“You have written so much—and convincingly—about better warriors: Vikings, Indians, Confederates, Germans in World War One and Two, being better men then their opponents. But in the end they get eaten up by numbers and industrial capacity. So what is the use; why be a better warrior, why even reclaim your masculinity, when in the end The Machine wins and you are left with nothing?”

Thanks for the thoughtful question George. This is probably the only question that I have fielded on this site that I could have answered at 12 years old, and which does not reflect an opinion that has ever changed in this matter. This surety has resulted in my being lax and not addressing this crux of a manly matter in either of my last three non-fiction books. It is times like this when a writer misses having an editor to slap him across the face and say, "But what about the obvious? Hello, anybody home!"

The Machine wins the material struggle, not the transcendent one. Agamemnon won the Trojan War, not Hector or Achilles. Three thousand years later we read the Iliad and half of us can’t remember the name of the fat rich bastard that fought that war for material gain. Who do we remember, who do we revere?

Achilles owns the book and Hector—both victims of Agamemnon’s cupidity and greed—gets the last line. Every Roman soldier wanted to be Hector. Even Alexander the Great wanted to be Achilles, gave away kingdoms to his men out of fear that he might become Agamemnon. Even Agamemnon would have rather been Achilles!

Achilles means ‘Sorrow-of-the-people’. So, just as he, doomed in his defiance and rage, remained the beating heart of martial culture throughout antiquity, our own modern defeated warriors live still, even in the hearts of their enemies’ descendents.

The Apache people spent 400 years kicking the shit out of better armed white men. Finally, when General Myles hired enough Apaches to track Geronimo and his refugee women and children down, and end the thing at last, at 5,000 to 60 odds, one might speak of the old Apache as having lost, having won nothing. He got sent to a swamp from his high dry mountains to rot away and be carted around as a trophy.

But, fifty years later, when the grandsons of his conquerors had to jump into Occupied Europe to fight the hard cases that had already slaughtered millions of brave Russians, what did they scream? They screamed Geronimo—and he had been their forefathers’ enemy. Even so, he had become what the American fighting man measured himself against.

The Machine does not win the battle, it is the battle; the stage the warrior strives on. The Machine cannot win, nor can its functionaries, and wards, and suckling children, anymore than the corrupt sport of boxing, or its fat cat promoters, or its snarky announcers, or its beer drinking fans, can win a boxing match. Only a boxer can win, and yes, the stage eventually expels or devours him, and that is the whole point, because he cannot live forever until he dies.