Abstract
Borderline is something of a hybrid and hard to categorize. Perhaps it is best summed up as a conversational – at times almost chatty – autobiography with comments, observations and opinions about war, sex and Church, and the relationships between them. At the heart of the book is the idea that Christians are a story-formed community that can be blown off course by other powerful narratives that tend to hold them back from fuller participation in the story of Christ. So there is a great deal of comment about these other stories and the way they are to be identified and understood according to various modes of analysis as well as excursions into the history of warfare.
A health warning: this is not a book for the squeamish. Stan Goff is a former American soldier and Vietnam war veteran. He served in the airborne Rangers and Special Forces Groups. He is very frank about his experiences during this time, admitting to terrorizing and brutalizing the weak and poor, burning houses, killing livestock, maiming people and exploiting women for sex. He describes himself as a divorced alcoholic who left a damaged trail that involved the suffering of his own daughter, ‘a very young witness to this insanity’ (p. xvii). And he took human life.
There are some insights into his life as a soldier, though the more sensitive reader should be warned that the language, while no doubt accurately reflecting that of the barrack room, is at times very coarse. Encounter with feminist thought caused him to rethink his attitudes and ultimately change his whole way of life. He saw connections between the way males project their masculinity in everyday life and the power play of politicians and generals. War produces and reproduces male contempt for women. He is uncertain, however, whether male attitudes and behaviour are primarily the result of nature or nurture. But Jesus shows us a better way because he repudiates all male power roles.
Christians, however, depart from Christ’s example which, he believes, necessarily entails non-violence. His position here tends to be stated rather than argued for. Following Stanley Hauerwas, who has had a great influence on his life, he sees nothing in the teaching of Jesus that would allow Christians to take up political power. Although a Roman Catholic, he dismisses the notion of just war and bridles at the American way of having the stars and stripes in the sanctuary.
The text is populated with frequent references to writers on feminism, psychology, psychoanalysis, politics, pacifism and the history of war, though they tend to be inserted like post-it notes rather than develop organically within an argument.
Borderline would have been a better book if it had been more focused on fewer issues or if it had been several books and not one. I found, for instance, the descriptions of life in the US armed forces and what war does to the ordinary soldier, illuminating. But these observations are scattered through the text and bringing them together is hard work.