A fabulous discussion of a genuinely fabulous story (and yes, it is great to be back at what feels like Full Wolfe, again). In particularly I really appreciated the insights you brought from your own military experience (speaking as someone who has none).
This discussion did reinforce for me the idea of returning to some of these episodes. You both threw out so many great thoughts — about the mice, about conditioning, about whether this was all an experiment (a dramatic thought that would upend much of the tale), about the watch — but it wasn't put all together. I feel like if we all sat down for a few more hours we could actually hammer it out. — Probably impossible: I know. Still.
I want to introduce a reading that I am not myself entirely convinced by, but that really occurred to me as I read the story and even as I listened to you two discuss it (it also indulges my tendency for interpreting a story as relating to the political and specific context it was written in, in a way that perhaps shouldn't be indulged). So let us say that I throw it out only to allow others to refute it. But I read the story as Wolfe's rage against the anti-war protestors of the Vietnam era, specifically against "conscientious objectors", here represented as the techs. Their portrayal seemed to me to be something close to a negative stereotype: they think they're better than the marksmen, because they're nonviolent, but actually they are both cowards (running in battle) and really more violent than the marksmen, and in fact attack them (which I read as sort of an exaggerated version of the rhetorical attacks that returning Vietnam soldiers got). That the techs support — and are dependent upon — the same colonial effort that the marksmen are, they're just cowardly, self-righteous and thuggish, all at the same time. Obviously a lot of the story is written out of Wolfe's specific experience (i.e. Korea), but it seems reasonable to think that the Vietnam war, which was still ongoing when this story was written, was in his mind too.
Incidentally, one of you (sorry I forget who) said that the U.S. hides its wars. This is certainly been true in the time since, well, this story was written; but when this story was written, at the tail end of Vietnam, it hardly was the case. (Korea, to be sure, was said to have been "forgotten"; but hardly hid during it.)
Other questions: what is up with the political situation? More needs to be done with that. At first blush it seems like Wolfe is sympathetic to the old woman — that the occupation is not a good thing — but her rather blatant racism makes me wonder. Is it simply that both sides are rotten? The part with the old woman can too easily disappear in the analysis, but I don't think it should.
And what about the UN? It can't be a mistake that in our world UN peacekeepers wear blue helmets; that the techs wear blue; that the story was called "The Blue Mouse"; and that U. S. troops were officially under a UN aegis in the Korean War.
Anyway, some scattered thoughts. Thanks again for yours (which are, doubtless, far better than mine). See you in the Slaves of Silver section...
PS: I seem to have fallen behind — your next podcast has been five days up. Uh, oops? Sorry?
To me, this story begins with a question. What if instead of getting deferred, academics are sent to the front-lines, but given non-combat duties? It's a neat alternate universe take on the draft. As with all Gene Wolfe stories though, there's a lot more going on.
My reading of this story is that it is examining the relationship between the U.S. soldier and the soldiers of the country they were fighting in, the RKO and ARVAN. All of the obvious race indicators were removed except that the techs were so much taller. It explains the Marksman nervousness around techs and their willingness to open fire on the bunker.
Many of things I have read about these conflicts portrayed the local soldiers in a very negative light by U.S. Military.
Great discussion and comments about this story.
Thanks, Glenn - I'm not sure that genetic manipulation, (and the disdain the "advanced" species of altered humanity feels for the left-behind genotypicals, as in "The Hero as Werwolf") is really the thrust of this story, I'm just spitballin' here. But the detail that the Techs seem to be taller than the Marksmen seems to indicate that, to me. Is the U.N. spearheading a genetic overhauling of humanity, and is that the reason the insurgents are fighting them? I should re-read the story with that possibility in mind.
The spectre of Vietnam seems to haunt this entire story. Perhaps Wolfe was simply making the point that America at that time was drawing a hard line between a privileged intellectual technocratic elite that was not willing to use lethal force to defend the community, or state (but was willing to use violence to protect its self-perceived interests in domestic political violence), and an underclass that is expected take life, and also to sacrifice their own lives and limbs on behalf of the state, and that such an arrangement was unnatural and could lead to the collapse of the state. Lonnie at the end is able to integrate the two halves of his nature.
