Warrior Dreams? : James Gibson Thinks Our Loss in Vietnam Triggered Feelings of <i> Angst</i> and Visions of Rambo in Some Men

The boy, 11 years old, slams a shell into a double-barrel 12-gauge, swivels, and shoots from the hip. Out in Lytle Creek wash, a battered plastic milk jug jolts and skitters.

Before the chalky dust has settled, the boy reloads and fires again. And again. Despite the shotgun’s roar, his pink-cheeked face remains a blank slate of sang-froid.

Twenty feet away, a fellow in a polo shirt and freshly pressed chinos pulls up in a sports car, sets an uncorked bottle of red wine out in the dirt, then opens up on it with a semiautomatic pistol.

This man, too, is expressionless, as are most of the hundreds of people blazing away in this designated free-fire zone.

But James William Gibson has a hunch about what’s on these shooters’ minds. Surveying the Sunday morning mayhem in this scruffy strip of the San Bernardino National Forest, Gibson, an associate professor of sociology at Cal State Long Beach, sees ample evidence to support the title of his book: “Warrior Dreams.”

From ex-Marines sniping at a refrigerator to the gangster types drawing down on the realty signs, soccer balls, microwave ovens and bowling pins they have hauled out as targets, Gibson sees hints that would seem to bolster his theory: In the wake of this country’s losing war in Vietnam, American males latched onto Rambo fantasies, embracing a mythic battle against evil by men who must step outside the bounds of an unappreciative society.

On the same morning Gibson tours this designated shooting area near Fontana, in fact, federal officers are rounding up suspects across Southern California, accusing them of vague but ominous paramilitary-type activity. Gibson’s not surprised by the next day’s stories, which make it sound as if the fatigue-clad “warriors” were training for some sort of mercenary activity, real or imagined.

As he sees things, America’s paramilitary fantasy plays itself out in behavior that runs the gamut from dorky to dangerous.

His interest in the subject is not purely academic. An incident from his youth still reverberates in his conscience--and, it might be assumed, in the pages of his book.

Gibson grew up in Ft. Worth, Tex. His father, a World War II veteran, “had seen enough of weapons,” Gibson says. So the boy did his hunting with an uncle or friends.

His youthful passion for blood sport ended one evening when Gibson was about 17. That night, he and some pals put on camouflage gear, darkened their faces, and set off armed to the teeth in imitation of the scenes they’d seen in countless war movies and on television shows such as “Combat.”

Up in the rolling hills of north-central Texas, they came upon a tree full of raccoons. The teen-agers took up positions and opened fire.

“The raccoons all fell out of the tree, but we hadn’t killed them,” Gibson says. “The noise they made, their crying, sounded just like human babies. We spent hours chasing them down and trying to put them out of their misery.

“It felt so bad,” says Gibson, 42. “I realized I’d sacrificed those raccoons for my childish fantasy.”

That was Gibson’s last mock battle until he began researching “Warrior Dreams.” In the meantime, he earned his doctorate in sociology from Yale and a student deferment from serving in the military during Vietnam.

Still, the war had an impact on Gibson. In 1986, he published a book about U.S. military technocracy in Vietnam: “The Perfect War--The War We Couldn’t Lose and How We Did.”

Research for that scholarly effort immersed him in the mythology of warfare. But what he discovered, he says, is that most of the soldiers who saw combat quickly rejected John Wayne movie romanticism as bunk.

“The one positive thing that came after Vietnam,” Gibson says, “is that the war movie definitely died out.”

Then, in the early ‘80s, Gibson points out, a new breed of movie rose up to glorify a new breed of warrior: the Rambos, Road Warriors and Conan the Barbarians.

Morbid fascination and scholarly instincts fused.

He wanted to understand this new version of the soldier and the resilience of war mythology, he says: “What gave it the power to resurrect itself 10 years after it was crushed?”

Gibson subscribed to Soldier of Fortune magazine and hung out with the warriors and wanna-bes at one of that mercenary magazine’s gun-ho gatherings. He pulled on camouflage, painted his face and engaged in elaborate paint-ball battles in Malibu.

He also plunged into an activity for which only a small percentage of the male population has the guts, the time or the tastelessness: reading survivalist-style potboilers with such titles as “Vigilante,” “Mack Bolan, the Executioner” and “Casca, the Eternal Mercenary.”

The themes he turned up in film, books and in one-on-one interviews disturb him.

America’s defeat in Vietnam, coupled with the growing influence of women and minorities, have left a segment of the male population feeling impotent, he says.

