I have been reading Stoic Warriors: The Ancient Philosophy Behind the Military Mind by Nancy Sherman and the excerpt below (the beginning of chapter two) struck a real chord with me. I know many people who have sought to attain a warrior physique (I am sadly not one of them) and the impulse has always been foreign to me. In the passage below Sherman concludes by pondering the transformation from the public investment in the development of a soldier’s body to the private consolation they must find if they are injured. I can’t seem to get over this dichotomy. What do you think? Can Stoicism help us through life’s hardships? Could it help veterans find peace?
On a sticky June morning in the D.C. area, I drove my daughter to a triathlon at a Navy base some two hours south of our home. The event (three-quarter-mile swim, six-mile bike ride, and three-mile run) drew a lot of military athletes, but there were also civilians interested in the same exhilaration of hard physical activity. As I helped my daughter unload her bike, I found myself gawking at the sculpted bodies that surrounded me, especially those of the men: V-shaped torsos and six-pack fronts, well-developed biceps, broad, muscular shoulders, thickened necks, well-defined pectorals, thighs pumped and strong like stallions’ legs. For the most part, I found them beautiful. I had become used to the sight during my time at the Naval Academy, and as one sitting squarely in middle age, I found the well-kneaded, non-saggy bodies even more attractive. Still, I knew most of these fit bodies were the product not just of youth or nature but of vigilant labor- hours of biking, swimming, or running logged each week. For some, additional hours had been spent at the gym in weight training.
Many participants had woken up at 3 a.m. or earlier to arrive for the 7 a.m. start time- some did regularly as part of the 
weekend triathlon circuit. But despite the hour, people were cheery and chatty, even the most serious-looking athletes. Among them were two USNA triathlon team members, who meticulously greased their bodies with a product called Glide so that they could slide into their full-length wet suits easily and slither out of them the moment they hit the shore and dashed for their bikes.
Side by side with this spirit of camaraderie was a subtle but unmistakable combat element. It came not just from the military types who flocked to this navy base and whose bodies have long been thought of as “war machines”- equipment that is part of the armor and weaponry of the military mission, bodies that are a public investment. It also emerged in the logos on equipment that civilians brought with them: racing bike tires emblazoned with the words “Speed Weaponry,” a T-shirt that featured a bodybuilder in combat fatigues and the caption “Take No Prisoners,” another T-shirt with a lighthearted revision of an Army recruiting slogan: “Be All You Never Were.” The scene confirmed something quite noticeable these days- that the fitness of the classic warrior has become a model for many Americans who have no military experience and little appetite for it.
The phenomenon has become conspicuous in the tony gyms and fitness programs that have mushroomed throughout the American landscape. In my neighborhood alone one finds the Fitness Corps, the Sergeant’s Program, Basic Training, and the Fitness Force. They are our local boot camps. In these programs, well-heeled men and woman pay good money to subject themselves to self-fashioned drill sergeants who specialize in just the sort of abuse that real military drill sergeants are now under pressure to abandon. Indeed, at 5 a.m. in my neighborhood, fitness sergeants are kicking the saggy butts of middle-aged folks who willingly accept the abuse. One winter my husband became a self-appointed victim. He would wake up before sunrise to endure the boot camp he’d managed to escape during the Vietnam years. One morning he lagged in his warm-up run around the park. The drill sergeant didn’t fail to notice and instantly ordered him to pay for his sloth by doing twenty push-ups on the frosty ground. As if this weren’t enough of an indignity, the sergeant then barked out: “Presser, you little piece of shit, do them like you mean them, or else you’ll do twenty more.” It is not just men who subscribe to civilian boot camp. Women too flock to fitness corps, to be all they can be and everything they weren’t. One women’s workout group in our neighborhood has a four-D slogan: “Drill, discipline, dedication, dignity.” At a local 8K charity race I ran (my only competitive race in some twenty-five years of running), it was just those fitness drill sergeants- many of whom, I am sure, are former military men and women- who goaded the runners on from the sidelines to run harder and faster than we thought possible: “Push it out, push it out,” they yelled, and “Make it happen!” “Hey, ho, hey, ho!” they chanted in military cadence. If Jane Fonda’s best-selling 1983 workout video first launched the fitness craze, military-minded trainers are keeping it alive and well.
