Tonight, across this country and on bases far afield, young American soldiers will take shifts guarding explosives. They did so last night. They will do so again tomorrow night. They do so without a threat in sight. They do not suspect that there lurks, somewhere past the chain-link fence that pens in the ammunition holding area, a threat out of sight, either. If lucky, the soldiers will have some cell service. But manuals mandate explosives be stored at some remove from the cantonment area where the off-duty sleep, and in such remote corners cell service sometimes proves elusive. When service fails, tinny saved music from a phone, a needle’s slow fall on an idling truck’s fuel gauge and one’s own strange thoughts: these are the ammunition guard’s diversions. For whatever the headlines may be, in most garrisons it is peacetime, and like war, peace is boring.
The great majority of us will pass the night without thinking of these soldiers, just as you did last night and I did too. This is as we want it. It seems the mark of a good society that the need to wage war—the sort for survival that rattles one’s windows—is so rare in arising that violence remains largely latent, contained within a stored grenade or an unspent round. We hope these rounds stay packed away, ready for a day that never comes. We hope the guard shifts watching over them are sleepy ones, during which no threat arrives, nor any midnight call to arms, nor anything else at all save the guard’s timely replacement. To forget that our guards exist, and for those guards to forget why they do, so abstract is the purpose of their post: that is what we want.
It’s worth considering the ammunition guard anyhow. There is something to learn from tonight’s shift. I say this with certainty because I’ve stood these shifts myself, though as an officer I have more often ordered others to do so. Both the standing of the guard and the issuing of the order invite thoughts that can teach. But do not take it from me. For years I hardly paid these thoughts any mind until, with a jolt of recognition, I read of them in a book written nearly two hundred years ago, read of these “strange thoughts” belonging to “a soldier standing guard alone with a loaded gun by a powder magazine on a stormy night.” The passage was written as preface to an inquiry into the aborted sacrifice of Isaac titled Fear and Trembling by someone calling himself Johannes de silentio. We know him now to be Søren Kierkegaard.
●
Why join the peacetime army? When there’s a war on, the reasons to join, however grave, are at least obvious. In peace, they are not. And you do not have to spend much time in a peacetime garrison to detect among its officers and soldiers a certain tension derived from this unanswered question. That tension is nothing like the psychological strain of war, but it is a tension all the same. It inhabits group chats. It animates memes. One meets it in the shrug of a tired sergeant and in the unexpected bitterness of a young lieutenant’s reply. It often goes unarticulated, manifests only indirectly in things like closed-door arguments between officers or the languid way a soldier tightens a ruck to its frame before a road march. But now and then, when told to reenlist at the end of a contract, handed some late-breaking task or made to miss a night at home with spouse and child, a soldier expresses that tension rather straightforwardly by asking something like “What’s the point?”
What gives an otherwise abstract question such force is that in peace, soldiers must do hard things that only make sense in war. Late nights digging foxholes in the rain mere miles away from one’s own bed only make sense if there’s reason to think such habits will soon save a life. Long, infuriating hours fixing aged tanks only make sense if one expects to lurch toward battle in them. Lonely shifts guarding ammunition only make sense if one anticipates returning fire. It is easier to send a company to the field for training if its soldiers believe their lives will soon depend on what they learn. Without a war on, such work appears to many an exercise in pointlessness. Most persevere for a time if only out of professional discipline. But to reconcile themselves to their work, peacetime soldiers must hallucinate a war for want of one at hand or else live with the absurdity of playing war when there’s none to be had.
To its credit, the army does what it can to make hallucinating easy. Doctrine writers issue thick volumes on fictional wartime scenarios, ready on the shelf for when it’s time to imagine. Almost monthly at facilities spanning hundreds of square miles in the Louisiana swamps and the Mojave Desert, thousands of soldiers fight weeks-long battles against their counterparts in which every exchange of fire is adjudicated by a massive laser-tag system affixed to every weapon, vehicle and body. And training is measured by its realism. Units regularly practice maneuvers with live bullets at night. They do so not only to better themselves but also to convince the soldiers, if only for a moment, by the smell of gunpowder and the arcing red of tracer rounds and the chest-shaking thud of falling mortars, that they’ve stumbled through some portal into the real deal. Banners hang in pacific equipment bays, urging those who pass under them to work as if they will have to “fight tonight.”
