Entry #17: Hell is the Impossibility of Reason

“Somebody once wrote: ‘Hell is the impossibility of reason.’ That’s what this place feels like. Hell.”*
-Chris Taylor, Platoon-

The Korean Army is a place devoid of reason. A place so devoid of reason, I’d like to imagine it would drive the greatest of thinkers insane. Einstein’s rowdy salt-and-pepper would fall out from stress, Stephen Hawking’s tongue would go numb from exertion, Bobby Fischer would disappear forever in failure. After a while, you have to stop trying to rationalize what is happening around you because the only reward for your efforts is a migraine and possibly an aneurism or the onset of insanity.

Tradition is the excuse given for much of the apprehensible, incomprehensible practices in the army. “This is the way it’s always been done,” people say, shrugging their shoulders and sighing or rolling up their sleeves to give you a thrashing. Some blame the Japanese, but figuring out whether it really is the hand-me-down of the Imperial Japanese Army or attributing tradition to the Japanese is a convenient way to divert the blame by playing on historical enmities is something I can’t be bothered with. Does it really matter? The past is endlessly arguable, the present was fucked up.

People say that the Army is getting better. I hear that the term of service has been shortened by four months since I left the gates of the Second Army for the last time, the pay has increased to slightly above slave wages, and certain basic freedoms and amenities have been afforded to conscripts, but there is one thing I am sure of: senior conscripts are still assholes to their subordinates.

How can I be so sure? Because it’s more than just tradition. It’s the basest aspect of nature codified into tradition. We all want to be that alpha male silverback gorilla, so we bide our time and suffer through the degradation, waiting for our day in the sun. It’s why we all can’t get along. It’s why high school seniors will always pick on freshmen. I was picked on as a freshman, so when I become a senior, I will also pick on freshmen. It’s a vicious, never-ending cycle. Not to say that it can never change. “Someday” is always nice to believe in.

I once heard a nice story in which a man was shown two scenes. The setting was the same in both scenes: a group of people sit around a huge pot of stew. Each person holds a spoon with a handle a meter long. For some reason, they could only hold the end of their spoons—an inherent flaw in the story. The difference between the two scenes is that in one, the people sit around the pot, silent and starving because they cannot bring the stew to their mouths with their own spoons; in the other, the people feed each other with their spoons and are happy. The first scene is supposed to be hell, the second, heaven. The first is too nice a scene to depict the relationships in the Army. In an Army depiction, a few of the people would be fed and happy, their spoons by their sides or used as instruments to hit the rest of the people who are forced to feed them.

In one of my favorite books, Cannery Row, Steinbeck states that “there are two possible reactions to social ostracism—either a man emerges determined to be better, purer, and kindlier or he goes bad, challenges the world and does even worse things.” It’s too bad that the latter is the more popular choice.

* This is the epigraph for my first interim chapter, Basic Combat Training.