“How many Vietnam vets does it take to screw in a light bulb?” “I don’t know. How many?” “You wouldn’t know. You weren’t there.” In the American military, identity is an enduring obsession. Long before debates swirled through cultural institutions about the value of hyphenated American identities or the relative fixity of gender-based pronouns, the American military had already determined that identity supersedes individuality. Within the ranks, the individual means little, he or she exists as a mere accumulation of various organizational identities — your rank, your unit, your specialty — all of which stand in service to the collective. This obliteration of the individual begins in training, on day one, when every new recruit is taught a first lesson: to refer to themselves in the third person. You cease to exist, you have become “this recruit.” And you are taught, among the many profanities you might hear in recruit training, that there is one set of slurs that is most unforgivable of all: I, me, my. This doesn’t last forever. I served in the Marines and one of the first privileges the Corps granted me on the completion of training was the privilege to again refer to myself in the first person. Except that I was no longer the same person. I was now 2nd Lieutenant Ackerman, my military identity had eclipsed my civilian one. This new identity placed me firmly within the military hierarchy as a junior officer, and from this position I would over years further build out my identity — and thus my authority — within the organization. I would pass through training courses that would give me expertise. I would go on deployments that would give me experience. And I would gain in seniority, which would give me rank. When in uniform, I would literally wear my identity. Badges of identity, indeed: eventually it became the captain’s bars on my collar, the gold parachute wings and combat diver badges that showed I had passed through those rigorous training courses, as well as the parade of multicolored ribbons that at a glance established where I had served, if I had seen combat, and whether I had acquitted myself with distinction. All these colorful pieces of metal on my uniform served the purpose of immediately establishing my place within a hierarchy. Which is to say, the military obsession with identity is not really an obsession with identity at all; it is an obsession with status and rank. And so it has become in the cultural hierarchy of America, where identitarians invoke an elaborate taxonomy of hyphenations and pronouns with the zealotry of drill instructors. Ostensibly, this new language is designed to celebrate individual difference. In practice it annihilates the individual, fixing each of us firmly within an identity-based hierarchy that serves collective power structures. 
As a combat veteran, I have been the beneficiary of identity-based hierarchies for years. But this was not always the case. In April 2004, I took over my first unit, a forty-man Marine rifle platoon. We were based in Camp Lejeune waiting to deploy to Iraq that June. On a rainy day, when I asked some of my Marines to patrol around the base practicing formations we would soon have to employ in combat, Sergeant Adam Banotai, a super-competent (and at times super-arrogant) twenty-one-year-old squad leader in the platoon told me that he thought my plan was a waste of time. He had been to combat, and I had not. Even though I outranked him, he sat above me in an invisible moral hierarchy in which combat sits as the ne plus ultra of status. I decided to respond to this minor act of insubordination. I brought Sergeant Banotai into my office and had him sign a counseling sheet in which I marked him deficient in “leadership.” I explained that leadership required loyalty both up and down the chain of command. By flagrantly refusing to follow orders he had been disloyal to me and, thus, a bad leader. When I explained that I would place this counseling sheet in his service record, Sergeant Banotai didn’t like it one bit. As he signed, he said, “What the fuck do you know about leading Marines, sir. I was leading Marines while you were still in college.” Fair enough; but we still had to go to war together. Only a few weeks after the counseling sheet incident, out on patrol near Fallujah, my Humvee hit an IED. We were driving parallel to a long canal and I was first in the column of vehicles with Sergeant Banotai sitting a few Humvees back. He later told me that from his perspective I simply vanished in a cloud of dust and smoke. As hunks of shrapnel and earth plunked down into the canal, he was certain that pieces of my body were among the debris, and, in a macabre admission, later told me that he imagined having to fish my joints out of the putrid water. What had happened was that two artillery rounds had gone off right next to my door. Fortunately, the rounds had been dug in too deep, so that their blast fountained upward, over my head, leaving me with dust in my throat and ears ringing but little else. I then jumped out of my Humvee. Whoever had detonated the IED fired a few shots at us as I jogged back to Sergeant Banotai. He and I worked together to coordinate our platoon’s response, in which we searched the area and eventually carried on with our patrol. After that day, everything changed. Our operations ran more smoothly, with no complaints. During off hours, Sergeant Banotai and the other NCOs came by my “hooch” to joke with me. We all got along. Several months — and firefights — later, I asked Sergeant Banotai about that sudden shift in attitude. At first he laughed off my question. When I pressed, he became a bit sheepish, even apologetic. “Well, you got blown up,” he said. “After
There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence