How the Military Mindset Has Crushed Our Country's Men

"Carefully stored away in Jesse Holland's condo in East Brunswick, New Jersey, are the totems of a culture that nearly killed him. When I visited his place on a cold afternoon in December of 2023, it had been nearly four decades since Jesse first donned his dress blues as a first-year, or “plebe,” at the Valley Forge Military Academy, just north of Philadelphia. He showed me the uniform he was given at age 14, neatly folded, still hanging in his closet. Jesse's old textbooks and academic records from the Forge were tucked away, too, as was a towel and laundry basket the school had issued him. Also, a brass badge depicting Gen. George Washington praying on the Pennsylvania Revolutionary War battleground for which the Forge is named."

"As we settled on the couch, Jesse acknowledged that even most of his computer passwords play on the school's name. “For so many years, I never left the Forge, even though I was physically removed from the property,” he explained. This insight, he added, stemmed from a passage he'd read in The Body Keeps the Score, a somewhat controversial 2014 bestseller that tries to explain how trauma can seemingly trap someone in time. Jesse and I were speaking now because he was on a journey to finally wriggle free. “The only way out,” he reasoned, “is through.”"

"Per his own harsh admission, Jesse was born a coward. “Apparently, as a baby, you couldn't put me down without me crying,” he said, somewhat ashamed. “The stove was scary; trees were scary.” To me, these seemed like the typical behaviors of a newborn, though I understood why Jesse saw them differently. His father, Christian, was macho-and mean. He would become especially butch around his drinking buddies, many of them Vietnam War veterans. Today, Jesse reasons that his dad's hypermasculine posturing was a response to his shame over the fact that he never served in the military himself-a shame, it seems, that also drove"

Jesse Holland keeps uniforms, school-issued items, and a Revolutionary War badge from Valley Forge Military Academy, where he attended as a teenager. He describes how he remained psychologically tied to the school for decades, even after leaving physically. He connects this sense of being stuck to ideas about trauma and how it can trap someone in time. He frames his path forward as “the only way out is through,” emphasizing confronting what was endured. He also recounts a childhood shaped by a harsh, hypermasculine father who drank with Vietnam War veterans, suggesting shame and aggression influenced family life and identity formation.

Read at The Nation