1.
In the summer of 2012, under the watchful eye of a drill sergeant, I found myself learning to throw a hand grenade — decidedly not how I preferred to spend the summer after my freshman year of college. I pulled the safety pin from the small mango-shaped explosive and hurled it in a high arc. It landed in the water with a soft plop, followed by an erupting geyser and a deep rumble.
The city of Nonsan lies among the strawberry fields of the southern Korean Peninsula, a pastoral lowland quilted with rice paddies and vinyl greenhouses. Yet for Korean men of a certain age, its name is a dreaded synecdoche for the country’s Army Training Center. It’s a sprawl of barracks and drill fields that has processed, since its founding in 1951 — a year into the Korean War — upwards of seven million men, with some 120,000 new recruits still passing through its gates each year.
There, alongside a hundred or so other young men with freshly shaved heads, I was acquainted with the machinery of conventional warfare, on the theory that this might make me useful against North Korean aggression.
As everyone who knows me would agree, I am not exactly combat material. There are two kinds of men: those who feel a certain thrill upon hearing words like “AK-47” or “Hellfire missile,” and those who find the first kind embarrassing. This is not to say I’m a wimpy milksop. I have cycled across a country (Japan) and run several marathons, which of course means I am superbly equipped to outrun anyone when it's time to flee.
It was the same eventful summer “Gangnam Style” galloped toward its first billion views, giving my country a spike of cultural relevance that has somehow yet to recede; Usain Bolt and Michael Phelps pulverized records at the London Olympics. Facebook had just IPO’d, and Tesla had released its Model S. Looking back, it was a prelapsarian time all around, set against the gentle drama called the American presidential election between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.
For those who care, CERN announced the discovery of the Higgs boson.
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The Korean War, which lasted from 1950 to 1953, never ended with a peace treaty, only a ceasefire. This meant, as we were insistently told growing up, the country is technically still at war. Hence, all able-bodied South Korean male citizens from 18 to 28 are required to serve in the military for about two years — “about” because the length of service depends on the branch: Army, Navy, Air Force, or Marines (twenty-one months for the Army during my time). After finishing my first year of college in the U.S., I enlisted to serve from 2012 to 2014.
Despite what Ridley Scott would have you believe, a typical soldier’s life anywhere is, I suspect, neither exciting nor glorious. In the South Korean version, it unfolds as if Kafka and Solzhenitsyn had gotten a joint book deal to adapt The Gulag Archipelago into an absurdist tragicomedy set on the Korean Peninsula.
What every South Korean man agrees on is that serving in the military is a dreadful experience. The chief agony reported by draftees isn’t the plutonium-happy neighbor to the north but the hazing and abuse — physical, mental, and sexual — that have long defined military life.
A telling statistic: In 2024, of 44 deaths in the army, 41 were suicides. (The remaining three deaths were accidents; the enemy to the north claimed no victims.) The essence of South Korean military life remains a blend of cruelty, dark comedy, and sickening monotony — a slaughterhouse of boyhood, where even the gentlest young man learns to hurl profanities and is coaxed into acts of casual cruelty.
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The long tradition of carceral creativity goes back centuries: John Bunyan wrote The Pilgrim's Progress, Boethius The Consolation of Philosophy, and Oscar Wilde De Profundis all while behind bars. The lineage continued into modern times with Primo Levi's If This Is a Man, Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks, and, of course, Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail." Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o wrote an entire novel on toilet paper in his prison cell.
Confinement in the military, it turns out, can also be a boon to literary output. James Salter packed a typewriter to write between flight missions, and Ludwig Wittgenstein drafted the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in the trenches of World War I.
Because I'm no genius, writing philosophical treatises would be a tall order. But I figured I could at least read them. The bleak summer before enlistment felt less grim when I realized I could make it a reading retreat. Twenty-one months of service were ninety-one weeks — in my economy, six academic semesters, or three years of college.
With the naïve optimism that smacked of a college sophomore (which I was), I declared that with books, any hell could be turned into a Walden. And with a mortality rate about five hundred times lower than a real Gulag's, I figured I'd manage.