The disparity in height? I'm still not sure about that, but it could reflect that many of the healthier, more fit, more successful members of society in the Vietnam era opted out of service - there were certainly some professional college athletes who went to serve in Vietnam, but nothing like the number of college and pro athletes signed up in WWII, and some, like Muhammad Ali, resisted going to Vietnam to fight quite publicly. Quite a lot of handsome, good-looking, wealthy actors enlisted in the military and fought overseas in WWII (Jimmy Stewart, Clark Gable, Sterling Hayden, David Niven, and many more). With a couple of exceptions (mostly older actors who were Reserve pilots who flew transport missions from the U.S, and didn't fly in combat, or held administrative, senior staff positions), I can't think of a single popular actor who left their career to serve in Vietnam. Some Vietnam vets later became successful film actors, but none that I know of volunteered to serve or accepted being drafted to go to Vietnam.
The violent fratricide between the Techs and the Marksmen (in off-duty assaults, food choice and medical care, blossoming almost into civil war near the end on the battlefield) was likely influenced by the increase in reports of "fragging" in the latter years of the Vietnam war- the homicide by hand grenade or shooting of NCOs and superior officers by draftees who resisted an overly vigorous war effort as the goals of the war became more murky and troops were drawing down and being returned to the states,.
Personal contacts between troops and Vietnamese civilians in the countryside were often testy and fraught with suspicion on both sides, and the contact with the old woman could reflect this, but relocated to the English countryside.
Mick, this is an awesome and thoughtful response to "The Blue Mouse." Whichever the stories you enjoyed more, it seems that you had a more intense reaction to this one than to "HORARS," much as we did. For me, at least, this one captures something more of the actual experience of soldiering and seems to be more personal for Wolfe.
I'm intrigued by your suggestion that there is some sort of genetic engineering going on. This wasn't on my mind at all when we covered this one, but because we had just finished Operation ARES behavioral programming was. But now that we're covering The Fifth Head of Cerberus, it seems so obvious that Wolfe is interested in the extent to which our biology determines our personality. Like Marc, I'm not sure that's really at the surface of this story, but I think it's an interesting reading.
I see this as a primarily human story in regards to the uncertainty of determining how someone will react in extreme situations. Pacifism is all well and good until someone is bent on killing you, and then some people will kill (and some will die, and some are in both of those groups). I really don’t like the idea that there is any genetic engineering going on here unless it is to undercut the efficacy of that as a determining factor to behavior, given freedom (free will) and the breaking of mechanisms like that clock. I think this is an examination of extreme biological responses tied to will. ( I can’t be the only guy who daydreams about violence, geez.) Violent Catharsis is one of the oldest tricks in managing unruly populations. Luckily I never had to worry about the draft, though of course Wolfe did. If there is genetic engineering in this, then I think the point would have to be that it doesn’t do what it is supposed to do. As far as the height and propensity to violence ... lots of psychological reasons. I don’t have to look farther than my 5’7” Vietnam veteran father to think of countless unnecessary arguments and confrontations in public that could easily have become physical or lethal. My mother once summed up his philosophy quite handily: do unto others before they do unto you. But that doesn’t mean he’s a bad guy. And I think that Wolfe has a nice middle ground that looks at the horrors of violence and war without condemning all self-defense and self-preservation instincts.
Another great, thoughtful podcast. Glenn suggested I read both this and the “HORARS of War”, so I’m reviewing stories and listening to podcasts out of order. Some random thoughts:
I think it’s instructive to look at the date of publication (1971, and possibly written a year or so earlier), at a time when the Vietnam war had aroused extreme civilian opposition from the left, and the young (who stood to be drafted) in particular. The story (from my vantage-point) seems to be clearly about the class societal divide between combat soldiers and non-combatant civilians in the 1970s.
I graduated from high school the week that Saigon fell, so I was never in any real danger of being drafted, but grew up watching reports of the war on the nightly news from as early as I can remember, and expected that the war would continue until I reached 18 and was sent to die or survive, and that the war would possibly continue forever, as it seemed to already had to my childhood self.
The draft ended at the beginning of 1973 when I was still a high school freshman, but I can recall that older friends were strongly urged in high school by teachers and counselors to graduate high school, to apply to college, and to stay in college through graduate school to avoid being sent to Vietnam. The unspoken, and sometimes spoken, position was that the intelligent, the thoughtful, the gentle, and the artistic should be preserved alive at all costs, and that the “grunts” of the combat arms unit slots were meant to filled by the hapless high-school drop-outs, the guys who hung out in auto shop classes, the boys who worked in the factories and service stations, and (although this was left unvoiced by many on the left) the blacks, the Hispanics, and the Native Americans, who were thought by society to never really have had a chance of achieving the American Dream. It was one of the most clear-cut class-based prejudices in American society in the 1960s. It’s often been suggested that if the number of college deferments had been drastically reduced in the 1960s, the Vietnam war would have ended much sooner, or the large scale commitment of conventional military units might never have happened at all, if the middle and upper middle classes had seen more of their sons returning in caskets or without limbs. As it was, the lower middle class and lower economic class, groups with little political suasion, bore the brunt of the war for years, to society’s disdain. Kipling’s poem “Tommy” could well have been an influence on this story.