Yet morning breaks again without a fight, and in its light one begins to see absurdity. A soldier with face paint on finds himself fixing the office printer. Another finds herself rushing off a parachute drop zone to make a dental appointment. A third begins a fourth training cycle of the same work, having watched skills in a unit develop then atrophy again without ever being called upon, and the soldier begins to tire. The boulder rolls down the hill and one follows it down for another round, in support of what doctrine terms the “sustainable readiness model”—a standing ability to meet the wartime moment when it comes. Eventually, the real costs of this notional readiness and its attendant absurdities, costs felt in worn joints and failed marriages, lead to disenchantment. It is not hard to spot the disenchanted in uniform. Look for the sullen face. Listen for the acerbic aside. To soldier on despite such disenchantment is nothing less than an act of faith.
●
A soldier appears only once in Fear and Trembling, but like any good soldier he carries an outsized load. Kierkegaard, writing as he often did under a pseudonym, has just finished introducing the knights of resignation and of faith, concepts that will all but launch existentialist philosophy. He has illustrated both by way of a young man who falls for a princess. The young man’s love is of the most serious sort, he lets it “twine itself in countless coils around every ligament of his consciousness,” bathes in “a blissful rapture.” But tragically, as is often the case with princesses, fruition is an impossibility. The young man and the princess cannot wed. He who would at this juncture throw his hands up in the name of prudence or pragmatism, hedge his bets with other flirtations and marry the brewer’s widow, Kierkegaard rules is no knight. Such a man will pass the remainder of his days “running errands” in a life stripped of spirit.
How does Kierkegaard suggest a forlorn lover avoid a spiritless life? Resign himself to the reality that his beloved is beyond reach and, regardless, keep on loving her, transfiguring his love from one for her earthly form to her eternal one, thereby accomplishing spiritually what is impossible on earth. Kierkegaard calls this leap, borrowing from the language of dance, the first movement. It marks the knight of resignation. Its reward is peace. The second movement is far rarer, and it marks the knight of faith: it is the declaration on the lover’s part to not only go on loving despite his resignation to that love’s earthly impossibility, but to sincerely believe—“on the strength of the absurd”—that he will be united with his love anyhow.
Abraham, the hero of Fear and Trembling, is Kierkegaard’s canonical example, because he not only raises the knife to sacrifice his son but, when an angel stays his hand, receives his Isaac back with true joy and with only fleeting surprise. Abraham’s motion to kill his son is proof of his resignation (the first movement). That his surprise at receiving Isaac back alive soon fades is proof of Abraham’s undying faith (the second movement). The paradox of Abraham’s faith confounds and awes Kierkegaard. Hegelian philosophy he understands, he says, but when he contemplates Abraham, he is “virtually annihilated.”
It is following these knights that the soldier makes his one brief appearance in Fear and Trembling. The soldier is alone on guard at an ammunition magazine in a midnight storm, thinking “strange thoughts.” It is these thoughts that interest Kierkegaard, for he believes they contain knowledge of life’s horror: the realization that our desires may well be impossibilities and that our work may well be in vain. The ammunition guard, the lonely soldier, has “the strength of soul” to grasp this possibility before the sleeping masses. And that knowledge is the starting point for the first movement, for without it there is nothing to which we must resign ourselves, and there is no need for faith. Kierkegaard’s contention is that the Christians of Copenhagen have not reconciled themselves to the truth that is known to the lonely soldier in the rain, who, muttering under the thunder, wonders, “What’s the point?”
With this allusion Kierkegaard leaves the soldier behind. We won’t. Just as Kierkegaard uses the ammunition guard to illuminate something of his world, we might use Kierkegaard to illuminate something of the garrison. Replace the young man with a soldier, replace the princess with war, replace the expectation of union with the expectation of war’s outbreak—and one quickly arrives at something like garrison life. On weekdays like any other, commanders and sergeants stand before their soldiers and seek to inspire within them an uncommon will to dedicate themselves to some hard task for no other reason than the belief, supported by no discernible evidence, that their work might matter tomorrow. I knew of a commander who waved in front of his formed-up men a yellowed newspaper from September 10, 2001 and told them every day was September 10th until the 11th came.
