Seismic Shift (Cont.) | Outside Online

You Are Here:

Home >> Seismic Shift (Cont.)

Today's Question
What should you do if you run into a cougar in the backcountry? answer

What is the number one backcountry skill people should learn? answer

Today's Question
What are the five best environmental movies of all time? answer

What are the greenest colleges? answer

What kind of dog will make me look manlier? answer
Is there a sport that safely combines my twin passions for guns and kayaks? answer
How come most of the world's cultures enjoy eating goat, but Americans don't? answer

Online Favorites

Special Issues

Photo Galleries

Outside Magazine December 2001

Page:

Seismic Shift (Cont.)

LIKE MOST OF MY generation, I never served in the military. I've seen the raw borderlands of hot and cold war, however, in South Africa and Burma, in Sierra Leone and Tibet. I've been arrested, interrogated, and detained by guerrillas and by "legitimate" military forces. I've sidestepped land mines, crawled under barbed wire, and ducked bullets with soldiers and mercenaries. I've met their victims. And now this tenuous trip to Afghanistan was forcing me to confront the contradictory relationship between war and adventure.

For much of human history, from the imperial triumphs of Alexander the Great to the conquests of colonialism and our own ultimately world-altering revolution, adventure and war were virtually synonymous. Boys, be they Vikings or Greeks or Mongols or Brits,

"Adventure is largely a luxury of peace. And when peace fails, the spirit of adventure is inescapably twisted into the martial form of war."

were taught the fundamental skills of warfare. Swordsmanship, archery, and wrestling were the educational prerequisites for the great test of manhood. The same flags that flew vanguard over expeditions of discovery flew over the smoke and carnage of battlefields.br>
Some of the world's greatest explorers were military men: Sir Richard Burton, Major John Wesley Powell, Captain Robert Falcon Scott. Yet many were not: Ibn Battuta, Marco Polo, Fridtjof Nansen. Both kinds were driven as much by an inextinguishable curiosity as by a sense of national duty. In our own culture, Theodore Roosevelt might be considered the quintessential soldier-adventurer hybrid. He hunted, fished, climbed the Matterhorn, explored Africa; he also served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy and commanded troops and fought in Cuba. < "War always does bring out the highest and lowest in human nature," Roosevelt wrote in his 1913 autobiography, just before the outbreak of World War I. Veterans of the Great War, for one of the first times in history, spoke candidly about the conundrum that Roosevelt had acknowledged. Yes, in war there were untold thousands of heroic, self-sacrificing acts, but there was also untold horror and thousands of acts of cruelty and sadism. To those who had not seen it, war remained a grand and mysterious opportunity for adventure—but few who had seen its unspeakable depravity spoke of it that way.

Page: