Previously clean-shaven veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan who left the ranks in the late aughts began embracing the “post-service beard.” (Disclosure: The authors of this article both indulged in this habit—one after two hazardous infantry deployments to Afghanistan, the other after an inconsequential tour contracting in Iraq.) Active-duty troops, too, began to push for looser restrictions on facial hair. Over the past year, the Pentagon has determined that Sikhs and earnest pagan worshipers of Norse gods may wear beards in the ranks, but “Pastafarian” followers of the Flying Spaghetti Monster may not. (Some of the same conservative circles that deify America’s bearded operators grouse that the military’s recent consideration of facial hair for religious enlistees is “Muslim appeasement.”)
Popular culture capitalized on this trend. Fresh-faced stars like Bradley Cooper and Mark Wahlberg gained plaudits for their turns as unapologetic, steely eyed Navy Seal survivors. The men they portrayed—the ones that weren’t dead—got book deals, film royalties, and regular celebrations on Fox News and at NRA conventions. Consumer culture capitalized, too: If a $3,000 AR-15 with fancy optics and rail-mounted tactical accessories is too rich for your blood, you can capture a little of that operator mojo with Gladiator beard oil from Amazon. (Enter VETLOVE15 for the military discount.)
There was a fundamental disconnect here, though: The Bellum Americanum was not going well. Iraq deteriorated into civil war, and U.S. attention there took away from the “pacification” of Afghanistan. As American strategy floundered, the operators served a useful cultural purpose: highlighting tactical victories and individual courage, made doubly and tragically heroic by politicians’ and strategists’ blunders. The beard became a marker of hard men who did their part to win the war, even if it was unwinnable. If only our politicos and tastemakers were made of such resilient stuff! While the Cold War’s clean-shaven American military hero stood in contrast to his unkempt, unchurched foes, the Long War’s bearded operator now stood in contrast to his own unchurched fellow Americans.
There was another problem: What separated many of these operators from their less-virile counterparts on the American homefront was their capacity for horrifying brutality. As the cultural zeal for beards caught on back home, Afghan tribal leaders were advising locals to avoid bearded troops and deal with the clean-shaven ones, who were empirically less likely to mistreat them. The bearded operators, they said, were the raucous, profane ones who raided your home, searched your women without dignity, and snatched people away to indefinite detentions in arbitrary arrests. Even this could become a point of pride for the operators, who thrived on instilling fear, like the early Seals in Vietnam who reveled in their hoary local reputations as supernatural “men with green faces” who came to take enemies in the night. But in counterinsurgency—that already-paradoxical quest to win hearts and minds at the ends of rifle muzzles—such draconian tactics moot the strategy.