I was asked to share my thoughts on John Walker, aka Falcon/Soldier’s Captain America. I’m about halfway through episode four, but I’ve gotten a pretty good read on Walker’s character. Overall I don’t think he’s a good representation of what an Army Ranger would look like if he volunteered for Captain America’s shield. So to do that we’re going to break down what an Army soldier is normally taught to handle, what an Army Captain is actually like and the duties they have on them, how Army infantrymen are different from the rest of the Army, and what experience I had with Army Rangers.I preface this whole post with the warning: this is an opinion. It may be a somewhat reasonably informed opinion, given that I am an Army vet, but it is only an opinion. Wyatt Russel is a great actor and I've been enjoying Falcon and The Winter Soldier quite a bit, so far. I'm finding the discussion of power from Zemo quite enjoyable, as well as seeing The Falcon show why Steve picked him to be the next Cap.
Y’know what the first thing that was done to me at boot camp? I was forced to stay up for 48 hours, straight. During that time the other unfortunates and I were forced to stand in long lines, for hours, without falling asleep, a task I somehow managed to complete, although I’ll be damned if I know how. We were all asked to take in enormous amounts of information while sleep-deprived. And then we were given four hours of sleep. It was disorienting. Confusing. We just sorta bumbled from one station to the next, trying to absorb as much as we could.
The way we were greeted at Basic itself is what’s known as a shark attack. The drill sergeants get on the bus and scream at you at the top of their lungs, forcing you off the bus, picking at every last thing you did wrong, forcing you along into a path. People are routinely dropped into pushups or whatever else the drill sergeants felt like making us do. It was an entire day of being yelled at over the slightest thing, with you being punished for what others did; if one person screwed up EVERYONE was forced to do as many push-ups as the drill sergeants liked. And they liked seeing a lot of push-ups. You’d go to bed with the drill sergeants yelling at you over the PA system, listening to others around you crying themselves to sleep.
The next day was no better. Nor was the day after that. And the one after that. A seemingly endless number of days followed of being punished for things you did not do but were your fault, because you did not stop your neighbor from doing them. Image became everything. Individual disagreements took a back seat: band together or be worked into a state of complete and utter despair. You learned to pick your battles with those around you, to smile and laugh with those you desperately wanted to injure and maim for being pieces of shit, because you all suffered together. Folks you hated became brothers and stayed brothers, even if you still hated them.
During this point in time you’re taught cadences, marching songs. These songs center around a few themes: nobody is loyal to you (particularly your significant other), the only things that matter are how well you kill people, and living happily ever after is a lie. And, despite how awful Army life is, how spiritually destructive it is, you will probably renew your contract and stay in. And these ideas are ground into you, day after day after day. And you know the really awful thing?
By and large they’re right.
No one is actually loyal to you. Marital infidelity is astonishingly high in the military, as is spousal abuse. Supposed friends stab you in the back to get their promotion. You can claim to have whatever gifts and skills you’d like, but nothing really matters if you can’t live through the next task, whatever it may be. And accomplishing your goal normally doesn’t really feel all that good. One mountain down, infinity to go! The amount of things that can go wrong in a military day is close to 100% of the whole day, all day, every week, for years.
Soldiers are never off the clock. Never. Each and every action done can be brought up in a court marshal and in disciplinary action; there is no private life, not if someone with enough power pushes. You don’t decide when to go home, your command team lets you know when to go home. I’ve pulled 16 hours days unexpectedly, simply because some idiot lost a piece of equipment and no one was going home until it was found, by Captain’s orders! You could be awoken in the middle of the night and yanked out of your house to go see to an emergency of some sort, from something breaking down at command to watching your buddy who got into a drunken fight with the cops.
And you know what? I don’t know a single soldier who doesn’t laugh about every second of it. Actual, genuine, hysterical laughter. No irony, it’s genuinely funny to us! The constant wearing down and facing of utter bleakness produces a dark sense of humor that very few civilians can imagine. Jokes are routinely cracked about suicide, adultery, dying violently, running way, and roasting in the fires of Hell as a way of coping with the fact that we have no actual control over our lives. And we laugh to the point of tears about it all. I was more than halfway there with this sense of humor before the military. Now? I look at things that others would see with horror and chuckle darkly. It can always get so much worse. And it probably will. And since I can’t control it, I maintain the one true control anyone actually has in this world: the right to look oncoming doom in the face and laugh at it, to belittle the certain doom. To refuse to crack.
No, I’m not even halfway done. We haven’t talked about infantrymen yet.
