It never fails. Whenever I think I have a good post developing in my drafts folder, along comes a reader’s comment that abruptly halts that process and demands my full attention. Rational Reader, Eric had one such comment today:

Rollo,

Military men ought to be a targeted audience for your red-pill teachings.

As an Army veteran, I can attest that being socialized as a soldier is to learn positive masculinity in terms of a man among men. While not immune from political correctness, there is a stand-off distance from civilian society that preserves within the military perhaps our last best repository of traditional masculine values and culture.

Before I joined the Army, the military seemed alien and threatening. What I found, instead, is the nature of soldiering just made sense to me on a basic level as a man that I had not experienced before the Army. Soldiering opened my eyes to the intrinsic higher value of manhood. I have not found the same masculine fit since returning to civilian society. (Granted, I didn’t become a cop.)

However, the Army does not cure Beta. The military – as you imply – does not teach soldiers how to handle women and deal with feminism. When soldiers apply the 7 Army values (loyalty, duty, respect, selfless service, honor, integrity, personal courage) to women, they simply don’t receive the same positive feedback they get from applying the Army values on the job among soldiers. If anything, their heightened engagement with masculinity in male terms obscures their understanding of women. Editorially, I believe the disjunction between the masculine culture of the military and the feminized culture of civilian society is an unacknowledged reason why many seemingly capable veterans are tripped up in their transition from military life to the civilian world.

The masculine values that soldiers learn are invaluable, and our society would be made healthier and stronger if veterans could spread those values upon their return to civilian society. However, in their current condition, military-sourced masculine values are fragile in the context of feminized civilian society.

I believe the solution is adding formative red-pill teachings to the traditional masculine lessons received by impressionable young soldiers. Doing so will empower and protect the soldiers in their immediate personal lives, especially important for the soldiers who are anxiously distant (Dear John, Jody) from their love objects. And, by the time they are mature veterans returning to civilian society, their traditional masculine values hybridized with red-pill awareness should be robust enough to thrive in feminized civilian society. From their success, the combination of red pill and traditional masculine values can spread.

I attempted to address this in Casualties.

For whatever reason I seem to be held in high respect with military guys. It’s kind of strange thinking about this post-red pill, but a majority of my male friends have been soldiers and marines, and the common theme with every one of them has been their ‘get it done’ attitude and the conflicts it has with a beta relationship they all had with women.

I’ve got a guy in another dept. who was a former Marine who served 3 tours in Iraq and is an amazingly organized and responsible guy. Alpha as fuck in all respects but one; he too is saddled with an overweight fianceé (soon to be his 2nd wife I might add) who barks at him via cell phone while he takes his smoke breaks. I hear them bickering occasionally and all the guy does is attempt to appease her – this former Marine, who had live ammunition fired at him, is crushed mentally and emotionally by a woman who should never have a position to question him. Why? because he subscribes to the societal fem-centric default mentality when entreating with women.

At the risk of encouraging some ecumenical debate in the comment thread, the great failing of most military guys is the expectation of relational equity with regards to their commitment to the 7 Army values. In a military sense, in a sportsmanship sense, in a business sense men believe that the personal investments of sacrifice, loyalty, duty, respect, selfless service, honor, integrity, personal courage, etc. will be appreciated, considered and rewarded with respect, value and/or status. Whether or not this is the actual case on an individual basis, the expectation from amongst a man’s peers is one of an appreciable equity he can build upon and have his eminence increase upon.

The rude awakening for most soliders is that Hypergamy doesn’t care about relational equity. All of the social value he should be able to accrue through his steadfast commitment (actual or imagined) to principle isn’t recognized by feminine hypergamy. Hypergamy doesn’t care about his belief in the 7 Army values, it only cares about its own imperative. It’s not that women can’t learn to appreciate these virtues in a man, it’s that her natural state of hypergamy (and solipsism) doesn’t facilitate it.

I have no doubt I’ll get female commenters explaining to me how they in fact do recognize and appreciate men’s commitment to duty, but I’d argue that this appreciation came from learned necessity, not a natural appeal to her hypergamy. When hypergamy is satisfied for a woman, mitigated by her capacity to attract better male prospects, only then is a woman in a position to consider men’s integrity and character.

This is naturally frustrating for a young soldier wondering why his sacrifice and commitment to duty doesn’t make him any more attractive, more arousing, more deserving of his girlfriend or wife’s monogamous commitment. He’s done everything ‘right’ yet there is no advancement, no appreciation, and in fact sometimes outright abandonment of him and his ‘principles’. The reflex of course is to amplify that sacrifice to levels above and beyond what he’s previously committed himself to, or to rationalize disqualifying a woman lacking the capacity to appreciate that sacrifice.

The real tragedy is that young soldiers (and sometimes old) are easy marks for the feminine imperative looking to consolidate on a security derived from those sacrifices without ever appreciating them. I have a friend back in Reno who after 16 years, and 4 children, had his wife leave him after a military marriage. In her unhaaaaapiness she decided to go to back to school (funded by him) to be a dental assistant and promptly divorced him just 3 months prior to his discharge. They share custody now, but she ended up getting with a dental surgeon soon after the divorce. His disappointment and depression didn’t come from her abandoning him and the kids as much as it came from his bewilderment that she’d leave everything he’d built for them as a family, and himself personally. He couldn’t imagine that his investments had been less valuable to her than a life with a more resource rich man.

Parting Shot: Military Suicides exceeded combat deaths this year. While this is sobering, what most media covering the story fail to illuminate is the overwhelmingly disproportionate number of men who take their lives in comparison to women.

Tom says the military’s suicide problem is a complex one. “Most of those committing suicide are young men, 18-24,” he says, who are worried that asking for help will undermine their career.

While some of the deaths can be linked to the stresses of being deployed in a war zone, a third or more of those who killed themselves were never deployed, Tom says. They seem to have been made desperate by financial or personal problems.

Personal problems, yeah, personal problems.