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No Korean man forgets the date of his enlistment — mine was August 20th — which feels simultaneously like a second birthday and a funeral. After waving goodbye to the family and friends who traveled to Nonsan to see you off, you step inside the barracks. You’re handed a crisp camouflage uniform, and you stuff your civilian clothes into a plastic bag to be mailed home. You squeeze your feet into leather military boots that, by the final week’s march, will have chewed your heels raw.
On your first night, you lie sleepless on a two-inch-thick sleeping pad. The next morning brings the particular shock you feel the day after something awful happens — the kind that follows the death of a loved one, maybe: You open your eyes and, for a few seconds, the world feels normal again, then the staggering realization that your life has irrevocably changed.
A bugle call jolts you awake, bringing the dislocation of waking up in a strange place. You’re expected to spring up and fold your sleeping pad. If there's a straggler, the entire platoon must hold a punishing pose resembling a downward dog, often for a full hour. To this day, you still don’t understand why people pay to do yoga.
Herded like cattle, you march to the mess hall for your first taste of military food. With the same rascally smile you come to recognize on drill sergeants everywhere, one tells you that you must be well fed, because you now belong to the Republic of Korea Army. You’re served on a five-section steel tray, where the food is at least portioned out with utilitarian exactitude.
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The last day of the five-week training had a graduation-day feel to it, since we would soon be sent off to different bases. While I was sad to leave the friendships I'd forged in that blitz, I was suspicious of this orchestrated intimacy — one that must be reliably reproducible in Nonsan, under the engineered conditions of shared misery and resentment toward our drill sergeants. Was this kind of ready-made camaraderie the particular fiction that underwrites the enterprise of war? In the end, I’d never see most of them again. Perhaps friendship is what’s born of shared sensibilities, and we reserve the word camaraderie for what’s born of shared hatred.
A couple of months earlier, I’d passed the test qualifying me as a military interpreter, which meant I was more likely to be assigned to a military high command where the U.S. military was also present — South Korea being a close ally — than to a field unit where manual labor, artillery drills, and winter patrols awaited. But this didn’t rule out the possibility of being stationed at the Korean Demilitarized Zone, where one would be facing North Korean soldiers who had no particular need for interpreters.
Assignments are more or less random. This prevents the corrupt practice of buying plum assignments for sons through back channels — a racket once rampant — but it also results in colossal misapplications of talent: an oncology researcher with a Ph.D. patrolling the DMZ, a cartoonist driving a battle tank, and a poet operating a self-propelled howitzer.
Each of us was called up to find out our assignment. Some faces looked stricken as they learned they would be near the border; others celebrated getting cushy postings. Mine: U.S. Army Garrison Yongsan, at the main headquarters for American troops on the Korean Peninsula.
2.
Yongsan Garrison is the strangest place I’ve ever been. Having lassoed a prime stretch of land in the now-fashionable Itaewon district, it occupied more than half the area of Central Park, right in the heart of Seoul. But on Google Maps — coordinates (37.54, 126.98) — you’ll find a conspicuous blank space where it should be.
Walk its perimeter — a concrete wall topped with barbed wire — you’ll occasionally come across nondescript gates, each a portal to, quite literally, another country: Outside, street vendors sell rice cakes and kimbap; one step inside and you're on a patch of U.S. jurisdiction. Traffic signs switch to English and U.S. dollars replace Korean won.
It was a liminal space where old military compounds built by the colonial Japanese stood next to buildings raised by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The resulting architectural dysmorphia felt like the time I went wandering through an odd corner of Berlin. The whole place could be mistaken for a standing film set in Culver City, except the tanks and guns were not props.
The garrison was a node of some military significance where the United Nations Command (UNC), United States Forces Korea (USFK), and the ROK/US Combined Forces Command (CFC) were collocated. If you have no clue what those acronyms mean, neither do I, really. The precise function of these entities remained obscure to me until the end. But they did sound terribly important.
The official motto was “Katchi Kapshida” (“Let’s Go Together”), which we were made to shout at the end of every official ceremony, a phrase our U.S. counterparts could never quite pronounce, making one unsure if we were really going anywhere together at all.
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Life in the barracks unfolded with metronomic regularity: 06:00 bugle call, 06:30 roll call, 07:00 breakfast, 08:00 to 17:00 training or office work (12:00 lunch), 18:00 dinner, 20:30 cleaning, 21:30 roll call, 22:00 lights out.