Still, the American fascination with the military image, even if primarily the body image portion of it, s something not to be taken for granted. Before the events of 9/11 and the widespread mobilization of permanent and reserve troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, many argued that there was a growing gap between the military and civilian worlds. Indeed, in 1997 Tom Ricks, a Pentagon correspondent, argued in his book Making the Corps that this gap is widening as the result of a number of factors: the end of the draft in the early 1970s and the institution of an all-volunteer army with lengthened periods of enlistment, a swelling in non-middle-class recruits at the bottom end of the chain of command matched with a growing professionalization within the officer class at the top, and a new partisan conservatism among officers that no longer reflects the partisan divisions in the general public. Add to this the diminishing number of ROTC units on campuses, the dwindling number of congressmen who have served in the military, and the military’s own prolonged “Vietnam hangover” (its sense of civilian betrayal during that war), and one gets a fairly vivid picture of weakened links between those who wear uniforms and those who don’t. Ricks’s own experience comes from covering Marine boot camp at Parris Island. After eleven weeks of deprivation and drill, recruits were not simply alientated as they returned to their largely working-class communities but disgusted a the corpulence and unkempt lives they had left behind.
It is not just Marine recruits who harbor these views. Increasingly, many civilians do, and some of it is self-directed. Indeed, for those tired of pleats of adipose tissue, modified boot camp seems to offer an attractive tonic. In a country of extremes, it is the antidote to Homer Simpson’s gluttony and lassitude.
This renewed interest in hard control of the body may sound Stoic in spirit, especially in terms of its emphasis on self-toughening through severe training and drill. Epictetus, in particular, routinely employs athletic metaphors to capture the dedication and discipline needed for Stoic training: We are to be like the “invincible athlete” who continues to prove himself even after “he has been victorious in the first encounter,” even if it is “burning hot,” even if there are naysayers who try to bring him down. No one can be “an Olympic victor…without sweat.” “Remember that god, like a wrestling master, has matched you with a rough young man.” But training and discipline, whether physical or mental, are on thing; attachment to the body is another. And Epictetus himself will argue, in Stoic fashion, that while we have a duty to care for the body, ultimately our bodies should be regarded as indifferents, not as intrinsic elements of our good.
This can be difficult advice to swallow. We non-Stoics tend to view ourselves as embodied and our identity as a function of our bodily existence. We may overexaggerate that identity and become obsessive in our care and cultivation of the body, but a healthy sens e of self does not leave the body behind. Soldiers who return from war with bodies maimed and disfigured lose more than just a physical part of themselves. They sacrifice a fundamental part of what shapes their sense of self and good living- easy mobility, full and independent use of arms and hands, sightedness and hearing, and in many cases a fitness for competitive physical adventure and risk that made the military attractive to them in the first place. They may also have to live with the fact that they inflicted comparable losses on others. The bitter irony of war is that the fittest risk becoming the most disabled. As we shall see, cutting-edge technology has transformed the lot of veterans, with many more surviving the sort of severe injuries that would have killed them in past wars. Even so, they still must adjust to a new kind of life, lived with a new kind of vulnerability and set of compensatory skills.
In a sense, the Stoics address fragility of just this sort. We are vulnerable to disease and disability, whether through war, sickness, or old age. We need lessons for preparing for this- indeed, hard training and drill- if we are not to be totally undone by life’s tragedies…How might Stoic consolations help a soldier face the gruesome casualties of war?…[there] is striking paradox about which there has been a stunning silence: a warrior’s body is in many ways a public investment, and yet the sacrifices he or she makes are harrowingly private. Can Stoic doctrines help in facing those losses?
[…] Original post by Rebecca […]