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. “Send us your boy and we will return to you a man.” Since the dawn of America, the military has articulated some version of this pledge, solidly staking its claim on the monumental work of building the American man. When investigative reporter Jasper Craven first dug into Valley Forge Military Academy five years ago, he uncovered an acrid strain of masculinity that was raw, violent, fiercely hierarchical, and quickly mutating out of control.Initially, he had assumed that military education was a dying, outmoded brand.But as he looked deeper, he found a sprawling, well-funded network featuring dozens of military schools, like Valley Forge and West Point, plus thousands of ROTC programs