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Jasper Craven’s new book, “God Forgives, Brothers Don’t” has just been released, and it is brilliant! A thorough investigation into the history of military education in America, Mr. Craven’s book demonstrates not only how destructive it has been for young men but also how this is a cycle of violence stemming all the way back to our nation’s founding. While Post-traumatic stress disorder is often associated with veterans who have already served, many cadets are already crippled by it upon leaving basic training or military school. Of course, this is nothing new. A West Point colonel told the parents of an incoming freshman class in 1976 that “your kids are going to get depressed…we usually get eight or nine suicide attempts the first year.” The treatment of this fact, as though it were unavoidable, is just one example of the destructive element imposed upon boys and men in our society: “Buck up, or else”. Traditions of “hazing” have had severe and fatal consequences that rarely resulted in any recourse. Other boys succumbed to substance abuse as a coping mechanism, including famous West Point cadets such as Jefferson Davis and Edgar Allan Poe, among many others. During the 20th century, organizations like the Boy Scouts of America engaged in similar indoctrination efforts on young boys to mold them into ideal soldiers, with the idea that if you were anything else, you were a failure as a man. Punishments for “weakness” were similar to those inflicted on lesser “plebes” at West Point, VMI, and other schools. Mr. Craven puts it best when he says, “the military seeks young people not because they are the most physically adept, but because they are the most emotionally vulnerable.” Whether it be in anecdotes from recent graduates of West Point or in primary sources from pupils 200 years ago, we see a clear pattern of victims being indoctrinated into a system of violence that they are both taught to fear and embrace. Once a generation has been indoctrinated into seeing violence as both a punishment for misdeeds as well as a reward, a release, and a source of pleasure, it is passed down, cruelly, to the next generation as a cyclical ritual of abuse. What necessitates an examination like “God Forgives, Brother’s Don’t” is that our culture not only dismisses the harm these institutions do, but presents it as noble and necessary. Many of our current leaders, such as Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump, are either proponents of or products of military schools and have vowed to uphold the military’s vision of how to produce the ideal man. In Hegseth’s own words, if that “makes me toxic…then so be it”. “God Forgives, Brothers Don’t” is a vital read, now more than ever. A must-read and must-own.
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