H ats off to Rishi Sunak. Or rather, helmets off.
In the midst of an election campaign, the prime minister of the United Kingdom had the guts to propose an idea American politicians won’t dare to moot: mandatory military service. Via his home secretary, James Cleverly, Sunak even articulated a justification: Conscription would diminish identity-politicking, narrow differences among the young, and build “a society where people mix with people outside their own communities.”
To say that hostility greeted Sunak’s proposal is to understate. “Bonkers” was the judgment of Admiral Alan West, former chief of the U.K.’s naval staff, who argued that the £2.5 billion cost was prohibitive. Despite the fact that Sunak also offered an alternative for youth, a form of civil service, other critics also rubbished the Tory PM’s proposal, charging that it would be wrong to force young people to perform such service. Whyever not, asked Cleverly. “We force people to do things all the time.”
Indeed.
Cleverly’s unguarded honesty drew another round of thunderous opposition. And it even forced him into immediate backtracking — no one would go to jail for not serving, the Sunak government declared within a day of Cleverly’s line.
On this side of the Atlantic, hostility to the very mention of conscription is likely to be just as strong. Indeed, so controversial is PM Sunak’s little idea that it is likely to remain the subject of international chatter right through the U.K.’s July 4 election.
All of which makes this a good time to turn to perhaps the most perspicacious analysis of conscription’s value ever put before the English-reading public: a 65-year-old text titled “Defender of the Faith.”
“Defender of the Faith” happens to be fiction, penned by an author better known for his treatment of other topics, Philip Roth. The short story can be found in that paperback copy of Goodbye, Columbus on your guest-room bookshelf, hidden behind that collection’s racier title story.
The original pub date doesn’t matter. For the dynamic that “Defender” captures is so achingly familiar that, with names and grievances changed, it could have come from a report of an exchange between protesters and a professor on the steps of Columbia’s Low Library during Commencement 2024.
Roth being Roth, the story is also social comedy — a genre we don’t often risk nowadays. Of course, that’s part of our problem, too.
Roth sets his scene at Camp Crowder, a real-life giant of a military base in Newton, Mo., where on thousands of acres tens of thousands received basic training before shipping off to the battlefields. The time is May 1945. General Eisenhower has just led soldiers through the Ohrdruf concentration camp. The war against Japan is still very much on. The narrator is Nathan Marx, a sergeant hardened by grueling service in the forests of Belgium and the rubble of Germany. If Marx is a defender of anything at this moment, he is a defender of the Army.
At Camp Crowder, Marx must train new troops, many still teens, including several of the most sensitive ethnicity of that year: Jews.
Trouble comes just before Friday night, the time normally reserved on the base for “GI parties” — barracks cleanup. The Jewish soldiers approach Marx about getting a pass to attend Sabbath services instead. Marx bridles: “You against cleaning the barracks Friday night, Grossbart?” he demands of one of them in classic noncom fashion. “Maybe we shouldn’t have GI Parties. Maybe we should get a maid.”
But the GI presses. “It’s just — GI parties on a Friday night, of all nights.” Guessing correctly — to the sergeant’s chagrin — that this sergeant is a fellow Jew, the draftees play on the fact: “We thought that with you here things might be different.” They report that the other men mock them as slackers when they ask for Friday night off — “It’s unfair.”
“Look Grossbart,” replies Marx, “this is the army, not summer camp.” The draftees snap back, suggesting that Sergeant Marx abandoned his identity: “You even talk like a goy.” All too aware that he cannot control the reaction from an uncomprehending command, Marx reluctantly relents and takes the Friday-night matter to his higher-ups.
The outcome is just as Marx fears. The captain assumes that Marx is “not so much explaining Grossbart’s position as defending it” — playing for privilege himself. “Seems awful funny,” says the captain, mangling some of the facts, “that suddenly the Lord is calling so loud in Private Grossman’s ear that he’s just got to run off to church.”
“Synagogue,” cringes Marx. And we cringe with him.
A primitive corporal — “He had a glaze in his eyes that made one think of caves and dinosaurs” — delivers the army’s verdict by loudspeaker, and in fashion as likely to damage the Jewish GIs’ standing as to help them observe their faith: “Give me your ears, troopers. Toppie says for me to tell you that at 1900 hours all Jewish personnel is to fall out in front here, if they want to attend the Jewish mass.”
