikely possibility), it would still be chicken feed in the cost-cutting sweepstakes. The president’s team estimates savings of $250 billion over ten years. On the other hand, the National Priorities Project has done some sober figuring, based on projections from the Office of Management and Budget, and finds that, over the same decade, the total increase in the Pentagon budget should come to $522 billion. (And keep in mind that this figure doesn’t include possible increases in the budgets of the Department of Homeland Security, non-military intelligence agencies, or even any future war supplemental funds appropriated by Congress.) That $250 billion in cuts, then, would be but a small brake on the guaranteed further rise of national security spending. American life, in other words, is being sacrificed to the very infrastructure meant to provide this country’s citizens with “safety.”

Or consider that $14.2 billion meant for the Afghan military and police. Forget, for a moment, all obvious doubts about training, by 2014, up to 400,000 Afghans for a force bleeding deserters and evidently whipping future Taliban fighters into shape, or the fact that impoverished Afghanistan will never be able to afford such a vast security apparatus (which means it’s ours to fund into the distant future), or even that many of those training dollars may go to Xe/Blackwater or other mercenary
private contracting companies. Just think for a minute, instead, about the fact that the State of the Union Address offered not a hint that a single further dollar would go to train an adult American, especially an out-of-work one, in anything whatsoever.

Hollywood loves remakes, but a word of advice to those who admire the secretary of defense’s movie tastes: Do as he did and get the old
Seven Days in May
from Netflix. Unlike
Star Trek
, the James Bond films,
Bewitched
, and other sixties “classics,”
Seven Days
isn’t likely to come back, not even if Matt Damon were available to play the marine colonel who saves the country from a military takeover, because these days there’s little left to save—and every week is the Pentagon’s week in Washington.

In my childhood, I played endlessly with toy soldiers—a crew of cowboys and bluecoats to defeat the Indians and win the West, a bag or two of tiny olive-green plastic marines to storm the beaches of Iwo Jima. Alternately, I grabbed my toy six-guns, or simply picked up a suitable stick in the park, and with friends replayed scenes from the movies of World War II, my father’s war. It was second nature to do so. No instruction was necessary. After all, a script involving a heady version of American triumphalism was already firmly in place, as it had been long before my grandfather made it to this land in steerage in the 1890s.

My sunny fantasies of war play were intimately connected to the wars Americans had fought by an elaborate mythology of American goodness and ultimate victory. If my father tended to be silent about the war he had taken part in, it made no difference. I already knew what he had done. I had seen it at the movies, in comic books, and sooner or later in shows like
Victory at Sea
on that new entertainment medium, television.

And when, in the 1960s, countless demonstrators from my generation went into opposition to a brutal American war in Vietnam, they did so still garbed in cast-off “Good War” paraphernalia—secondhand army jackets and bombardier coats—or they formed themselves into “tribes”
and turned goodness and victory over to the former enemies in their childhood war stories. They transformed the “V for Victory” into a peace sign and made themselves into beings recognizable from thousands of Westerns. They wore the Pancho Villa mustache, sombrero, and serape, or the Native American headband and moccasins. They painted their faces and grew long hair in the manner of the formerly “savage” foe, and smoked the peace (now, hash) pipe.

American mytho-history, even when turned upside down, was deeply embedded in their lives. How could they have known that they would be its undertakers, that their six-shooters would become eBayable relics?

You can bet on one thing today: in those streets, fields, parks, or rooms, children in significant numbers are not playing G.I. versus Sunni insurgent, or special ops soldier versus Taliban fighter; and if those kids are wielding toy guns, they’re not replicas from the current arsenal, but flashingly neon weaponry from some fantasy future.

As it happens, G.I. Joe—then dubbed a “real American hero”—proved to be my introduction to this new world of child’s war play. I had, of course, grown up years too early for the original G.I. Joe (b. 1964), but one spring in the mid-1980s, during his second heyday, I paid a journalistic visit to the Toy Fair, a yearly industry bash for toy-store buyers held in New York City. Hasbro, which produced the popular G.I. Joe action figures, was one of the Big Two in the toy business. Mattel, the maker of Joe’s original inspiration and big sister, Barbie, was the other. Hasbro had its own building and, on arriving, I soon found myself being led by a company minder through a labyrinthine exhibit hall in the deeply gender-segregated world of toys. Featured were blond models dressed in white holding baby dolls and fashion dolls of every imaginable sort, set against an environment done up in nothing but pink and robin’s egg blue.

Here, the hum of the world seemed to lower to a selling hush, a baby-doll whisper, but somewhere off in the distance, you could faintly hear the high-pitched whistle of an incoming mortar round amid brief bursts of machine-gun fire. And then, suddenly, you stepped across a threshold and out of a world of pastels into a kingdom of darkness, of netting and camouflage, of blasting music and a soundtrack of destruction, as well-muscled male models in camo performed battle routines
while displaying the upcoming line of little G.I. Joe action figures or their evil Cobra counterparts.

It was energizing. It was electric. If you were a toy buyer, you wanted in. You wanted Joe, then the rage in the boy’s world of war play, as well as on children’s TV where an animated series of syndicated half-hour shows was nothing but a toy commercial. I was as riveted as any buyer, and yet the world I had just been plunged into seemed alien. These figures bore no relation to my toy soldiers. On first sight, it was hard even to tell the good guys from the bad guys or to figure out who was fighting whom, where, and for what reason. And that, it turned out, was just the beginning.

