Tomorrow, Tom Izzo will have his basketball team don what he thinks are some nifty camouflaged uniforms as they take to the deck of the USS Carl Vinson in San Diego to play North Carolina. Hopefully, Izzo won’t go as far as dressing in his own camo, but you never know since he was recently quoted as saying “I think the uniforms are pretty cool.”
He also said in several interviews that when he was in Kuwait coaching troops a few years ago that he felt fortunate to be able to wear fatigues, not once but twice.
He said, “If a player doesn’t get a little more excited wearing this, there’s something definitely wrong.”
I just wish that one player would step up and say “something’s wrong”. I empathize with the Coach. When I was five, I remember trying to make a gun out of every odd-shaped stick and once even liberating my father’s metal saw to use as a submachine gun. When I was a little older “The Ballad of the Green Beret” and a dead classmate almost inspired me to enlist during the Vietnam War.
Michigan author, actor and filmmaker Benjamin Busch writes about his own fascination with warfare as a little boy in his memoir “Dust to Dust” which is due out next year. I met Benjamin along with authors Phil Caputo (“Rumor of War”) and Doug Stanton (“Horse Soldiers”) when I was a moderator for a panel discussion “On Writers Writing About War.” Watch a video of the event here.
Read what Benjamin wrote for NPR on playing war versus real war. Busch was uniquely qualified to write about war after doing a couple combat tours in Iraq as a Marine.
At no point in any of his writing does Benjamin glorify war or warfare. And that’s my point. Tom Izzo has gone overboard sort-to-speak in a kind of military madness to glorify war. Just a few weeks ago, he used his midnight madness introduction of the team to appear in the pilot’s seat of a toy F-16 fighter.
Now, I doubt that military recruiters on campus will get even one additional enlistment from Izzo’s show of force, but that doesn’t justify his unadulterated hero worship or ritualization of warfare and warriors. He’s not alone, earlier in the football season the football team was one of the few teams in the country to be able to wear Nike “combat” gear.
If it takes camo-the uniform of warriors-to rev up his basketball team, Tom Izzo might face some disappointment this year. However, one time that the invocation of war did work to motivate a team happened way back in the last century when the Carlisle Indian Football Team got a rousing half time speech from their coach with the reminder that their opponent’s fathers were responsible for killing their fathers. Carlisle soundly defeated West Point that day. Maybe, that’s where this whole sports as warfare got its start or does it even go further back to jousting tournaments?
It doesn’t matter, I’m sure that sporting events will continue to be “war sniffers” complete with flyovers, but maybe it’s time we have a “peace classic” on a landing strip at a former SAC base in the Upper Peninsula.
Our universities, places which once advocated for peace, (an exception, of course, is MSU’s role in Vietnam) have become part of the military-industrial-complex again. Tomorrow, on Veteran’s Day, I’ll take a few minutes to think of my classmate Terry whose life was cut short while serving as a “military advisor” in Vietnam.
And maybe I’ll swing by the Lansing Peace Center’s protest against the Carrier Classic at the “Nets for Vets Basketball Benefit” being held at the Central United Methodist Church, 215 North Capitol Ave in Lansing. The Northstar Center Troublemaker will play the PEC Peacemakers.
A strong opponent of our entrance into World War I, the anti-war journalist Randolph Bourne couldn’t tolerate the complicity with which citizens so easily accept the war culture which he referred to as “popular hysteria or military madness.”
He also said that war “mocks the fantasy of individual heroism”. Dorothy Day, noted peacemaker, often cited Bourne for her inspiration in never accepting an honorary degree from a university. She refused at least 16 of them telling the universities that “they were the heart of the industrial-military conglomerate.”