The new warrior came to see himself preparing for, or engaged in, a “New War.” The enemy forces, Gibson says, include not only crooks and communists, but also the “liberals” whom the warrior believes run the country. It is significant and disturbing, Gibson says, that unlike the heroes of WWII legend, who fought to preserve society, the new warrior feels betrayed by his society and fights outside it.

“Today’s warriors have only one purpose. They exist to keep fighting. Fighting any enemy is seen as the best of all possible lives. . . .”

Warrior dreams seeped into American thinking at every level in the 1980s, Gibson says. In the broadest sense, the mythology remained dilute: Millions of people enjoyed the Ramboesque films, and some absorbed their political messages.

On another level, a relative few new warriors swaggered around with the fancy assault-style weaponry that manufacturers aggressively marketed to their new-found tastes, Gibson says.

And from time to time over the past 15 years, he adds, a hard-core minority of new warriors have acted out their aggressions in racist organizations or individually, in the sort of lone-gunman mass murders that make headlines.

In Gibson’s view, though, the ultimate expression of new warriorism was the Ronald Reagan and George Bush administrations’ foreign policy, from the invasion of Grenada to the Persian Gulf War.

The most obvious manifestation of new warrior thinking--that the good guys must now fight outside the constraints of the system--surfaced during the Iran-Contra affair, Gibson says.

“When Oliver North testified in July, 1987,” Gibson writes, “he was speaking to a nation saturated with New War fantasies and actual political-military programs, both of which made war and the warrior essential to America’s salvation and survival.”

Even some of the people Gibson considers key contributors to the new warrior mythology agree that there are wanna-be warriors afoot and that their behavior can be pretty goofy.

But Robert K. Brown, the founding editor of Soldier of Fortune, doubts that these people--other than the few oddballs--pose much of a problem. “Does he get the same heartburn from people who dress up and re-enact Civil War battles or Revolutionary War battles?” he wonders of Gibson.

He also doubts the origins of this species: “The idea that all this has occurred because of Vietnam trauma is a bunch of bull. . . .”

John Milius, who wrote and directed the archetypal warrior movie “Red Dawn,” takes a similar view: “There’s always been stuff like that. I don’t think it’s particular to this time. . . . The Black Panthers were a paramilitary organization.”

Jeff Cooper, the articulate and notoriously opinionated owner of the Gunsite Ranch shooting school in Arizona, would almost certainly place Gibson among the domestic enemies of the United States, which he lumps together as CLAMS--”Congressional Left, Academics, Media.”

But Gibson has proved that he ain’t just another liberal wienie. Signing up for Gunsite in 1988 without revealing his trade, Gibson joined police officers, federal agents and all variety of wanna-be gunslingers in a weeklong combat shooting course.

As it happens, the professor blasted his way to the third-highest ranking for his class. In the process, he was momentarily transformed into “the armed man . . . the reborn warrior.”

“Cooper’s philosophy of violence had become part of me,” he writes in “Warrior Dreams.” “Political ideas, shooting techniques, and flesh united to form a cold killing machine. . . . It felt like the energy roared down my arms until it formed a tunnel that extended out to wherever I aimed my weapon.”

*

A few miles into the national forest, Gibson watches shooters of every description fire weapons of every description at targets of every description. He is particularly unsettled by the group blasting away at a pink stuffed bunny, a stuffed dog and a teddy bear that had been propped up in the rubbish.

“I think that’s sacrilege,” he says, as the snap, crackle and ca-boom of gunshots float on the wind and echo like thunder down the side of canyons. When questioned, none of the shooters in Lytle Creek say they are lost in warrior reverie or imagine themselves killing liberal foes as they squeeze the trigger.

As one man with a legal AK-47 says: “If I’m shooting at a tire, I’m shooting at a tire. I’m focusing on that target.”

Gibson is skeptical. To him, the type of weapons--not to mention the symbolic targets such as teddy bears--suggest that many of the shooters fantasize about killing as they fire.

That repulses him. At the same time, he understands the allure of the warrior myth.

In Bosnia on this Sunday morning, Serbian soldiers slaughter Muslims. In Rwanda, tens of thousands of gallons of blood flow. And just a few miles from Lytle Creek, young men in suits of armor joust and engage in mock sword fights at the Renaissance Pleasure Faire.

“I really think a need for challenge, adventure, risk is biologically wired into men,” Gibson says. “The question is, do you make the warrior identity the only symbol of manhood?”