West Point’s campus looks like a castle — not some tarted-up Neuschwanstein or magical Hogwarts fantasy but a real fortification designed to withstand any assault. I wanted to be like that too. The glossy mailer arrived during my sophomore year of high school, and I remember staring, transfixed, at the castle and the smart gray uniforms. A chance at an elite education, a call to adventure. Was Fox News playing in the background? Probably. Like a lot of kids who end up in the military, I had trouble with emotional regulation and a difficult family life. I was desperate to be broken down and built back up into something that made sense — something able to withstand any assault. I suppose, in my own way, I wanted to be a man.
I stopped getting Bs and got serious about extracurriculars. I secured the required recommendation from my congressman. I even went to a weeklong camp for prospective cadets. And then, for reasons almost entirely my fault, I failed the physical fitness test. My backup plan was to enlist, get in shape, and reapply the following year, which is how I ended up at basic training in Missouri less than a month after my eighteenth birthday.
Jasper Craven’s new book, God Forgives, Brothers Don’t: The Long March of Military Education and the Making of American Manhood, deconstructs those brochures’ promises to reveal something far darker. Craven, who has spent nearly a decade covering the military and veterans’ issues for publications like Harper’s and New York Magazine, blends history and investigative reporting to expose a 200-year tradition of anti-intellectualism, incompetence, and top-down cruelty, not just at West Point but at military academies across the country.
At first glance, this book appears niche. A vanishingly small percent of the U.S. population attended a service academy like West Point or Annapolis, not counting the few thousand teenagers who attend private military academies like New York Military Academy or The Citadel each year. Nor are these numbers growing. Craven’s book opens with the 2025 closure of the storied Valley Forge Military Academy amid public outcry against hazing rituals that included brandings, waterboarding, and rape. Many such institutions have closed in recent years.
But God Forgives, Brothers Don’t is about military academies in the same way that Catch-22 is about fighter pilots — it’s the central conceit, but not the point. “The deeper I have looked, the more evidence I have discovered that military education is not a dying, outmoded brand, but a generously resourced, always-and-forever force in shaping the American man,” Craven writes. “The military conception of masculinity has thoroughly leaked into America’s cultural groundwater.” The end result, he argues, is all around us. It’s the manosphere. It’s Trump 2.0. It’s Pete Hegseth doing his best Patton impression in front of a neon American flag as he shouts about “lethality” and returning military standards to a “male level.” Two years ago, God Forgives, Brothers Don’t would have been an important book. Today, it’s essential reading.
God Forgives, Brothers Don’t makes me more thankful than ever that my flexed arm hang was so subpar. West Point has long compared itself to the Ivies, but Craven shows that this has never been true. The academy scorns lectures and class discussion in favor of the “Thayer Method,” in which cadets learn the material outside the classroom, then demonstrate that knowledge in class. This approach works well for classes that require memorization and technical knowledge, but neuters any subject that requires critical thinking or creativity; as Craven writes, “Cadets read books for facts, not meaning, leading one officer to acknowledge that his peers ‘can’t write because they can’t think.’”
For Sylvanus Thayer, one of West Point’s first superintendents and the man behind the Method, this inability to think was a feature, not a bug. A joyless and puritanical man with little combat experience but great belief in himself, Thayer maintained that the young men in his care “must learn it is only their province to listen and obey.” West Point was America’s first military academy, and every subsequent institution has adopted its authoritarian approach.
Thayer’s “fourth-class system,” which persists to this day at all American military academies, further instilled obedience in his young charges. Upperclassmen exert basically unchecked power over first-year “plebes,” intended to “engender in them absolute surrender.” In theory, this system cultivates responsibility and teaches ethical leadership. In practice, “savage, power-drunk seniors” inflict arbitrary punishment and institutionalized hazing that goes well beyond pranks and youthful high jinks. This abuse isn’t just tolerated, it’s mandatory — the book includes the story of a high-performing senior cadet who was expelled in 1988 for refusing to haze the plebes.
“The military conception of masculinity has thoroughly leaked into America’s cultural groundwater.”
West Point’s honor code is purposely vague; arbitrary infractions like “carelessness” and “inattention” can be severely punished by student-run honor committees. “One cadet who told a superior he had done twenty push-ups when, in fact, he had done eighteen had the book thrown at him. Another who lied about shaving was expelled,” Craven writes. “Admitting one’s failures could also result in expulsion … even cadets who reported others for wrongdoing were sometimes expelled for ‘tolerating’ bad behavior.” The only way to stay safe was to get in good with the enforcers: Toe the line, do as you’re told, conform.
