Wandering in the Wilderness

Jesse Walker from the April 1999 issue

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None of this shatters Kaplan's views, but it does shake them; and he bears these experiences in mind when he visits Portland, Oregon, a heavily regulated city. He likes the town, but he's also wary about it: "The very temporariness of American civilization...as indicated by the Bransons and Tucsons and Albuquerques and Orange Counties, with their overnight theater-prop development, is the image of our dynamism. Portland may be beautiful with its architectural accumulation and civility, but too many Portlands, too tightly held, might stultify us."

Kaplan's book begins and ends on military ground. It starts in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, an army base and war college. It concludes on the battlefields of Vicksburg, Mississippi, which Kaplan visits with 54 officers from Fort Leavenworth. His observations illustrate his ideas about the American future while reminding the reader of his social biases.

Kaplan sees a military rapidly hardening into a specialized caste. The demands of high-tech warfare have transformed the commanders' work, he reports: "The draft has become obsolete," an officer tells him, "because of the way warfare is changing. War has become so technological that it takes too long to train people who will serve for only a year or two." Those who have mastered these specialized skills learn to speak an equally specialized jargon. They live in settlements isolated from the coastal cities favored by other elites, and, in subtler ways, from the inland communities that surround their bases.

They are, in short, another subculture in a splintering country. But this subculture derives its identity, its sense of self, from its loyalty to an unfragmented American nation, however abstract that allegiance may have become. Its mission is evolving, away from what Kaplan pretentiously calls "the Homeric age of the Civil War, World War II, and the Cold War" and toward "the role of first among equals in a lean and mobile global strike force, in which blood-and-soil traditions have all but vanished." But this shift is frustrating for the soldiers. To judge from Kaplan's account, a defensive super-nationalism may be taking hold among them, even as their attachment to the actual nation fades.

When Kaplan speaks to these officers about the future of warfare, the prevailing vision involves a host of small missions around the globe: rescue operations, civil disturbances, battles against urban guerrillas. An alarming number of them see the military turning its attention inward, doing the same things here it does in Bosnia. Many even feel that the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits using the military as a domestic police force, should be repealed.

This raises the specter not of dissolution but of centralization. It's one thing for the professional classes to live separately from the rest of America; it's quite another for them to have so much power over everyone else, particularly people they neither like nor understand. Kaplan's aforementioned prejudices are at play in rural areas, where yuppie newcomers try to prohibit poor people from keeping couches on their porches or cars on their lawns. They are at play in urban areas, where planners try to rip out and redo whole neighborhoods that don't fit their vision. They are at play in the suburbs, where self-proclaimed "regionalists" are trying to squelch the independence of mini-townships like those around St. Louis.

And they are at play in the military. Near Vicksburg, in Tunica County, Kaplan and some soldiers enter a casino. There they observe the teeming mass of gamblers, whom Kaplan describes with his usual eye for the intersection between poverty and ugliness.

"And we risk our life for this," a major comments sourly. "Kind of makes you go warm and fuzzy inside."