What these commanders and sergeants ask of their soldiers, on behalf of an often unwitting society, by way of a reply to those strange thoughts one gets on guard, is to undertake at least Kierkegaard’s first movement, to resign themselves to their work. Ideally, however, we want our soldiers to undertake that second movement as well, and so by the hundreds of thousands become what Kierkegaard estimated was the rarest, most incomprehensible, noblest type: knights of faith. Should war come, though we do not expect joy from these soldiers, we also do not expect of them surprise—for what else could readiness mean? No, we ask that each garrison soldier become a sort of Sergeant Abraham, reconciled to peace yet ready to receive war when it comes as if it were inevitable. And that, as Fear and Trembling reminds us, is a hell of an ask.
●
Kierkegaard wrote Fear and Trembling in part as an attack on what he regarded as the objectionably comfortable Christianity preached in Copenhagen during his time (he would sustain this attack with mounting fervor until he died, perhaps most directly in an unsubtly named tract called Attack upon “Christendom”). The line of attack arises early in Fear and Trembling. Those preaching in the churches of Copenhagen, he says, have often taken up the story of Isaac’s would-be sacrifice, but when they do, they get the story wrong, in a way emblematic of their greater theological failing. To explain away Abraham, those preaching simply say he was willing to offer God the best he had. To Kierkegaard’s ear, this telling has the advantage of pleasantness. It permits the congregant to “very well leisurely stretch out his legs” as he considers the sacrifice of one’s son, to “very well puff at his pipe as he does so.” But missing from it is the story’s essential ingredient, and that is Abraham’s anguish:
The ethical expression for what Abraham did is that he was willing to murder Isaac; the religious expression is that he was willing to sacrifice Isaac; but in this contradiction lies the very anguish that can indeed make one sleepless; and yet without that anguish Abraham is not the one he is.
Here the soldier may well feel another jolt of recognition. First, he may notice the remarkable parallel between what Kierkegaard writes here and a central question of the U.S. Army’s ethics curriculum: Why is killing in war not murder? But he might also recognize in the separation between the religious and the ethical something like the gap between the garrison and greater society. Since the military draft ended, that gap has become a well-documented fact of life in the United States, memorably captured by Samuel Huntington when he wrote of West Point as a “bit of Sparta in the midst of Babylon.” And just like how those sermons once made comfortable the Copenhagen faithful, so too do today’s sermons on the American military, which we hear at halftime shows or in gritty war films, make us comfortable. In them, veterans are often either vessels of virtue or ticking time bombs; in either case, such sheer simplicity permits the congregation to sidestep harder questions while still feeling itself pious.
Absent from these sermons is something more fundamental, if less cinematic: the peace anxiety that possesses young soldiers as they stand astride the gap between the garrison and wider society. They have a foot in both worlds: calling a child’s teacher from the live-fire range, watching an Instagram story of the lives of friends back home, swiping through a dating app while on shift guarding small munitions. Not only must they summon an almost inhuman faith if they are to make sense of their work, but they must do so in the shadow of a society that, by its sheer indifference every day, reminds them that to do so is a choice.
A year after Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard published The Concept of Anxiety, which famously compares anxiety to a dizziness that arises from looking “down into the yawning abyss” then returning one’s gaze to the path ahead, newly aware of the freedom each step represents. Every time a young soldier lights up his phone screen and gazes to the indifferent world, something like this dizziness returns. Then the retention sergeant comes around to ask about the possibility of a re-up. A different sermon, at once truer and harder to square, might tell of this soldier-as-human, plagued by doubt, alone in the rain, wavering on the edge of faith—who may yet do something of annihilating power.
The analogy can only be taken so far. Whereas Abraham expects to receive his son back, whereas knights of faith are somehow certain in divine redemption, the peacetime soldier is not permitted to hope for war. The best one can hope for in garrison is that war does not occur for one’s labor. The idea that the readiness for war that results from soldiers’ peacetime labor keeps war at bay by staying any would-be aggressor is called “deterrence,” a fixture of American strategy. One need only stand before a group of tired soldiers and urge them back into the muck of a Lithuanian training ground one more time for deterrence’s sake to discover the very real limits of such abstractions. This paradox—that one cannot know if one’s lifework has borne fruit—only sharpens the recurrent pangs of anxiety that now and again seize a peacetime garrison.