Those enforcers have traditionally been white and male. Women and people of color come in as outsiders: the one thing you never want to be. These service academies used every tool at their disposal to resist the mandated integration of Black and female cadets. Henry Ossian Flipper, who became West Point’s first Black graduate, in 1877, experienced four years of “The Silence”: West Point’s term for total enforced ostracism. Johnson Chesnut Whittaker fared even worse a few years later. He was “found in his room unconscious, bound by his feet and hands, with his head shaved and his ears cut. Burnt pages of the Bible were strewn across the floor.” West Point’s administration accused Whittaker of staging the assault, then court-martialed and expelled him.
Legislation forced the service academies to accept women in 1975, nearly two decades after women were allowed to enlist. From ill-fitting and poorly made uniforms to the military science professor who gave a female cadet a C because, in his own words, “a woman shouldn’t be doing well in tactics,” West Pointers did what they could to make these cadets feel unwelcome. The school also refused to install locks on dorm rooms until the 1990s, and the hazing machine took full advantage with “Project Zero” — as in, zero women at West Point. “Some male cadets pierced female cadets’ pillows and mattresses with their ceremonial sabers, or left condoms on their bunks,” Craven writes. “Others intruded into women’s rooms while they were asleep, sometimes simply to scare them, other times to assault them.”
Conditions have improved, but that’s a low bar, and systemic problems remain. A survey of the Air Force Academy’s class of 2003 found that 12 percent of female cadets were rape survivors and 70 percent experienced sexual harassment during their time at the academy. Black cadets are still scapegoated, as when West Point discovered widespread drug abuse within the school’s football team in 2014. Rather than acknowledge and address the larger problem, the administration pinned all blame on seven cadets they claimed were dealing. Six of those cadets were Black. All were expelled. And then there’s the title of this book. “God Forgives, Brothers Don’t” was the West Point football team’s motto from the mid-1990s until 2019. It is also a slogan of the Aryan Brotherhood.
Women and people of color are often considered outsiders, but when it came to queer students, the problem was they hit too close to home. “Gay” and “weak” are synonyms in military parlance, yet close proximity and shared trauma foster intimacy that goes beyond regular friendship. “Cohesion and community may be the most beautiful facets of military life,” Craven writes, “but they are fragile and easily perverted by the military’s training regime.” Many hazing rituals, up to and including forced penetration, are overtly sadomasochistic, and serve to replace love, platonic and otherwise, with displays of power and violence. “This stress can easily fracture a man’s interpersonal relationships, but it forms the exact instincts that the military requires.”
The military machine would have us believe these instincts are what natural masculinity looks like — loyal, obedient, and violent — when unsullied by effeminate cultural forces. Craven rejects this framing. If violence is so natural, why is PTSD such a problem? Why is this curriculum necessary at all?
The military machine would have us believe these instincts are what natural masculinity looks like — loyal, obedient, and violent.
Not only is violent masculinity unnatural, it is unattainable. “The male military identity is ultimately false, and fleeting, for it is meted out in small doses by men in power, who, for institutional purposes, always withhold unconditional acceptance,” Craven writes. Only death on the battlefield can secure masculinity for good. Nothing about this system supports men or helps them live authentically. Instead, it “exalts male sacrifice and, by extension, devalues male life.”
Original sin that cannot be transcended, fealty to a higher power, a fetishization of sacrifice, canonization of heroes who died for the cause — if this sounds a bit like Christianity to you, that’s no accident. From Thayer’s time through the present day, military academies have cultivated nationalistic, evangelical Christianity to provide comfort and transform obedience into sanctified moral imperative. Evangelicals, for their part, work hard to expand their influence. In the 1940s, they launched a decades-long stealth quest to take over the military’s chaplaincy, which was ultimately successful. “Activist chaplains” have since founded several religiously affiliated military academies. By the early 2000s, 90 percent of Air Force Academy cadets identified as Christian, and 30 percent reported aggressive conversion attempts by their peers. That number climbed to 41 percent by 2010.
The military “pledges to wipe away an existing identity, and that’s often exactly what people want,” Craven writes. But those who learn to survive and thrive within this abusive environment don’t just leave with twisted ideas of masculinity and morality. They leave with an officer’s commission, fully prepared to make their damage everyone else’s problem.
By the time I was in a position to resubmit my West Point application, I knew better. It was common knowledge among the enlisted that West Point grads were the officers least likely to listen to their experienced NCOs and most likely to get people killed. The best officer I ever served under was a West Pointer, to be fair, but so were all the worst. Craven quotes an ROTC officer who nails it: “The shittiest officers, those who were most out of touch and the most arrogant, were always fucking West Pointers.”
