The Wall Street Journal ran a book review today that raised way more questions than it answered, including a possble hard-news hook to the ongoing tensions among the chaplains who serve the various branches of the U.S. military. Click here for a flashback on those stories.
The book by Robert Kaplan is called Imperial Grunts and the headline on Daniel Ford's essay has a kicker phrase that will certainly catch the eye of anyone interested in religion news: "God-Fearing Spartans: A look at America's 'imperial grunts.'"
So you are reading along and then you crash into this summary paragraph:
One of the more surprising of Mr. Kaplan's findings is that evangelical Christianity helped to transform the military in the 1980s, rescuing the Vietnam-era Army from drugs, alcohol and alienation. That reformation, together with the character-building demands of Balkans deployments of the 1990s (more important, in his judgment, than the frontal wars against Saddam Hussein), created our "imperial grunts."
Whoa. What in the world does all of that mean?
And later we meet a soldier who takes the whole "God, country, honor, duty" equation up to a whole different level. Who are the new "grunts"? We are told that they are the heart of America's military and are dug in deep out in the overseas battlefields that they call "Injun Country," an environment in which the grunts say that moral absolutes are easy to see and defend (according to those interviewed for this book).
"We're the damn Spartans," explains Maj. Kevin Holiday of Tampa, "physical warriors with college degrees." A civil engineer with three kids, he is a National Guardsman with an attitude. "God has put me here," he tells Mr. Kaplan. "I'm a Christian. . . . You see this all around you" -- the dust, deprivation and anxiety of Injun Country -- "well, it's the high point of my life and of everyone else here."
And believe it or not, that is about where things stop. Hey, folks, can you tell us more?
It is my hope that, somewhere at the WSJ news desk, some editor who works with the newsroom's celebrated column-one feature team read these paragraphs this morning, spit out her or his coffee, and said: "What? Can somebody get me some hard numbers on this thing about 'evangelical Christianity helped to transform the military in the 1980s' and all of that?"
There's a story here. I hope that the talented people on the news side at the WSJ report it, find out if this editorial claim is true and then print the results. Just do it.