●
It would be poetically and perhaps satisfyingly tragic to imagine America’s army bases as redoubts of anguish, another sad story in a supposedly unraveling world. But visitors who stick around know they are not quite so. Most soldiers serve honorably, many happily, usually without the aid of any Abrahamic movements or existential treatises. Your average ammunition guards, far from some theological revelation, will spend their shift swiping through that dating app or watching a favored streamer. The only thought they will give to that shift is its end time. And they often re-up not as a metaphysical leap but for bonuses and pensions and reliable insurance, to advance the economic station of their families. In this way, career soldiers might disappoint Kierkegaard, but they satisfy themselves. For doing so, they are not thoughtless. They lay equal claim to our admiration. On them, too, we depend.
But there are those, civilian and soldier alike, who still wonder: Why join the peacetime army? They are not alone in asking, it would seem, as the American military’s ongoing recruiting troubles suggest. And they should know that the image of the ammunition guard is not Kierkegaard’s originally. He borrowed it from German theologian Karl Daub. It appears in no text of Daub’s, but has been traced to a memoir of Karl Rosenkranz, another German philosopher. Rosenkranz recalled that, after complaining to Daub about his upcoming mandatory Prussian military service, Daub replied that military service might not be so bad, as lonely sentries have “thoughts that otherwise are altogether impossible.” Put another way, the very image of the ammunition guard was intended originally as an affirmative answer to the question of whether one ought to join a peacetime army. Why? Because even the greatest theological minds of the day thought that to the ammunition guard come thoughts otherwise altogether impossible. Such thoughts are prelude to virtue, if not faith, in a world desirous of both but uncertain of how to arrive at either. And this makes the guard someone worth becoming, if only for a little while.
A memorable passage from Fear and Trembling describes the knight of faith as he appears in the street, inwardly heroic but outwardly unremarkable, “solid through and through.” The Abrahams wandering the garrison today are much the same; they appear outwardly as other soldiers do, even as they contend with great spiritual movements in the course of their service. One examines them “from top to toe” for “some small, incongruous optical telegraphic message from the infinite” but finds their stances belong “altogether to finitude,” as mundane as a tax collector or pen pusher, without a trace of “strangeness and superiority.” They, too, will be on shift tonight. On them, too, we depend. And they, too, are worthy subjects of sermons—for if understood in the right light, their example might just annihilate us.
The views expressed in this essay are the author’s own and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army or Department of Defense.
Art credit: Scott Brownell, Soldier Training, 1991. Courtesy of the artist.
Tonight, across this country and on bases far afield, young American soldiers will take shifts guarding explosives. They did so last night. They will do so again tomorrow night. They do so without a threat in sight. They do not suspect that there lurks, somewhere past the chain-link fence that pens in the ammunition holding area, a threat out of sight, either. If lucky, the soldiers will have some cell service. But manuals mandate explosives be stored at some remove from the cantonment area where the off-duty sleep, and in such remote corners cell service sometimes proves elusive. When service fails, tinny saved music from a phone, a needle’s slow fall on an idling truck’s fuel gauge and one’s own strange thoughts: these are the ammunition guard’s diversions. For whatever the headlines may be, in most garrisons it is peacetime, and like war, peace is boring.
The great majority of us will pass the night without thinking of these soldiers, just as you did last night and I did too. This is as we want it. It seems the mark of a good society that the need to wage war—the sort for survival that rattles one’s windows—is so rare in arising that violence remains largely latent, contained within a stored grenade or an unspent round. We hope these rounds stay packed away, ready for a day that never comes. We hope the guard shifts watching over them are sleepy ones, during which no threat arrives, nor any midnight call to arms, nor anything else at all save the guard’s timely replacement. To forget that our guards exist, and for those guards to forget why they do, so abstract is the purpose of their post: that is what we want.
It’s worth considering the ammunition guard anyhow. There is something to learn from tonight’s shift. I say this with certainty because I’ve stood these shifts myself, though as an officer I have more often ordered others to do so. Both the standing of the guard and the issuing of the order invite thoughts that can teach. But do not take it from me. For years I hardly paid these thoughts any mind until, with a jolt of recognition, I read of them in a book written nearly two hundred years ago, read of these “strange thoughts” belonging to “a soldier standing guard alone with a loaded gun by a powder magazine on a stormy night.” The passage was written as preface to an inquiry into the aborted sacrifice of Isaac titled Fear and Trembling by someone calling himself Johannes de silentio. We know him now to be Søren Kierkegaard.