But Wolfe’s choice to make the protagonist a member of the cultural elite, rather than having any identifiable sympathetic characters in the Marksmen (as he does in the HORARs) makes me think this was probably just of several themes. The cruelties visited on the “Marksmen” by the ostensibly pacifistic “Tech” caste in the story seems to have been influenced by the dichotomy between the anti-interventionist, anti-capitalist American left, and specifically the violence which some on the fringes of that ideology used to try to end it - the campus bombings of ROTC and college Math departments that were supported by the Army, the violence of the SDS and the Weather Underground and the SLA, all violent acts purportedly in the cause of ending violence overseas, conducted by people who would probably have told you they abhor violence. Lonnie’s reference to the Techs jumping a lone Marksman in a parking lot after the Tech’s graduation (which is hinted to end in murder) certainly bears some similarities to the violence, both verbal and sometimes physical, visited on soldiers returning from Vietnam. The extent of that abuse has become a controversial subject in recent years ,with several books debating the extent it happened, and you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone on the left nowadays who would admit to spitting on a returning soldier back then, but petty assaults on the dignity of soldiers in that era (and sometimes a lot more) seem to have been pretty common. The Vietnam veteran soldiers I met when I later enlisted certainly had some stories to tell on the subject, and I tend to believe them. The anger and helplessness they felt when jumped in a crowd or verbally abused in an airport corridor still ate at them years later in the retelling.
The ending seems to find the protagonist finding an unexpected and redemptive capacity for violence. As this is coupled with a short discussion of the genetics of the mice he raised as a young man, does this indicate that this society’s split between the fighters and a technocratic society could be the result of genetic manipulation? (If a story has something to do with Wolfeian aggression, it also often has something to do with Mr. Wolfe’s first name, I’ve noticed.) Is the protagonist a genetic throwback? Or a genetic experiment?
Al the time the story was written, there was a lot going on in the zeitgeist about the genetic nature of violence, like the work of Konrad Lorenz, B.F. Skinner, Desmond Morris’s The Naked Ape, Ardrey’s The Territorial Imperative, Peckinpah’s film Straw Digs, and similar popular works, which often included discussion of whether humans’ genetic capacity for aggression is outdated, or not. Wolfe may have been debating whether aggression could be, or should be, genetically modified, or modified through operant conditioning, on B.F. Sklnner’s model, or whether it is something we still need in some contexts. Wolfe would not have had access to more recent research, which has identified what may be a genetic mutation commonly found in special operations soldiers who survive training - a higher level of neuropeptide Y in their bloodstream, which seems to increase one’s capacity for operating with higher effective cognitive ability in high-stress situations such as combat. (It also apparently reduces the likelihood of PTSD.) But Wolfe may have been presciently playing with this theme as well - what makes a man survive in combat? Is it an innate capacity? Blood testing on successful and unsuccessful candidates for special operations courses for the SEALs, Army Special Forces, and the Ranger Battalions have shown that a high level of the peptide is one of the highest predictors of success for passing those courses and, presumably, success and survival in combat. At one time not long after 9/11, when high casualty rates in Iraq and Afghanistan created a demand for moving higher numbers of special operations soldiers through the service training pipelines successfully, it was suggested that a positive test for the peptide be a requirement to attend those and other SpecOps courses.
I’ve heard that the Army Special Forces decided not to go that route, for one, as the commander felt that we can’t say for certain what other combination of unforeseen skills and aptitudes and personality factors could lead to success on the battlefield. The SF lineage includes the OSS Jedburgh teams of WWII, which famously recruited across a broad range of military backgrounds and civilian specialties ,with some success, so SF may have been drawing on some long-term institutional knowledge and lessons learned in making that decision. (I don’t know about other SpecOps units - it could well be that peptide Y level is tested for, a report is put in the soldier or sailor’s personnel jacket, and it could be a factor that is weighed in evaluating the results of training. I have no idea.)
Wolfe may also be pointing out that no one knows for sure what their own capacity for violence is until it is tested in time of crisis.