The place I called home was a two-story concrete building with peeling white paint resembling an abandoned asylum, where five platoons were crammed together. Each platoon — a mix of twenty-four men from the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps — slept on the floor of a single bedless room, approximately 20 by 70 feet, packed so close our arms almost touched, which must've made us look like a box of drab crayons from above.
Privacy was a rumor, as was freedom. For two years, we moved in pairs and showered communally. A specially engineered hell for a homebody like me with an unlimited appetite for solitude, who avoids team sports and doesn’t even believe in book clubs.
There are 30 days of leave in two years. Stepping off base otherwise counted as desertion and would land you a military prison cell, as did getting caught with a smartphone. Three landlines, shared by 120 people, were our official way to communicate with the outside. But if you were low-ranking, you were unlikely to get a turn.
Military prison itself wasn’t much of a deterrent — arguably, it offered an easier existence than the anomie of the barracks. The catch was that prison time didn’t count toward your service. A day-for-day extension of the service was the most fearsome deterrent of all.
Visits were allowed, but most bases sit in rural nowhere, not places your friends can reach on a whim. Breakups were an expected product of long distance and a near-total communication blackout. Weekends were spent being dragooned into soccer or losing an afternoon at the post exchange buying snacks with a monthly salary that was about $60 — not a typo — my first month.
Yeseul, my girlfriend at the time, visited me regularly. Jaded seniors were quick to remind those of us in relationships of our precarious situation, prophesying our inevitable breakup. (Reader, we got married.)
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To put legions of young men on the cusp of manhood together is to create a petri dish of male ego. The military can serve as, to steal a phrase from D. W. Winnicott, a permanent alternative to puberty.
The hierarchy was absolute, based on ranks that were determined strictly by time served. Every six months or so, one’s station was automatically elevated: Private (0–6 months), Private First Class (6–12 months), Corporal (12–18 months), and Sergeant (18+ months).
This oppressive cardinality governed every social interaction. Even within the same rank, your month of enlistment mattered. An August recruit (me) was forever junior to a July recruit of the same year; it was common to call someone by their enlistment month. I was, for a time, simply “August.”
It is easy to mistake the military for an unimaginative institution, but a glance at South Korean hazing culture reveals that creativity is alive and well in these unlikely places. By the time I enlisted, the most brutal forms of physical hazing that had plagued the military for decades — burning skin with cigarettes, beating recruits senseless (check out Netflix's D.P. for the full repertoire) — were officially banned. Even so, there were creative offerings that could teach American frat bros a thing or two.
The more innocuous ones involved forcing new recruits to dance or sing on command. On the gastronomical front, a marine once forced a private to eat an entire box of chocolate pies (1,980 kcal). There was simulated solitary confinement, where a person could be denied all communication with the outside world — no calls, no visits, no leave.
For the low-ranking, many forms of “self-improvement” were forbidden. Going to the gym was out of the question. Lying down was considered too comfortable; one had to sit with a perfectly straight back. The privilege of changing the TV channel or adjusting the fan was reserved for seniors.
The simplest chores were inflated into laborious rituals. Every night, the most junior private from each platoon would line up with tissues. A senior would then make them squat and, with the tissue, pick up every single pubic hair from the communal bathroom floor.
Once it was reported that a newly enlisted private in our platoon had forgotten to show up for the pube-harvesting duty, I remember his immediate superiors — three other privates and I — audibly gasped. The fallout was catastrophic, not for him but for us, the designated sin-eaters, for failing to properly educate the newcomer.
Strangely, the whole ordeal was aggravating but not exactly humiliating. The philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser captured this psychology aptly. After being beaten by police during a campus protest, he was asked if he had been treated unfairly or unjustly. He responded: “Unjust, but not unfair. It was unjust because they hit me over the head, but not unfair because they hit everyone else over the head.”
3.
Not long into my service, my plan to turn the military into a reading retreat hit a predictable snag. The issue was finding time amid all the usual nonsense of barracks life. So I turned to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, hoping for some wisdom on how my man Sasha pulled it off, only to learn the disappointing news that he didn't — he started writing it five years after his release. (Of course, you idiot, did you think the zeks ran a writing workshop while digging the Volga?)
