Disposable children.(warriors, violence in youth)

Writing a little more than a decade ago in Parameters, the journal of the U.S. Army War College, Major Ralph Peters warned of the emergence of a global "warrior class" of "erratic primitives of shifting allegiances, habituated to violence, with no stake in civil order."

Peters distinguished between "warriors" and "soldiers." The former are savage, self-serving hedonists; the latter are disciplined, self-sacrificing individuals motivated by a love of a particular community. The American ideal is embodied by those who stand "between their loved homes and the war's desolation," eagerly returning to civilian life when the crisis has passed. For the "warrior class," by way of contrast, "the end of fighting means the end of good times."

"The primary function of any civilization is to restrain human excess," observed Peters. However, "as society's preparatory structures such as schools, formal worship systems, communities, and families are disrupted, young males who might otherwise have led productive lives are drawn into the warrior milieu." Decades of totalitarian rule left critical social structures in ruins throughout the Balkans, Africa, and the former Soviet Union, thereby producing millions of adolescent males eager to join the warrior class.

In future military conflicts, Peters predicted, the warrior class "will not be impressed by tepid shows of force with restricted rules of engagement. Are we able to engage in and sustain the level of sheer violence it can take to eradicate this kind of threat?" Citing the 1993 debacle in Somalia--our first collision with the "warrior class"--Peters said the answer, at the time, was "No."

Ten years after Peters published those words, war correspondent Evan Wright published Generation Kill, recording what the author observed during the invasion of Iraq while embedded with the second platoon of Bravo Company of the Marine Corps' First Reconnaissance Battalion. Wright offers finely etched portraits of individual Marines, for whom he displays abundant respect and genuine affection. He also offers telling, and probably unintentional, insights regarding the progress made by America's welfare/warfare state toward cultivating our own "warrior class."

"They are kids raised on hip-hop, Marilyn Manson and Jerry Springer," notes Wright of the fighting men he came to know. Many of them consider an unprintable 12-letter word describing Oedipal intimacy to be "a term of endearment." For some, murdered rap star Tupac Shakur "is an American patriot whose writings are better known than the speeches of Abraham Lincoln."

"These young men represent what is more or less America's first generation ...