The tension between Marx and the Jewish GIs builds, part bitter, always funny, with the draftees raising further grievances or nudging for more of what nowadays we call “accommodations.” Mess-hall fare isn’t kosher, and the Jewish group pushes the reluctant Marx yet again into the role of translator-messenger: “Captain,” Marx tells his superior of a Jewish GI, “he’s a very orthodox Jew, so he’s only allowed to eat certain foods.” Whenever Marx resists their demands, the Jewish GIs try to shame him into standing up for the Jewish community, even invoking the Holocaust, an off-putting analogy. “That’s what happened in Germany. They didn’t stick together. They let themselves get pushed around.”
Attempting to pull social — if not military — rank, the draftees remind us that the term chutzpah derives from the Yiddish by arranging for a letter from a congressman protesting the treatment of Jewish recruits at Camp Crowder, thereby guaranteeing hostility from all officers. The draftees seek a weekend pass — not normally a possibility in basic training — to observe Passover off base in St. Louis. Marx points out that the holiday has already passed. The men counter that they’ve been offered a Passover meal — and can at least see relatives and eat the traditional foods. Marx guesses, correctly, that these new GIs aren’t always so observant, and that they are, to some extent, abusing their privilege, as we would put it. The sarge turns vindictive.
Roth, again being Roth, is addressing Jewish self-hatred: The tackiness of his fellow Jews appalls the sergeant. Of wider interest, for the rest of us, is what emerges in the encounters between Marx and his captain. The army is preoccupied — these are the very days when the U.S. is battling on Okinawa. “I’d like to punch him one right in the mouth,” says the captain of one of the complainers. “There’s a war on, and he wants a silver platter.”
But the captain also makes another point: “Sergeant, nobody gets special treatment here, for the good or the bad. All a man’s got to do is prove himself.” The captain also gives Marx some advice: “You’re going to be old before your time if you worry about how the men feel. . . . Let’s us train these fellas to shoot straight.”
What to conclude? One message is what every vet discovers when, all grown up, he is dumped back abruptly into the triviality of peacetime life: Tribe intrudes more than we would sometimes like. Religious observance turns out to matter. Sometimes, it clashes with military life as loudly as a Marine band. This, even the angry Marx concedes. The other message in “Defender” is larger: Any institution, whether an army ending a war or, yes, a university in peacetime, can take us out of ourselves by pulling us into a larger endeavor. That institution can also expose us to truths that place our private preoccupations in perspective. Including the fact that there is evil in the world. “We are told the American soldier does not know what he is fighting for,” as Ike said when explaining his decision to show troops the inside of concentration camps. “Now, at least, we know what he is fighting against.”
We know why generals today, whether here or in the U.K., will dig in their boot heels to fight anything like conscription. The money is just the first issue. The second is the hard work of turning a lost, entitled generation of non-stars into “straight shooters.” Our governments have made that work yet harder by demanding all sorts of coddling, those “silver platters,” for both enlisted men and officers. Sunak’s national service, or any conscription here, may merely force the military into degrading the institution, serving as its nation’s chief progressive indoctrinator. Military brass, whose next promotion already depends on their ability to display concern for every complaint a soldier makes, will never say they don’t like running “a summer camp.” But they can resist doing more of that work.
Still, perhaps we need the military more than it needs us. Or something like what the military used to be. In Roth’s time, Americans learned much from the army — but also from school or the office. These days however, grammar schools are DEI training centers. Sartorial concessions are no longer required in the workplace. Nor is turning up at all. The result is that young people never see that dressing professionally — or fitting in in more profound ways — can also provide its own form of liberation. As a friend of NR Capital Matters, David Bahnsen, noted in a recent book, Full Time: The Work and Meaning of Life, we cut young people off from some of the greatest joys of adulthood when we deprive them of the chance to fully participate in a work community. “Work is not, primarily, a thing one does to live, but the thing one lives to do,” as Dorothy Sayers put it.
The data support the case that stable, serious participation in a demanding work community — especially military service — benefits the careers of workers. “Flexibility” and the “ability to learn new systems” or “working with others” are the traits sought by the hirers. Every month for decades now, the Department of Labor has compared unemployment among veterans with unemployment among the rest of the workforce. The unemployment rate for vets, male and female, is always lower.
This reality is what Rishi Sunak is trying to get at. Whether the result is conscription or some version of it, the moment has come for us to hear out those who dare emphasize service to something greater than private or domestic political concerns. And, also, to defend them.