Officially, after lights-out at 10 p.m., there were two hours of voluntary study. It's a standard policy on every base to have a 연등실 (延燈室), which has the uncharacteristically poetic translation of "the Room Where the Lights Stay On." In our barracks, this was just a decrepit room with a dozen or so carrels. There were two bookshelves where every unwanted book donated in Korea seemed to have ended up — a sad archive of titles that had never changed anyone's life.
These seats were highly coveted. Some were studying for the GED, others for the suneung — the once-a-year Korean college entrance exam — so the lowest-ranking private was always the first to be booted if someone of higher rank appeared.
There was also a general sentiment that a private had not yet “earned” the right to study, meaning that during the first year of service, even using an available carrel would draw unwanted attention. This wasn’t so much anti-intellectualism as a form of deprivation grounded in a clear understanding of education's value — they knew exactly what was being withheld.
My solution: night watch duty. Every night between 22:00 and 06:00, two men were woken up for an hour-long patrol. After getting into full gear — uniforms, cartridge belts, helmets — we would walk the building for an hour, wake the next pair, and go back to bed. A universally hated task, as you can imagine, since your sleep was interrupted by shifts that came around every two or three days. But it also meant an hour of solitude, an hour to read unwatched.
One night, loath to put my book down halfway through, instead of waking the next person, I just kept on reading. I figured I would get chewed out for the screw-up later. But the men whose shifts I covered were only too glad not to be woken up. Eureka.
I started covering others’ shifts — often three hours from 1 to 4 a.m., sometimes two from 4 to 6 a.m., when loudspeakers blared the start of the day. A fair trade. More sleep for them, more reading for me. My late nights were made possible only by military-grade instant coffee and the kick I got from my own insufferable self-romanticization as a reader by night, soldier by day.
Only once was someone unhappy about this arrangement. A corporal from another platoon, seeing me with a paperback, snatched it — “Who are you to read a book as a private?” — and threw it down the stairs.
After he disappeared down the hallway, I picked it up and continued where I had left off.
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Two or three hours every few nights were hardly enough. I began finding ways to outwit the system during my day job. Books were too conspicuous, so I printed out magazine articles, essays, and book chapters in what was surely unauthorized use of military computers. I shuffled these printouts in with my translation tasks, all practicing, in Gulag slang, tufta — "the art of pretending to work." As long as the papers were in English, the officers didn't notice. Once I'd finished, off to the shredder they went.
Most news sites were blocked, but a few somehow slipped through, memorably Aeon and The Electric Typewriter — bless their souls — with its grandly titled list of “150 Great Articles & Essays.” It’s probably where I read my first Baldwin and Didion.
To regular rounds of drills and marksmanship training, I brought a tattered collection of printouts — an analog Kindle of sorts. I folded them into quarters and slipped them into my uniform pockets, sneaking pages with an M16 assault rifle slung over my back. During guerrilla-warfare training, I would read holed up in a tent pitched on a tundra of frozen mud.
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Twice a year came the ROK–U.S. joint military exercises, which drove Kim Jong-un nuts with calendrical regularity. Thanks to my post at a high command in Seoul, I wasn't reloading mortar shells in the field but was stationed in a vast, nuclear-proof underground bunker called CP TANGO. I was never able to grasp its full size, only that it felt as though an entire airport had been carved into the mountain as I walked through its subterranean labyrinth, which smelled faintly of mildew and certainly of rat shit.
In practice, those war exercises in the bunker meant long hours of downtime, waiting for some simulated escalation to occur. So my main mission became sneaking in print magazines and finding which MREs contained M&Ms. Occasionally I sat in on briefings in the situation room — the kind with tiled screens straight out of a movie — so I could later spin those moments into answers for job interviews, where I could present myself as some goddamn war hero. Got me what I wanted a few times.
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What I read early on was primed by those around me. Private Yu, a philosophy major from training camp who spoke fluent Russian, taught me a Pushkin poem I used to be able to recite from memory. The popularity of Russian literature in Korea runs so deep — perhaps because of a shared sense of bleakness and melancholy — that it’s not unusual for university theater clubs to stage, beyond the usual Chekhov, works like Maxim Gorky's The Lower Depths. In the army, it felt all the more thematically apt, if only as a reliable reminder that things could always be worse.