Every single infantryman I’ve ever met has been extremely principled, honorable, and uncannily intelligent. There’s a self-possession in them that’s hard to describe, because every last thing I just described is far worse for an infantryman. And at the end of such an ordeal you possess yourself, because literally everything else has been taken from you. Pride, dignity, the illusion of control that civilians entertain themselves with, all of it gone. What you get is a sense of honor and control that one would not think possible to have. Every single infantry leader I’ve met has a level of focus that should not be possible. Relentlessly goal-oriented, beyond ruthless, they know how to push you beyond what you would have considered in getting stuff done.
But that has a cost. One day I was talking with one of my sergeants, who was former infantry. Some of my compatriots asked him for some stories from “the front”. Our sergeant proceeded to tell a story about shooting off an enemy’s nose and laughing hysterically with his battle buddies about the way the fallen enemy’s blood squirted out of the hole: an arc like a drinking fountain. Even years removed he had the look of look of nostalgia, over shooting someone’s nose off. I’ve heard stories of infantrymen being forced to run over Middle Eastern children with tanks because terrorists frequently attach bombs to children, and so to stop was possible death… so you didn’t stop. And laughed. As they ran over children. Infantrymen talk about these things with a casual, yet steely, acceptance. There is little regret left in them; they could not afford to question what they did then, as it would have killed them, and that would have been one more body bag, one more team of condolence whisperers sent to a grieving family. No thank you, they’re going to live, and sleep at night. And if you have issue with that that’s just too bad.
Being an officer in the military is both better and worse than being an enlisted. On the one hand you’ve not had your individuality ground out of you in the same way as enlisted. But on the other hand you are taught to dehumanize those under you, while being threatened with jail should they get killed. An officer generally doesn’t have an issue with grinding enlisted into the dirt, depriving them of sleep and sanity, because they’re not people to the officer, but immediately flip the script if the officer’s actions lead to the enlisted’s harm, self-inflicted or otherwise. The enlisted become a means to an end, with the officer being forced to look the other way at all but the most egregious of harm.
Now it’s time to talk about the Rangers. Ranger school is one of the most grueling things one can ever go through: days without sleep, land navigational courses that would make others starve to death, and de-programming training. Most Army soldiers are taught to act as a cohesive whole by giving up their individual judgements. Don’t question, move on, the group needs you to. Rangers have that impulse to blind group think removed, the way a surgeon would take out a cancerous tumor. Formations, uniforms, and other means of enforcing blind group-think are destroyed, because if you can make it this far and become a ranger then you are truly trustworthy. At the same time the image of the Rangers becomes an unconscious reality. You have to look good, because you are no longer you. You are an Army Ranger and must present your group at its best.
You know the things that get trained out of you the most, with all that? Doubt. If you think something you have to own it. People can die if you’re unsure. You also develop a disturbing sense of the blackest humor, learning to lean into the sickest parts of your brain, because every part of that buffalo has been shown to be useful to you. And you will be found out if you’re not in 100%. No one is that good of a liar. No one. So you have to become the real deal. If you’re not you’ll be drummed out.
People who doubt get other people killed.
People who aren’t willing to be okay with killing other people will get their friends killed.
People who have not learned to accept their darker impulses will crack under them at the first sign of stress.
My issue with John Walker is that he’s not sure enough. The man thinks his time in Afghanistan is awful and wants to cry over it? Boo hoo, you signed up for Ranger school, nobody drafted you! At no point in John Walker’s process would he have been actually forced into something. He signed up. He did it to himself. Entering the Rangers is completely and utterly voluntary. And there’s this curious entitled sense to the John Walker we see on screen. He thinks he’s entitled to doubt.
Doubt is a luxury, a sickly sweet poison that kills all souls that it comes in contact with if there’s too much of it. And for a soldier? A Ranger? Almost any instinctual doubt is too much.
And I find it more than a little odd that John Walker, a man who has had absolutely no room for doubt anywhere in his life for a long time, has any of it left. Put on your uniform, smile, kiss babies, and then go kill people. The Army puts you in whatever job they can safely put you, at any point in time. I promise you that in the real world John would not have been forced into Captain America’s role. He would have had to audition, to compete with others, and any personality flaws he had would have been spotted miles away. Miles.
Because doubt is a stench that would have been scrubbed off of him a very long time ago. And if it hadn’t John wouldn’t have gotten up there in the first place.
I never thought I’d miss the John Walker of the comics. Brutal and awful as he is, US Agent from the comics at least doesn’t doubt. And that is something, regardless of what he does with it.
So no, halfway through episode four I’m not buying it. This John Walker would have died a long time ago, nevermind gotten three Medals of Honor. And his friend would have died long before this point.