The brief conversation between Lonnie and the insurgent on knowing what percentage of their forces will fight reminded me of General S.L.A. Marshall’s studies in WWII (with which I think Wolfe would have been familiar) in the book “Men Against Fire” (1947) which claimed that a large percentage (I think 75%) of soldiers in combat will not fire their weapons directly at the enemy in warfare, and will either fire over the enemy’s head or not fire at all. This was an enormously influential document within the Army (although its conclusions have been vigorously debated over the decades), and impacted the why the Army conducted its combat training afterwards (and which was credited for the increase in active engagement in firefights with the enemy in Vietnam.) I suspect Marshall’s book also played a part in the genesis of this story.
Koppell’s reminder to Lonnie that he may need to use the weapon on his truck, and his warnings that the insurgents will execute techs is interesting, as well as the references to the testing (conditioning?) you mention in the podcast. Is this related to the distrust the insurgent and the old woman feel to the U.N. forces - i.e., is this part of a greater attempt at social control to end nationalism by the U.N. / world government? I need to look at the story again.
The wording of Lonnie’s statement that techs “can’t be trusted in a fight” is key, I think. They obviously can, and habitually do, display a capacity for violence and attack the Marksmen (one shies away from Lonnie because of that risk), and take up arms seized from the Marksman, presumably to kill or at least defend themselves.. Simple aggression is not enough, as Wolfe would have known well from his own combat experiences - aggression needs to be part of a disciplined, cohesive whole to be successful, yet the military establishment in the story seems to be following a willful process of atomizing its forces. Soldiers fight not for their country, as is often repeated, but for the biddy next to them in the trench. Not only do the Techs treat the Marksmen with studied cruelty, but the Marksman officer directs a soldier to spray automatic weapons fire into the bunker where the Techs are cowering after the attack. So, is the military trying to resolve that problem - either genetically, or through a covert conditioning process?
If the test is an behavioral experiment (and mice are commonly used for experiments, both genetic and behavioral - as Lonnie notes, some mice have tufts of fur, others dance), the purpose could be to see if the increasingly nonviolent segment of the population could be trained to participate in violence again as part of a cohesive body. Like the genetic split in humanity in “The Hero as Werwolf”, did humanity split into two castes genetically, with the unfortunate result that the half - or more - can now no longer fight war?
Are there any clues that Lonnie’s experiences after the attack on the base are a set-piece to observe his reactions?
Why are the tech described as physically so much taller than the Marksmen? Typically, small size is not something for which the infantry selects. (Height occasionally seems to be a tip-off by Wolfe that a character is genetically modified, as in “Pirate Freedom”.)
There’s something going on with Koppell questioning Lonnie about his interaction with the old woman, I feel, but I’m not sure what.
In both this story and “The HORARS of War”, the enemy vastly outnumbers the protagonist’s force, and attacks en masse, which probably reflects the human wave assaults of the North Korean and Chinese forces.
Where is this taking place? It appears, from the speech of the old woman and the insurgent, to be in Great Britain. If so, it’s cheeky of Wolfe to make the human wave insurgents the British!
Just some disjointed thoughts. Again, wonderful podcast!
These are some really great thoughts. I'm glad our discussion allows some new thoughts and ideas to foment and arise as you listen. For me, this is a big part of what we are trying to do with this podcast. I would love to have a real book club (rather than a virtual one) where we can really hammer out some of these disparate thoughts in real time and put all the pieces together. But maybe in a year or so, we can do a return to some of these stories and present stronger critical readings. I think it would be a huge amount of fun.
I really like the idea that Wolfe is criticizing conscientious objectors in this story, in that they are people who refuse to acknowledge the ways in which they benefit from their nations conflicts and simply protest or go after the soldier rather than make meaningful change to the system that asks people to kill for it. It raises questions about what Wolfe is trying to do by having the tech take up arms. Maybe he wants to point out that given certain conditions event the critics of war can do violence, or that there are a contingency of objectors who are just as violent, but in a different way, as the soldiers themselves.
I am not sure that Wolfe is sympathetic with the woman in this story. He does a lot to generate a sense of disgust around the main character's experience with her. Of course, this could be a demonstration that the war effort has created sense of diminished hospitality due to the rationing of goods for civilians.
In any event, a lot of great food for thought.
Great points, as always! I love this reading of the divide between the Marksmen and the Technicians as a commentary on conscientious-objectors. There is a lot to be done there, incorporating this into Wolfe's political views in the late 1960s or into Wolfe's views about violence -- at least two good articles, if not more.
Although we didn't dwell on it at all, I think you are right to focus on the old woman. I still think that Wolfe is sympathetic to her (and critical of the U.N., which we've seen in Operation ARES as well), but I don't think that has to be a zero-sum game -- we can be sympathetic to all of the people who are involved in this war that is not of their own making.
I'm looking forward to more of your comments now that we are back to Full Wolfe!