Conveniently, one of the last courses I’d taken before leaving college was Russian literature, so in the boxes I'd brought home from school were Andrei Bely’s Petersburg, Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, along with the usual Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Turgenev — the bulk of which I of course hadn’t read while taking the actual course. The army now provided the ideal setting to correct this educational oversight.
There was also Corporal Cheong, who had once worked as an undergraduate researcher for Francis Fukuyama at Stanford. He was now making his way through Kissinger's Diplomacy. This was 2012-2013, a season whose tensions were palpable on a U.S. Army base: Obama's "Pivot to Asia" coexisted uneasily with an ailing Eurozone and the long hangover of the Bush years. Still fashionable in those days were hefty "grand strategy" tomes, treatises on American declinism, a cottage industry of "Rising China" books, and the last gasps of globalization at the hands of the usual international set (Fareed Zakaria et al.), all of which were easy enough to find on a military base.
Later, books were sourced during my vacations or brought by my future wife, Yeseul. I remember her bringing me David McCullough’s The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris, a talisman on my barracks locker, reminding me of the day I could travel again. I read more self-help books than I'd like to admit. (A popular book among readers in the base was Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning.)
There was a steady diet of Nabokov — my vitamin N — though I later learned that Solzhenitsyn found him a disappointment. He believed that Nabokov had squandered his deep ties to a family once central to Russia's political life — his father, a prominent liberal, was assassinated — by choosing instead to retreat into apolitical literary brilliance. (Solzhenitsyn once told David Remnick, "I am pained by this. I do not understand it. I do not understand how this is possible.")
Books brought from outside required navigating the military’s censorship apparatus. There was an official list of banned books — selected with the predictable logic of the conservative administration — that included Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang’s anti-neoliberal critique, Bad Samaritans. (Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century made the list in 2016.) Every book brought onto the base required an approval stamp from a censoring officer.
As a private joke with the bureaucracy, I submitted Lolita for approval. To the censoring officer, it was just another book written in a foreign language. He stamped it without comment. My copy still bears the imprint: “Military Security Clearance Passed.”
4.
For all its byzantine rituals, the governance itself was simple: two platoon leaders formed a duopoly, issuing rules and diktats. Every few months, new platoon leaders were selected according to some mysterious criteria set by the officers. (One clear requirement was that they had to be at least corporals.) The cliché that power corrupts seemed true. It was as if the green shoulder patch identifying the platoon leader, once sewn onto his uniform, became a kind of radioactive implant that initiated a decay of character.
Who would become a tyrant was fairly predictable, but not always. A quivering new recruit might evolve into a martinet. I remember one loyal and efficient conscript who was constantly ridiculed for his short height and a face like an oblong potato. (Side note: even in a military context, there was always an unspoken hierarchy built around certain physical ideals of masculine beauty — good looks, chiseled bodies, and, naturally, penis size.)
But once he made platoon leader, he demanded from others the same adherence to protocol he imposed on himself. He weaponized his own law-abiding virtue, making his fellow soldiers’ lives unbearable. He was a living confirmation of La Rochefoucauld’s insight that “there are some wicked people who would be less dangerous if they had absolutely no goodness.” It seemed, in the end, that many a man’s appearance of virtue was merely a lack of courage to act on his concealed aggression.
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As much as conscripts inflicted misery on each other, we were united against our common enemy: the officers. I particularly remember a certain Master Sergeant Park who was a sadist, which I don't mean as an insult but as a clinical description. A man with a viper’s face, he made Gunnery Sergeant Hartman in Full Metal Jacket seem like Mr. Rogers. Excoriating us for the smallest breaches of discipline, he had a special talent for summoning murderous rage even in the most mild-mannered privates, who had to discover that they possessed such a capacity for hatred within themselves. Managing his moods was a constant exercise in appeasement.
He often arrived at the base with his young son, whom he loved with a kind of terrible, consuming devotion that made his cruelty all the more baffling. Weren't we someone else's sons, too? (Wouldn't his son have to enlist someday?) We privately nursed an ugly hope that his son would, say, get kidnapped, not even out of any wish that Park would finally awaken to the pain he caused us; we just wanted the greatest misery to befall him.
As for why we never reported anything to the officers, as you can now see, it was because they were apathetic to our welfare. Besides, the system exacts a vow of omertà from its members. To snitch to the officers was to commit the ultimate taboo, guaranteeing retribution beyond imagination — what exactly that was, we didn’t know, because I never saw anyone try.
