No More Warriors31so in an inverted manner. Marines are made, and their manufacture has traced a path not unlike the production of their tools. The craftsmanship of the sword maker is a focus of a nostalgic hope he almost desperate quest to retain a sense of honor and chivalry even though those attributes have very little to do with modern, posthe San and Beirut Marines. The ceremonial marching the full-dress Marine stands for is one of the practices marking his difference from the medieval swordsman. Bayonets still exist, but they are manufactured (not crafted), and are not ornamented. If the Marine actually uses his bayonet, it usually means that guerrilla "battle" has been engaged, and any such occurrence, now, must necessarily remind us of other recent times when the warrior Marines have tried (usually in vain) to confront an enemy in battle. This is what Timothy Luke has recently called a "teletradition," a cynical, instant, powerful inversion.19 In the ecstatic simulation of the warrior that now permeates popular culture, Marines can even respond to absence. The Corps, as they call themselves (core and corpse), advertises for recruits by openly inviting them to be the raw material for a manufacturing process. They "need a few good men," just as the munitions factory needs a few good casings. The phrase is rhetorically sophisticated. It understates ("a few") as a reminder of elite ritual. Promising symbols of honor when none can be delivered, the Corps's ad agency has not deceived so much as it has admitted the Corps's role in a simulation, turning this concession into evidence that Marines can even deal with a postmodern world that overruns the symbols that had guarded their perimeter. The U.S. Armed Services relied for generations on an "economy of obligation." All males were understood as "obligated" to do military service, even if no strict legal compunction applied. Even after Americans stopped feeling this obligation to serve, one could still choose to enlist for a strenuous and lengthy commitment to a more honorable branch of the service (the Marines), which would in turn avoid (if possible) using recruits rounded up by the Selective Service. Thus, reserving honor as an economic good available to be earned, the Corps had established a ritualized way of guaranteeing the value of the "contract" it offered recruits.20 The payoff on promised honor has always required action on a battlefield. In his essay on Clausewitz, Garry Wills defines the source of that honor as a prenuclear reversal essential to the warrior's code.Hatred assimilates each side to the other, the Wechselwirkung [a reciprocal altering, one of the other] becomes an oscillation as well as a mutuality, each side becoming the other as the sides work each other up to a resemblance in extremism. There is even an altruism of hatred, in which the other becomes more important than the self. One is willing to
