“Reading Lolita in the Barracks”:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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."
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.
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.”
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.
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.”
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.
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.