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I had trouble understanding the logic that sustained the dramas of the barracks — how violence seemed to obey a transitive property, with each man inflicting what he had once endured. A cluster of privates who had enlisted in close succession — e.g., July, August, September, October — would form a natural cohort. And time and again, once a new platoon leader was selected, the man we had hoped would be our Jesus Christ turned into a Grand Inquisitor. We underlings nursed the same fantasy: when one of us became a platoon leader, we would finally bring about reform.
Among the friendships that formed, I am most indebted to my officemate, Air Force Staff Sergeant Yun, a beacon of male decorum who had an instinctive understanding that a man’s true strength lay not in exerting power but in withholding it. It was an education to watch him. Others, however, brandished the overbearing bravado that men often mistake for affection.
In the outside world there's a divide between public and private morality: the stickler for recycling who's a terror to her friends; the man kind to his neighbors but votes for tyrants. In the barracks this boundary vanished. There was no public life, only private morality in its most naked form, namely, your character.
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It is a high orthodoxy in Western thought that literature does us some good. Martha Nussbaum, for instance, has tirelessly argued for the power of novels to cultivate "empathy," in her own narrow definition: "an imaginative reconstruction of another person's experience without any particular evaluation of that experience." In other words, to understand pain while recognizing that it is not your own.
So, does reading make you more moral? In the army, where you meet an assembly of people from all walks of life, it becomes clear that books are never a necessary condition for decency. The faith that reading does make you good, meanwhile, has its own damning counterexamples. In Language and Silence, the literary critic George Steiner posed his "brutal paradox" of how "a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning."
The philosopher Alexander Nehamas doesn't invoke the Schutzstaffel, but still finds such faith in literature misplaced: "Sometimes, perhaps. In general, no." The empathy literature fosters can be turned to any end — to help or to harm, to liberate or to oppress — as Nehamas notes, "well-read villains, sensitive outlaws, tasteful criminals, and elegant torturers are everywhere about us."
That much seems right. If we linger long enough in "literary communities," don't we all meet plenty of tasteful readers with cosmopolitan minds but parochial hearts? Those toting NYRB Classics and Fitzcarraldo editions with that terrorizing little glint of superiority? The judgmental aesthetes who weaponize their reading? Writers of some distinction who, off the page, fail to meet the ethical demands set by their own noble prose?
Comparing the contemporary literary world to a sinking raft with people pushing each other just enough to stay slightly more above water, Sigrid Nunez wrote, "If reading really does increase empathy, as we are constantly being told that it does, it appears that writing takes some away." Many an artist would rather make good art than be good. Admittedly, though, it is far easier to be cultured than to be decent. Many great artists may simply be failed saints.
5.
“Most of us didn’t know how truly good or truly bad we were, and most of us would never be sufficiently tested to find out,” writes Rachel Cusk in Outline. The dubious gift of military service is that most South Korean men are sufficiently tested. For those of us honest with ourselves, we know how petty we can be.
But — if I may brag a little — my time in the army revealed that one vice absent from my otherwise crowded inventory of vanities and flaws was a desire for power. If you reviewed the reels of my time there, you’d see me half-assing my national duty or getting caught with contraband, but you’d find nary a frame of me tormenting anyone.
I’m not under any illusion that I had a finer conscience, but rather that we each sought evidence of our strength by different means. If some men needed to confirm their toughness by inflicting pain, others perhaps needed to confirm theirs by resisting the temptation to cruelty. As someone who’d never been sure of my own goodness, I may have wanted, for once, to secure an alibi of my goodness that I could hold onto.
When it was time for someone among the 2012 summer recruits to lead the platoon, a July recruit openly coveted the position. I welcomed his eagerness to take on responsibility, as my desire to manage a zoo of a dozen grownup men was zilch. Plus, I had by then acquired a lifelong distaste for worming my way into the center of any organization. Still, the officers asked if I wanted the job. Absolutely not, I told them. Give it to him. Don't make me do it.
So they made me the platoon leader. My already low opinion of the officers' judgment was sealed by this calamitous error — one that would have been fatal in wartime. Should you ever find me your leader in a combat unit, rest assured our war will be a short one.