●
Why join the peacetime army? When there’s a war on, the reasons to join, however grave, are at least obvious. In peace, they are not. And you do not have to spend much time in a peacetime garrison to detect among its officers and soldiers a certain tension derived from this unanswered question. That tension is nothing like the psychological strain of war, but it is a tension all the same. It inhabits group chats. It animates memes. One meets it in the shrug of a tired sergeant and in the unexpected bitterness of a young lieutenant’s reply. It often goes unarticulated, manifests only indirectly in things like closed-door arguments between officers or the languid way a soldier tightens a ruck to its frame before a road march. But now and then, when told to reenlist at the end of a contract, handed some late-breaking task or made to miss a night at home with spouse and child, a soldier expresses that tension rather straightforwardly by asking something like “What’s the point?”
What gives an otherwise abstract question such force is that in peace, soldiers must do hard things that only make sense in war. Late nights digging foxholes in the rain mere miles away from one’s own bed only make sense if there’s reason to think such habits will soon save a life. Long, infuriating hours fixing aged tanks only make sense if one expects to lurch toward battle in them. Lonely shifts guarding ammunition only make sense if one anticipates returning fire. It is easier to send a company to the field for training if its soldiers believe their lives will soon depend on what they learn. Without a war on, such work appears to many an exercise in pointlessness. Most persevere for a time if only out of professional discipline. But to reconcile themselves to their work, peacetime soldiers must hallucinate a war for want of one at hand or else live with the absurdity of playing war when there’s none to be had.
To its credit, the army does what it can to make hallucinating easy. Doctrine writers issue thick volumes on fictional wartime scenarios, ready on the shelf for when it’s time to imagine. Almost monthly at facilities spanning hundreds of square miles in the Louisiana swamps and the Mojave Desert, thousands of soldiers fight weeks-long battles against their counterparts in which every exchange of fire is adjudicated by a massive laser-tag system affixed to every weapon, vehicle and body. And training is measured by its realism. Units regularly practice maneuvers with live bullets at night. They do so not only to better themselves but also to convince the soldiers, if only for a moment, by the smell of gunpowder and the arcing red of tracer rounds and the chest-shaking thud of falling mortars, that they’ve stumbled through some portal into the real deal. Banners hang in pacific equipment bays, urging those who pass under them to work as if they will have to “fight tonight.”
Yet morning breaks again without a fight, and in its light one begins to see absurdity. A soldier with face paint on finds himself fixing the office printer. Another finds herself rushing off a parachute drop zone to make a dental appointment. A third begins a fourth training cycle of the same work, having watched skills in a unit develop then atrophy again without ever being called upon, and the soldier begins to tire. The boulder rolls down the hill and one follows it down for another round, in support of what doctrine terms the “sustainable readiness model”—a standing ability to meet the wartime moment when it comes. Eventually, the real costs of this notional readiness and its attendant absurdities, costs felt in worn joints and failed marriages, lead to disenchantment. It is not hard to spot the disenchanted in uniform. Look for the sullen face. Listen for the acerbic aside. To soldier on despite such disenchantment is nothing less than an act of faith.
●
A soldier appears only once in Fear and Trembling, but like any good soldier he carries an outsized load. Kierkegaard, writing as he often did under a pseudonym, has just finished introducing the knights of resignation and of faith, concepts that will all but launch existentialist philosophy. He has illustrated both by way of a young man who falls for a princess. The young man’s love is of the most serious sort, he lets it “twine itself in countless coils around every ligament of his consciousness,” bathes in “a blissful rapture.” But tragically, as is often the case with princesses, fruition is an impossibility. The young man and the princess cannot wed. He who would at this juncture throw his hands up in the name of prudence or pragmatism, hedge his bets with other flirtations and marry the brewer’s widow, Kierkegaard rules is no knight. Such a man will pass the remainder of his days “running errands” in a life stripped of spirit.
How does Kierkegaard suggest a forlorn lover avoid a spiritless life? Resign himself to the reality that his beloved is beyond reach and, regardless, keep on loving her, transfiguring his love from one for her earthly form to her eternal one, thereby accomplishing spiritually what is impossible on earth. Kierkegaard calls this leap, borrowing from the language of dance, the first movement. It marks the knight of resignation. Its reward is peace. The second movement is far rarer, and it marks the knight of faith: it is the declaration on the lover’s part to not only go on loving despite his resignation to that love’s earthly impossibility, but to sincerely believe—“on the strength of the absurd”—that he will be united with his love anyhow.
