Reading Lolita in the barracks

From the article:

What every South Korean man agrees on is that serving in the military is a dreadful experience. The chief agony reported by draftees isn’t the plutonium-happy neighbor to the north but the hazing and abuse — physical, mental, and sexual — that have long defined military life.

[...]

The hierarchy was absolute, based on ranks that were determined strictly by time served. [...]

[...]Even within the same rank, your month of enlistment mattered. An August recruit (me) was forever junior to a July recruit of the same year; it was common to call someone by their enlistment month. I was, for a time, simply “August.”

It is easy to mistake the military for an unimaginative institution, but a glance at South Korean hazing culture reveals that creativity is alive and well in these unlikely places. By the time I enlisted, the most brutal forms of physical hazing [...] were officially banned. Even so, there were creative offerings that could teach American frat bros a thing or two.

The more innocuous ones involved forcing new recruits to dance or sing on command. On the gastronomical front, a marine once forced a private to eat an entire box of chocolate pies (1,980 kcal). There was simulated solitary confinement, where a person could be denied all communication with the outside world — no calls, no visits, no leave.

For the low-ranking, many forms of “self-improvement” were forbidden. Going to the gym was out of the question. Lying down was considered too comfortable; one had to sit with a perfectly straight back. The privilege of changing the TV channel or adjusting the fan was reserved for seniors.

The simplest chores were inflated into laborious rituals. Every night, the most junior private from each platoon would line up with tissues. A senior would then make them squat and, with the tissue, pick up every single pubic hair from the communal bathroom floor.

[...]

Strangely, the whole ordeal was aggravating but not exactly humiliating. The philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser captured this psychology aptly. After being beaten by police during a campus protest, he was asked if he had been treated unfairly or unjustly. He responded: “Unjust, but not unfair. It was unjust because they hit me over the head, but not unfair because they hit everyone else over the head.”

[...]

There was also a general sentiment that a private had not yet “earned” the right to study, meaning that during the first year of service, even using an available carrel would draw unwanted attention. This wasn’t so much anti-intellectualism as a form of deprivation grounded in a clear understanding of education's value — they knew exactly what was being withheld.

My solution: night watch duty. [...] A universally hated task, as you can imagine, since your sleep was interrupted by shifts that came around every two or three days. But it also meant an hour of solitude, an hour to read unwatched.

One night, loath to put my book down halfway through, instead of waking the next person, I just kept on reading. I figured I would get chewed out for the screw-up later. But the men whose shifts I covered were only too glad not to be woken up. Eureka.

I started covering others’ shifts — often three hours from 1 to 4 a.m., sometimes two from 4 to 6 a.m., when loudspeakers blared the start of the day. A fair trade. More sleep for them, more reading for me. My late nights were made possible only by military-grade instant coffee and the kick I got from my own insufferable self-romanticization as a reader by night, soldier by day.

[...]

For all its byzantine rituals, the governance itself was simple: two platoon leaders formed a duopoly, issuing rules and diktats. Every few months, new platoon leaders were selected according to some mysterious criteria set by the officers. (One clear requirement was that they had to be at least corporals.) The cliché that power corrupts seemed true. It was as if the green shoulder patch identifying the platoon leader, once sewn onto his uniform, became a kind of radioactive implant that initiated a decay of character.

[...]

As for why we never reported anything to the officers, as you can now see, it was because they were apathetic to our welfare. Besides, the system exacts a vow of omertà from its members. To snitch to the officers was to commit the ultimate taboo, guaranteeing retribution beyond imagination — what exactly that was, we didn’t know, because I never saw anyone try.

I had trouble understanding the logic that sustained the dramas of the barracks — how violence seemed to obey a transitive property, with each man inflicting what he had once endured. A cluster of privates who had enlisted in close succession — e.g., July, August, September, October — would form a natural cohort. And time and again, once a new platoon leader was selected, the man we had hoped would be our Jesus Christ turned into a Grand Inquisitor. We underlings nursed the same fantasy: when one of us became a platoon leader, we would finally bring about reform.