My edict was a simple one: benevolent anarchy.
I can’t take sole credit but by then, the work of the leaders who had come before me in my platoon — the most progressive-minded of the five, as it happened — had already shifted the culture, and I wasn’t about to let it slide back. By the end of my service, new recruits were treated with a measure of dignity: no more pubic-hair duty — just mop the floor, easy — and, likely to the scandal of our predecessors, they were allowed to go fully supine.
6
That was the story I told myself about my military service, until a few years ago — a neat little bibliomemoir. As I understood it, I was just a bookish, harmless presence. But it occurred to me one day that the story was in need of revision.
At a reunion, a man who had been my junior recalled me as a "nice" boss — his word, not mine — but also aloof. He mostly remembered me disappearing at every opportunity to read, saying that I was "never quite there."
I didn't have to wrestle with his observation for long to see that he was right to point out something that I'd long felt a lingering guilt about. That green shoulder patch had conferred on me, for once in my life, something unnervingly close to absolute power. I had convinced myself that my detachment from the affairs of the barracks was a form of respect for my subordinates' autonomy, which also conveniently allowed me to eke out a few more hours of reading.
But in what I believed to be an abdication of the power to harm, I had also abdicated the power to help. While I had contributed to the shift in the culture, the truly radical change came from the more reform-minded platoon leaders who took on a more activist role. By that measure, I came to see that I might've committed a sin of omission.
In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Richard Rorty distinguishes between two kinds of books: those that help us "become more autonomous" and those that help us "become less cruel." My reading in the army was an unambiguous pursuit of the first kind — a desperate bid to "become what one is" (a Nietzschean phrase that Rorty borrows) in an environment that reduced one to a fungible unit.
Yet, as Rorty warns, in that very quest for autonomy lies a potential for cruelty: "our private obsessions with the achievement of a certain sort of perfection may make us oblivious to the pain and humiliation we are causing." Which is to say, I may not have been cruel, but that doesn't mean I was virtuous.
7
From the first pocket notebook I was issued at the training center, I filled six journals, recording my days with punishing devotion. Things were happening outside the gates. My friends’ lives were moving on, but inside, our lives were suspended. I wanted to manufacture a sense that this meaningless time was still life, by documenting the minutiae of routine and wavelets of feeling.
Much of that writing stemmed from a more self-serving impulse: writing as as an act of compensation for life's travails, in which the writer becomes a kind of human converter, turning raw deals life hands them into words, squeezing out the juice and extracting the marrow from experience until it yields a restorative balm, of which this essay may be an instance.
In the end, the journals didn't redeem those years so much as expose their emptiness, filled with redundant observations that offered little insight. Little wonder, since the essence of military life is monotony — a force that, as Thomas Mann noted in The Magic Mountain, can "abbreviate and dissolve large, indeed the largest units of time, until they seem nothing at all." What this observation means in practice is that monotony has a peculiar psychological property: while you are living it, time stretches intolerably; in retrospect, it collapses into an instant.
My memory, like an unsparing film editor, compressed those repetitive scenes into a single blur. It is startling how little I can recall of those two years. Imposing monotony on someone is a form of thievery. Because of military service, my twenties feel two years shorter.
The yield of my reading project was modest, too. For a time, when deciding what to read, I followed my university's syllabus for a garden-variety Western canon course, but reading these supposedly great books without an interlocutor felt increasingly pointless — a hollow exercise in consuming without creating, taking in plenty but metabolizing little. Looking at the list of books I read then, it's appalling how little I retained. Much of it completely expunged from my memory.
What escaped me most was the supreme irony of trying to understand the human condition from books while being oblivious to the human drama in its rawest form right there around me. The life of a reader — certainly that of a writer — can easily become a kind of self-consumption, turning the world into a bloodless abstraction.
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On May 19th, 2014, 637 days and 184 paperbacks later, my service was complete. I was authorized to walk out of Yongsan Garrison as a civilian. Carrying a small backpack into which two years of my life fit, I assessed my time there — nothing remarkable or valiant by any stretch. I suffered more than some, less than most.
As I stepped through the garrison's revolving gate for the final time, about to meet Yeseul waiting on the other side, I asked myself: What would my life have been without books? But as my real life was about to resume, a different question demanded an answer: What is a life then, even with books?