Abraham, the hero of Fear and Trembling, is Kierkegaard’s canonical example, because he not only raises the knife to sacrifice his son but, when an angel stays his hand, receives his Isaac back with true joy and with only fleeting surprise. Abraham’s motion to kill his son is proof of his resignation (the first movement). That his surprise at receiving Isaac back alive soon fades is proof of Abraham’s undying faith (the second movement). The paradox of Abraham’s faith confounds and awes Kierkegaard. Hegelian philosophy he understands, he says, but when he contemplates Abraham, he is “virtually annihilated.”
It is following these knights that the soldier makes his one brief appearance in Fear and Trembling. The soldier is alone on guard at an ammunition magazine in a midnight storm, thinking “strange thoughts.” It is these thoughts that interest Kierkegaard, for he believes they contain knowledge of life’s horror: the realization that our desires may well be impossibilities and that our work may well be in vain. The ammunition guard, the lonely soldier, has “the strength of soul” to grasp this possibility before the sleeping masses. And that knowledge is the starting point for the first movement, for without it there is nothing to which we must resign ourselves, and there is no need for faith. Kierkegaard’s contention is that the Christians of Copenhagen have not reconciled themselves to the truth that is known to the lonely soldier in the rain, who, muttering under the thunder, wonders, “What’s the point?”
With this allusion Kierkegaard leaves the soldier behind. We won’t. Just as Kierkegaard uses the ammunition guard to illuminate something of his world, we might use Kierkegaard to illuminate something of the garrison. Replace the young man with a soldier, replace the princess with war, replace the expectation of union with the expectation of war’s outbreak—and one quickly arrives at something like garrison life. On weekdays like any other, commanders and sergeants stand before their soldiers and seek to inspire within them an uncommon will to dedicate themselves to some hard task for no other reason than the belief, supported by no discernible evidence, that their work might matter tomorrow. I knew of a commander who waved in front of his formed-up men a yellowed newspaper from September 10, 2001 and told them every day was September 10th until the 11th came.
What these commanders and sergeants ask of their soldiers, on behalf of an often unwitting society, by way of a reply to those strange thoughts one gets on guard, is to undertake at least Kierkegaard’s first movement, to resign themselves to their work. Ideally, however, we want our soldiers to undertake that second movement as well, and so by the hundreds of thousands become what Kierkegaard estimated was the rarest, most incomprehensible, noblest type: knights of faith. Should war come, though we do not expect joy from these soldiers, we also do not expect of them surprise—for what else could readiness mean? No, we ask that each garrison soldier become a sort of Sergeant Abraham, reconciled to peace yet ready to receive war when it comes as if it were inevitable. And that, as Fear and Trembling reminds us, is a hell of an ask.
●
Kierkegaard wrote Fear and Trembling in part as an attack on what he regarded as the objectionably comfortable Christianity preached in Copenhagen during his time (he would sustain this attack with mounting fervor until he died, perhaps most directly in an unsubtly named tract called Attack upon “Christendom”). The line of attack arises early in Fear and Trembling. Those preaching in the churches of Copenhagen, he says, have often taken up the story of Isaac’s would-be sacrifice, but when they do, they get the story wrong, in a way emblematic of their greater theological failing. To explain away Abraham, those preaching simply say he was willing to offer God the best he had. To Kierkegaard’s ear, this telling has the advantage of pleasantness. It permits the congregant to “very well leisurely stretch out his legs” as he considers the sacrifice of one’s son, to “very well puff at his pipe as he does so.” But missing from it is the story’s essential ingredient, and that is Abraham’s anguish:
Here the soldier may well feel another jolt of recognition. First, he may notice the remarkable parallel between what Kierkegaard writes here and a central question of the U.S. Army’s ethics curriculum: Why is killing in war not murder? But he might also recognize in the separation between the religious and the ethical something like the gap between the garrison and greater society. Since the military draft ended, that gap has become a well-documented fact of life in the United States, memorably captured by Samuel Huntington when he wrote of West Point as a “bit of Sparta in the midst of Babylon.” And just like how those sermons once made comfortable the Copenhagen faithful, so too do today’s sermons on the American military, which we hear at halftime shows or in gritty war films, make us comfortable. In them, veterans are often either vessels of virtue or ticking time bombs; in either case, such sheer simplicity permits the congregation to sidestep harder questions while still feeling itself pious.
