God Forgives, Brothers Don't: The Long March of Military Education and the Making of American Manhood

In the tradition of Sebastian Junger’s Tribe and Chris Hedges’s classic War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, a powerful investigation into the fraught history and ominous future of military education in the United States, and how it formed and fuels increasingly volatile strains of American masculinity. Thanks to the prevalence of Boy Scouts, military schools, service academies, JROTC, ROTC, plus other networks of funding and influence, the military has secured a dominant position in the American educational system.This has given the brass outsized power in shaping our youth and, by extension, society at large.As investigative journalist Jasper Craven powerfully demonstrates in these pages, the military has long defined American masculinity and often fosters its most toxic traits. Craven makes this case by revisiting American military history-beginning with the American Revolution.The birth of our nation required a new masculine ideal, which was crafted in the image of America’s most