Jasper Craven is a Northeast Kingdom native and former VTDigger staff writer who covers men and the military for outlets including Harper’s, POLITICO Magazine, NY Mag, Wired, GQ, and The New York Times. His first foray on this beat came in 2018 via a seven-part investigative series for VTDigger into sexual misconduct and an ultra-masculine “Top Gun” culture within the Vermont National Guard. That work prompted reforms, firings, and the resignation of the Adjutant General.
Craven’s work has been cited by outlets including The Wall Street Journal and The Daily Beast, as well as prominent policymakers and President Joe Biden’s Secretary of Veterans Affairs. A Boston Globe Spotlight Team series he contributed to in 2014 was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Craven was also named a 2023 finalist for the Livingston Award in national reporting for his article about corruption and abuse at Valley Forge Military Academy.
Craven’s new book, God Forgives, Brothers Don’t, is a people’s history of how the military shapes American masculinity, delving into the hardcore traits and heavy expectations foisted on boys through its military educational apparatus and enduring cultural cachet.
While George Washington aimed to curb his own influence and image lest the citizenry come to view him as a monarch, he frequently indulged romantic ideas around his manliness. Jasper Craven shows how the figure he allegedly cut – as the “political savior of our nation” who bravely “conducted the Americans’ thro seas of blood” – helped form America’s foundational warrior archetype, and its closely related, ever-evolving masculine mold.
On the 75th anniversary of The Catcher in the Rye, Jasper Craven chronicles the life of J.D. Salinger from a young cadet at Valley Forge Military Academy to an interrogator during World War II, including via unpublished writings provided by his estate, to illuminate the fiercely anti-war sentiments of his most famous novel.
Part of the traditional allure of military service was that it promised romantic interest. This was typified at West Point’s Cadet Hostess Office, composed of military wives who taught etiquette to cadets and fielded love letters from girls at Vassar College and other nearby schools. But as the feminist and Vietnam anti-war movements coalesced, the uniform lost its luster.
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