In summer 2009, G.I. Joe returned, this time to the big screen in
G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra
. Nobody mentioned it then, but the most impressive thing about the movie came during the eight minutes or so of credits, which made it clear that to produce a twenty-first-century shoot-’emup, you needed to mobilize a veritable army of experts. There may have been more “compositors” than actors and more movie units (Prague Unit, Prague Second Unit, Paris Unit) than units of Joes. After the last shot, those credits still scrolled inexorably onward, like a beachhead in eternity, the very eternity in American cultural life that G.I. Joe already seems to inhabit. The credits did, of course, finally end, and on a note of gratitude that, almost uniquely in the film, evoked an actual history. “The producers also wish to thank the following,” and the list that followed was headed by the Department of Defense, which has been “advising” Hollywood on how to make war movies, with generous loans of equipment, troops, consultants, and weaponry in return for script “supervision,” since the silent era.

I caught
G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra
one sunny afternoon in a multiplex theater empty of customers except for a few clusters of teenage boys. So where to start? How about with the Joes’ futuristic military base, all flashing screens, hi-tech weaponry, and next-generation surveillance equipment, built under the Egyptian desert. (How this most postmodern of bases got under pharaonic sands or what kind of Status of Forces Agreement the Joes have with the government of Egypt are not questions this film considers.) But here’s the thing: well-protected as the base is, spectacularly armed and trained as the Joes are, it turns out to be a snap
to break into—if you happen to be a dame in the black catsuit of a dominatrix and a ninja dressed in white. And then there’s that even spiffier ultra-evil base under the Arctic ice (a location only slightly less busy than Times Square in movies like this). It’s the sort of setup that would have made Captain Nemo salivate. Oh, and don’t forget the introductory scene about a Scottish arms dealer in seventeenth-century France condemned to having a molten mask fitted over his face for selling weapons to all sides or his great-great-great-something-or-other who’s doing the same thing in our world. Then there are those weaponized exoskeletons lifted from
Iron Man
(which also had its own two-faced arms dealer), the X-wing-fighter-style space battle from
Star Wars
but transposed under the ocean (à la James Bond in
Thunderball
), not to speak of the Bond-like scene in which the evildoer, having captured the hero, introduces him to a fate so much worse than death and so time-consuming it can’t possibly work.

And then there is the requisite scene in which a famous landmark (in this case, the Eiffel Tower) is destroyed by the forces of evil, collapsing on panicked crowds below, as in
Independence Day
or just about any disaster movie you’d care to mention. Throw in the sort of car chase introduced a zillion years ago in
Bullitt
, but now pumped up beyond all recognition, and, oh yes, there’s someone who wants to control the world and who will do anything, including killing millions, to achieve his purpose (ha-ha-ha!).

Movies like this are Hollywood’s version of recombinant DNA. They can be written in the dark or, as in the case of
G.I. Joe
, in a terrible hurry because of an impending writers’ strike. All that matters is that they deliver the chases and explosions, the fake blood and weird experiments, the wild weaponry and futuristic sets, the madmen and heroes at such a pace and decibel level that your nervous system is brought fully to life jangling like a fire alarm. Their sole justification is to deliver boys and young men—and so the franchise—to studios like Paramount (and, in cases like
G.I. Joe,
to the Department of Defense as well): the Batman franchise, the Bond franchise, the Terminator franchise, the X-Men franchise, the Bourne franchise, the Iron Man franchise, the Transformers franchise. And now—if it works—the G.I. Joe franchise.

After all, the first word that appears on screen without explanation in this latest junior epic is, appropriately enough, Hasbro. We’re talking about the toy company that
is
G.I. Joe and, in a synergistic fury, was then releasing an endless range of toys, action figures, video games, board games, Burger King giveaways, and who knows what else as synergistic accompaniments to this elaborate “advertainment.”

Hasbro first brought Joe to market in 1964. He was then twelve inches tall and essentially a Barbie for boys, a soldier doll you could dress in that “Ike” jacket with the red scarf or a “beachhead assault fatigue shirt,” then undress, and take into that pup tent with you for the night. Of course, nobody could say such a thing. Officially, the doll was declared to be a “poseable action figure for boys,” and that phrase, “action figure,” for a new boy toy, like Joe himself, never went away. He had no “backstory” (a word still to be invented), and no name. G.I.—for “Government Issue”—Joe was a generic term for an American foot soldier, redolent of the last American war in which total victory had been possible. Nor did he have an enemy, in part because young boys still knew a version of American history, of World War II and the cold war. They still knew who the enemy was without a backstory or a guidebook.

Though born on the cusp of the Vietnam War, Joe prospered for almost a decade until antiwar sentiment began to turn war toys into the personae non gratae of the toy world, and, in 1973, the first oil crunch hit, making the twelve-inch Joe far more expensive to produce. First, he shrank, and then, like so many of his warring kin, he was (as Hasbro put it) “furloughed.” He left the scene, in part a casualty, like much of war play then, of Vietnam distaste and of an American victory that never came.