When the Chinese soldier in Tiananmen Square hesitated to kill people his own age who were offering him food, and when he set fire to his own tank yet remained in uniform, we can only imagine his internal conflict. We like to frame this as a conflict between immorality and morality, but to the soldier […]

Stage I soldiers free women to be Stage II women Ninety-five percent of women’s experiences are about being a victim. Or about being an underdog, or having to survive. . . women didn’t go to Vietnam and blow things up. They are not Ram bo. Jodie Foster, The New York Times Magazine40 Muhammad Ali’s refusal […]

Men are likely to be not only the warriors of war but also the warriors of peace. Almost all those who risk their lives, are put in jail, or are killed for peace are men. While some of the peace warriors — Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Dag Hammarskjold — are remembered, most are […]

Why are men so cruel? Why do they need to prove their manhood?: The consequences of training our men to fight When John Beverly returned from Vietnam with posttraumatic stress dis­order, the men at work reinforced his suffering. They popped milk cartons, broke beer bottles, and even set off fireworks to see his reaction. He […]

The United States sprayed Vietnam with roughly 11 million gallons of Agent Orange, a chemical defoliant that contains dioxin. Laboratory tests on animals link dioxin to birth defects, cancer, infertility, and miscarriage as well as to damage to the liver and to the nervous and immune systems.77 Admiral Elmo Zumwalt was responsible for the decision […]

ITEM June 1991 America sees Bore Yeltsin acknowledge in a television interview that American POWs from the Vietnam War. World War II. and the Korean War had been transferred to Soviet labor camps and that some might still be alive.68 Within two days, the news media were explaining that Boris Yeltsin had probably just misspoken. […]

To many men, here’s what posttraumatic stress disorder actually felt like: The headaches started a couple of years after 1 came home from Vietnam. . . Then one night not long afterwards, my wife, Loretta, found me in the hallway of our apartment, wearing army fatigues and holding my bayonet… It took me another twelve […]

1 got killed in Vietnam. 1 just didn’t know it at the time. Paul Reutersban, Agent Orange victim55 ITEM More Vietnam veterans have committed suicide since the war ended than were killed in the Vietnam War itself.54 ITEM It is conservatively estimated that 20 percent of all Vietnam veterans, and 60 percent of combat veterans, […]

ITEM Parode magazine announces that 40 million Soviet men were killed between 1914 and I94S.52 The magazne’s headline reads “Short End of the Stick." Because men died? No. The women were seen as getting the short end of the stick because they were stuck with factory and street-cleaner positions the men weren’t around to do. […]

Our association of war stories with bragging leaves us with the impression that men love war — that war is a male "toy." This is the dark side. The light side is the celebration of self that compensates for the tearing down of self that prepared him to be disposable. War stories are the male […]