Absent from these sermons is something more fundamental, if less cinematic: the peace anxiety that possesses young soldiers as they stand astride the gap between the garrison and wider society. They have a foot in both worlds: calling a child’s teacher from the live-fire range, watching an Instagram story of the lives of friends back home, swiping through a dating app while on shift guarding small munitions. Not only must they summon an almost inhuman faith if they are to make sense of their work, but they must do so in the shadow of a society that, by its sheer indifference every day, reminds them that to do so is a choice.
A year after Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard published The Concept of Anxiety, which famously compares anxiety to a dizziness that arises from looking “down into the yawning abyss” then returning one’s gaze to the path ahead, newly aware of the freedom each step represents. Every time a young soldier lights up his phone screen and gazes to the indifferent world, something like this dizziness returns. Then the retention sergeant comes around to ask about the possibility of a re-up. A different sermon, at once truer and harder to square, might tell of this soldier-as-human, plagued by doubt, alone in the rain, wavering on the edge of faith—who may yet do something of annihilating power.
The analogy can only be taken so far. Whereas Abraham expects to receive his son back, whereas knights of faith are somehow certain in divine redemption, the peacetime soldier is not permitted to hope for war. The best one can hope for in garrison is that war does not occur for one’s labor. The idea that the readiness for war that results from soldiers’ peacetime labor keeps war at bay by staying any would-be aggressor is called “deterrence,” a fixture of American strategy. One need only stand before a group of tired soldiers and urge them back into the muck of a Lithuanian training ground one more time for deterrence’s sake to discover the very real limits of such abstractions. This paradox—that one cannot know if one’s lifework has borne fruit—only sharpens the recurrent pangs of anxiety that now and again seize a peacetime garrison.
●
It would be poetically and perhaps satisfyingly tragic to imagine America’s army bases as redoubts of anguish, another sad story in a supposedly unraveling world. But visitors who stick around know they are not quite so. Most soldiers serve honorably, many happily, usually without the aid of any Abrahamic movements or existential treatises. Your average ammunition guards, far from some theological revelation, will spend their shift swiping through that dating app or watching a favored streamer. The only thought they will give to that shift is its end time. And they often re-up not as a metaphysical leap but for bonuses and pensions and reliable insurance, to advance the economic station of their families. In this way, career soldiers might disappoint Kierkegaard, but they satisfy themselves. For doing so, they are not thoughtless. They lay equal claim to our admiration. On them, too, we depend.
But there are those, civilian and soldier alike, who still wonder: Why join the peacetime army? They are not alone in asking, it would seem, as the American military’s ongoing recruiting troubles suggest. And they should know that the image of the ammunition guard is not Kierkegaard’s originally. He borrowed it from German theologian Karl Daub. It appears in no text of Daub’s, but has been traced to a memoir of Karl Rosenkranz, another German philosopher. Rosenkranz recalled that, after complaining to Daub about his upcoming mandatory Prussian military service, Daub replied that military service might not be so bad, as lonely sentries have “thoughts that otherwise are altogether impossible.” Put another way, the very image of the ammunition guard was intended originally as an affirmative answer to the question of whether one ought to join a peacetime army. Why? Because even the greatest theological minds of the day thought that to the ammunition guard come thoughts otherwise altogether impossible. Such thoughts are prelude to virtue, if not faith, in a world desirous of both but uncertain of how to arrive at either. And this makes the guard someone worth becoming, if only for a little while.
A memorable passage from Fear and Trembling describes the knight of faith as he appears in the street, inwardly heroic but outwardly unremarkable, “solid through and through.” The Abrahams wandering the garrison today are much the same; they appear outwardly as other soldiers do, even as they contend with great spiritual movements in the course of their service. One examines them “from top to toe” for “some small, incongruous optical telegraphic message from the infinite” but finds their stances belong “altogether to finitude,” as mundane as a tax collector or pen pusher, without a trace of “strangeness and superiority.” They, too, will be on shift tonight. On them, too, we depend. And they, too, are worthy subjects of sermons—for if understood in the right light, their example might just annihilate us.
The views expressed in this essay are the author’s own and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army or Department of Defense.
Art credit: Scott Brownell, Soldier Training, 1991. Courtesy of the artist.
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