Beyond School

Artifact: Key-Chain awarded for Honor Graduate at Army Non-Commissioned Officers’ School
Date: 1996-2000
Elements of Culture: Rights and Duties; Military Values

The professional development workshop that day was on how best to blow people up.

The sergeant teaching the workshop was Thai-American. His tattoos and skater fashion signaled a person who had long since been assimilated into the American macroculture¹.

The young soldiers all took a knee as the sergeant demonstrated how to lay Claymore mines for maximum kill-power in an ambush on enemy troops. He was hip, he was cool, he said straight-faced ironic things that made all the new soldiers laugh. The ‘new’ army was so much better, now that they let cool people in.

I took a knee too. I had gotten to know this sergeant a bit in a couple of conversations around that time. He was a Berkeley graduate in philosophy who liked to talk about critical theory and deconstructionism.  At the moment he was talking about something else.

“Have you ever seen ten real Claymores in a line detonated?”

The new recruits all shook their heads ‘no.’

Instructions on a US Army Claymore Mine

“Man. It’s awesome. Done right, they won’t leave a trace of anybody in the blast zone. They just disappear.  Awesome.”

He gleamed. The recruits oooh’d.

War is war, and people die in it. It’s unfortunate. I liked to tell myself that my job in military intelligence was to provide information soon enough to prevent war from breaking out—and even if that was my oxymoronic way of trying to square my current vocation with my values (not so far-fetched in the Clinton years), it was still a far cry from advocating war as “awesome.” So I spoke.

“Sergeant. Have you ever killed another human being or seen it done?”

I was surprised to see him react to this symbolic punch like it had caught him squarely in the stomach, but he did. His head instantly bobbed down and back up—I think because I was a reminder of his Berkeley script because of our talks.

“No,” he said.

“So how can you say it’s awesome? Vets have nightmares over the people they’ve killed.”

"All Services Free of Charge" - Cambodia Trust poster

“You’re right,” he said. “I meant to say that the explosives are awesome because of their power.”

Pedagogically, this was simply an example of the student’s role to shape the construction of knowledge in the classroom. As a teacher, ideally I would want my students to challenge me when they catch implications of my words or actions that contradict their values. This does not mean that I will always tell them they are right when they do; rather, it offers teachable moments for teaching and learning to occur for everybody in the classroom—teacher included. As our textbook observes, we, as teachers, “are always emerging in our understanding; we never arrive; we are always on our way” (Huber, p. 9).

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Photo credits: Claymore Mine by Seadling; Cambodia Trust poster by Cambodia Trust

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The Web Legacy Series So Far:
1. Fear and Trembling at Camp Joy: Unborn Again
2. The Hulk Leads to Hamlet: Reading Despite School
3. Of Jocks and Fags: The High School Bullying Years
4. In the Crumbling Temple of the Dead White Males: The Beatnik College Years, pt. 1
5. Human Sacrifice: The College Years, pt. 2
6. Learning the Enemy’s Language: The Army Years, part 1

If you like this post, please spread it:

1. if you accept the premise that the youth macroculture has been decentered from WASP-ish norms—though not from WASP-ish economic interests—for at least ten years: the young went ‘alternative’ during the ‘90s, and . . . non-conformed together. The WASPs controlling the music, film, and apparel industries gladly mass-produced the talismans and icons showing membership to the commodified youth culture for all the young to buy. While the WASPs gladly pocketed the profits, with which they probably, among other things, reinforced the security systems around their estates to protect them from their young consumers [↩]

1. Legacy 2: Reading Despite Teaching (or, How the Hulk Led Me to Hamlet)
2. Legacy 5: Human Sacrifice
3. Fear-Based Curriculum: A Language Arts Tragedy (More on Teaching Lolita)

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