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Masculinity In Review
Nick Paro opens this one on a Tuesday, off the usual schedule, with a guest whose book title is itself an argument. Jasper Craven — an investigative journalist who has covered veterans and the military since 2014 for Harper’s Magazine, The New Yorker, and The New York Times — wrote God Forgives, Brothers Don’t about military education and what it manufactures in American men. The premise is deceptively simple: the military is not, and never has been, an institution designed to make men whole. Craven’s phrasing is blunt — “It is a very cold mission. It is not a warm one.” What makes the hour land is that Nick, a disabled veteran who enlisted, keeps testing that claim against his own service, insisting that “none of this is an attack on the service itself” while refusing to let the institution off the hook. Listeners come away with a usable separation: what service actually gave them, and what it only promised.
Craven’s central diagnosis is that the military is a machine for withholding. Boys arrive with what he heard over and over in interviews — “a yearning to secure masculine validation” — layered on top of genuinely civic motives: public service, democracy, structure, family. What they meet instead is an institution that “forever withholds true validation, true love, true support,” because anxiety and striving are what move a force. The rank structure makes the trick visible; there is always another grade, another medal, and so the masculine archetype stays “just out of reach.” His most unsettling example is Pete Hegseth — a man who has arguably won the game and still behaves like someone graded insufficient. Nick’s gloss is sharper and funnier, “our secretary of wannabes,” but the point underneath is identical: the men most fused to the identity are the ones it punishes hardest.
The book’s title is the second argument. God Forgives, Brothers Don’t served as the West Point football motto for years, until 2019, when it was discovered to have originated as “the omerta code of the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas” — the same year a bronze plaque in the academy’s science building was found to feature a hooded man and the words Ku Klux Klan. Craven doesn’t file this under scandal-of-the-week. He treats it as evidence that “military ideologies often rhyme with white nationalist ones,” which is why the exit from service is so easy to hijack: men leave highly trained in violence, still hungry for a mission, and convinced the last one was bungled — and militias recruit on exactly that frequency. His remedy is unglamorous and concrete: fund the VA, where he notes roughly a third of the workforce is veterans, and build more places where the mission can continue without a rifle. Nick extends the list to teaching, city council, school boards — service after service, redefined so that it no longer requires an enemy.
The third thread runs backward, into childhood. Long before recruitment, Craven argues, American schools export their hardest cases — kids with disabilities, kids with tumultuous homes, “these lost boys” — into military-style reform schools, on the belief that you can “break someone down and then build them up” and get a good man out the other end. He traces the residue further than you would expect: physical education teachers, he says, won their foothold in public schools through a deal with military leaders, then pushed compulsory military training and textbooks built around great military men and battles. The method fails even on its own terms — research on hazing and stress-induced training, he notes, shows it does not prepare anyone for battle. “They just instill trauma, anxiety, stress.” It is here that the two men most usefully complicate each other: when Craven hedges the academies’ rituals as “semi-indoctrinational,” Nick calls it, because you have to indoctrinate someone to get them to walk into harm’s way, and Craven admits he was “trying to be diplomatic.” “You don’t have to be diplomatic here,” Nick tells him — and the rest of the hour is better for it.
Craven has been on the veterans beat since 2014, and he is the son of an anti-war organizer who was “mentored by Howard Zinn and collaborated with John Lennon and members of the Chicago 7” — a lineage that handed him an “alternative form of masculinity” to measure the military’s against, even as he still felt a certain romantic pull toward it. The interview covered military education from West Point to reform schools, Vietnam as the hinge where aspiration curdled, the pipeline from service into extremist movements, sexual violence as the byproduct of a bonding culture built on violence, and the way a family lineage of service produces reformers as often as it produces recruits. It closes on a line Craven carried out of his reporting: West Point graduate John Wheeler contrasting “things worth dying for” with the more feminine-coded “things worth living for.” Destruction against creation — that is close to this series’ own thesis, arrived at by someone who came to it from outside the uniform. Intelligent Masculinity has spent months asking what men are for; Craven’s contribution is the reminder that the country’s biggest answer to that question was never built to answer it.
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Nick’s Notes
I’m Nick Paro, and I’m sick of the shit going on. So, I’m using poetry, podcasting, and lives to discuss the intersections of chronic illness and mental wellbeing, masculinity, veteran’s issues, politics, and so much more. I am only able to have these conversations, bring visibility to my communities, and fill the void through your support — this is a publication where engagement is encouraged, creativity is a cornerstone, and transparency is key — please consider becoming a paid subscriber today and grow the community!
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Thank you Farmers AGAINST trump., ArleneMach, Dana Britt, Patricia Wren, Debbi Gonzalez, and many others for tuning into my live video with Jasper Craven! Join me for my next live video in the app.
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