"Push always comes to shove and you folks, you TV folks, gonna need somebody to fight your
    wars."
        -Ambush at Fort Bragg

Before we begin, let me make my views clear so that anyone who might be offended can skip this one.  I believe that homosexuality is wrong, even that it is evil.  I believe that it should be illegal and that you should be able to discriminate against people on the basis of their sexual preferences.  However, I do not think that the laws should be enforced except in the most egregious circumstances, i.e. the authorities should feel free to raid bath houses or park bathrooms, or the like.  In short, if folks want to engage in this activity behind closed doors, there is no pressing societal need to interfere with them.  But where their personal behavior impacts others or the society in general, it is perfectly acceptable to me that government place rational limits on their behavior.  Which brings us to our review.

This is an excerpt that did not make the final cut for Wolfe's excellent novel A Man in Full (see review).  Instead it was serialized in Rolling Stone magazine (as was Bonfire of the Vanities) and then released in audio tape format only.  It tells the story of the clash of two diametrically opposed cultures, the US Army and the American media.  Irv Durtscher is the "Federico Fellini of television journalism" and he and his bimbette of a talking head, Mary Cary Brokenborough, are hot on the trail of a big story, the beating death of a gay soldier at Fort Bragg.  With the help of elaborate and illegal surveillance equipment, Irv manages to tape three soldiers discussing their roles in the murder.  But this, of course, is not a sufficient coup.  No, the real story hinges on a gotcha interview.  Irv has to find a way to have confront the soldiers with the videotape and film their reactions in this ambush at Fort Bragg.

That is the irony here.  The ambush that is the target of Wolfe's acidic wit is not the beating of the gay soldier, it is instead the cheap shot standards, tactics and stunts of television news journalists.  You see, in the first place, Wolfe is not particularly offended by the action of the three soldiers.  If anything, he seems to feel that they were fairly justified in what they did.  There's a terrific soliloquy by one of the men where he describes the essentials of military training and how we ask these soldiers to be prepared to kill our enemies because they are different than us, because they don't believe in the things that we do--things like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and the Bible.  But then we turn around and expect them to accept homosexuals into their units with little care for the effect that this will have on the morale and camaraderie of these fighting units.  In addition, Wolfe demonstrates the hypocrisy of people like Irv Durtscher, who becomes hilariously squeamish at the thought of television actually describing the actions that gay men engage in, but is outraged that these soldiers are made uncomfortable by being forced to share the forced Army intimacy with them.  This juxtaposition of the sort of easy liberality of the journalists and the rigid morality of the soldiers is really the crux of the story.  Irv is representative of a class of folks for whom moral questions are almost purely abstract, because it is unimaginable that the answers to the questions will ever really impact their lives.  For the soldiers, on the other hand, such issues can mean the difference between life and death.

I remember when Bill Clinton was embroiled in his little controversy over allowing gays in the military and around that time, the profoundly cowardly movie A Few Good Men came out, giving us the Hollywood take on the issue.  Naturally, the sexuality of the soldiers involved in the movie's central incident is never addressed, virtually proving Wolfe's point about the elites' double standard.  But then, rather than simply presenting a stark moral question about whether military discipline justifies the harsh treatment of those who can not measure up to their standards, the filmmakers resort to having Jack Nicholson's character dissolve into dementia, thereby stacking the deck in their own favor and neatly skirting any real confrontation with the issues they've raised.  At any rate, we were driving home after watching the movie (my poor mother had taken me, my doctor wife, my lawyer sister and my infantry Captain brother) and we were arguing over whether homosexuality should be just cause for dismissal from the military.  My sister and I were arguing legal points when my brother simply stated, "I oppose anything that makes it harder to maintain discipline in my unit.  And the mere possibility of romantic entanglements, jealousies and the like, means that having women and gays in combat roles will endanger my men.  I can assure you, if they decide to allow this, the men will take care of it themselves."

Where Hollywood shied away from the implications of these issues, Tom Wolfe has taken them and driven them to their ultimate logic.  Wolfe's soldiers, as my brother implied they would, have taken matters into their own heads and nipped a potential problem in the bud.  Their solution may be cruel, even barbaric, but it has an undeniable internal logic.  If the sexual preference of the guy you are going to be sharing a foxhole with, threatens your life and the lives of your compatriots, then the logical solution is to get rid of him.  Obviously, this is completely unacceptable intellectually, and must be repellent to the political, cultural and media elites.  But this is the situation that they have created and Wolfe is suggesting that it is they who will be responsible when such things occur.

There is a really delightful example below of the incapacity of Wolfe's victims to even understand his purpose.  In his review Timothy Noah suggests that Wolfe comes a little too close to homophobia here and that this insensitivity nearly mars the story.  You can barely make stuff like this up.  The guy has managed to completely miss the point of the story.  Of course, he still recommends it.

There is another prototypically Wolfeian jibe here.  He masterfully portrays the journalists' obsession with the language and metaphors of warriors and machismo, even as they are condemning the very men who embody these ideals.  All of the talk of journalistic competition and ratings races is couched in military slang and succeeding in these pursuits is viewed as conveying or confirming manliness.  Indeed, the final line of the story has someone saying of Mary Cary:

    Christ, that girls got some balls! Huh?

The irony, of course, (and we have seen it in other works by Wolfe, with The Masters of the Universe, etc.) is that modern life has seen people abandon the true tests of manhood in favor of these relatively trivial pursuits.  But in order to maintain a sense of self worth, they must adopt the language and mind set of the military.  As he has done so many times before, Wolfe steps forward to announce that the Emperor has no clothes.  In so doing, he makes it clear that he favors the men who actually continue to live by these ideals and test themselves against them.  I for one agree.

(Reviewed:)

Grade: (A) Orrin C. Judd

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