Why wouldn’t they be? Military academies teach their students that appearance is more important than substance, loyalty more important than results, and obedience more important than honor. If you’re not on top, you’re on the bottom. Pain is the best teacher. Never admit a mistake. “If there was anything West Point was good at teaching its elite recruits,” Craven writes, “it was unrestrained confidence.”
Through this smudged and fractured lens, constructive criticism reads as a dangerous personal attack, which may explain why the American military steadfastly refuses to learn from its mistakes. Craven writes, “Most high-ranking military men liked a black-and-white world, one free of the pesky word failure” — not that this stops them from failing. William Westmoreland, chief architect of America’s Vietnam catastrophe, was a West Point alumnus, as were most of his junior planners. The U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis produced Oliver North, who spearheaded the Iran-Contra affair. Most of the architects of the COIN strategy that lost the so-called War on Terror were also alumni of military academies. Not only did these institutions defend their alumni against all criticism, Craven reports, they also attacked graduates who attempted to hold them accountable, even for war crimes like the My Lai massacre cover-up.
To make matters worse, military academies have a long history of “‘intellectual inbreeding,’ in which malformed lessons passed from general to cadet.” Westmoreland, Petraeus, and many other failures returned to their alma maters to pass their myopia on to the next generation of officers. In the wake of America’s defeat at the hands of Vietnamese guerrillas, for example, West Point professors “expunged counterinsurgency materials from their curriculum and kept it out of training manuals.” When the reality of the War on Terror made such willful ignorance impossible, Petraeus channeled the West Point ethos to produce an impressive-looking counterinsurgency manual devoid of substance. Nowhere in the 412-page tome did Petraeus address the complex racial, religious, and political dynamics of Iraq and Afghanistan, for example; instead, he lumped every opponent into the category of “insurgents.”
This book makes a persuasive case for the political influence of military academies — but their model of the American man only has purchase if civilians also buy it. Craven provides many examples of the military-masculinity-industrial complex, including the National Security League of 1914. Funded by Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, and other robber barons of the Gilded Age, the league “promote[d] universal military service and ‘patriotic education,’” and decried what they termed the “feminization of teaching.” Relentless lobbying by their military fellow travelers forced public schools to adopt a jingoistic social studies curriculum, cut back on foreign language classes, and mandate daily recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance.
“Most high-ranking military men liked a black-and-white world, one free of the pesky word failure.”
The military’s sway over civilian life has only deepened. Some of that creep is obvious — Hollywood’s superhero-cum-special-ops action flicks and schmaltzy historical epics. Other aspects of it, like the Boy Scouts, or the provision in the No Child Left Behind act that allowed recruiters into public schools, are less apparent. “Most American men receive some form of military conditioning, even if it isn’t through institutional channels,” Craven writes.
And indeed, from alpha-bro podcasters to business consultants, glorified media violence to self-help books, our culture casually equates masculinity with dominant strength and a tendency toward violence. Now that mentality occupies our government as well. Donald Trump, who graduated from the New York Military Academy in 1964, did not create his cult of wounded machismo. That cult created him. Craven cites a data analysis study by two Penn State psychologists, which found that “hegemonic masculinity — a worldview defined by potent sexism and prejudice but consistent with the foundational military requirement of masculine dominance” — best predicted the belief that Trump is a good leader. Even party affiliation couldn’t come close as an indicator.
Thayer “believed that West Point needed to fit an authoritarian mold should it hope to fortify democracy,” Craven writes. In other words, democracy is by nature too feeble to defend itself. Officers and military aficionados quoted throughout this book agree: They see democracy as fundamentally weak, decadent, and feminizing. Increasingly, they see these traits as direct threats to America’s survival. We have arrived at this argument’s logical conclusion: democracy as a subversive and enervating force that must be eliminated.
Military academies are waning, it’s true, but perhaps we do not need them anymore. The monster in charge of our latest monstrous war never set foot inside a military academy, yet embodies their ethos entirely. Pete Hegseth is a Princeton ROTC graduate with an unremarkable service history: a propagandist, a racist, and a proud Christian nationalist, with an incredible inability to admit to what he’s done wrong. Now, as secretary of war, Hegseth is “finally able to construct a strong, perfect vision of the American man in his own image, one where women [are] second-class citizens, hazing [is] encouraged, and dominance [is] expected.” We’re all living in a military academy now.
Laura Jedeed is a freelance journalist and veteran of two tours in Afghanistan. She writes about the American apocalypse at firewalledmedia.com.
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