Last September, Jasper Craven got a tip that Valley Forge Military Academy in Wayne, Pa., would close its doors after nearly a century. The 33-year-old investigative reporter from the Northeast Kingdom can’t claim sole credit for bringing down an institution whose renowned alumni include retired general H. Norman Schwarzkopf Jr., commander of coalition forces during the first Gulf War; retired lieutenant general H.R. McMaster, former national security adviser to President Donald Trump; and author J.D. Salinger, who set his novel The Catcher in the Rye in a fictional version of Valley Forge. But Craven’s devastating reportage on the scandal-plagued school delivered the coup de grâce.
In May 2022, Mother Jones magazine published Craven’s “Hazing, Fighting, Sexual Assaults: How Valley Forge Military Academy Devolved Into ‘Lord of the Flies.’” The story chronicles decades of abuses, lawsuits, and cases of alleged assault, arson, burglary, narcotics use, weapons possession, stalking, rape, and severe hazing such as branding and waterboarding.
Craven found that, during a four-year period, police responded to more than 300 incidents on campus, with cadets as young as 13 experiencing psychiatric crises that included suicide. Valley Forge staff, some of whom were former cops and prison guards, not only turned a blind eye to the misconduct but also often participated in it. Even as the academy incurred more than $4 million in legal expenses and sank $7 million into debt, administrators prioritized the school’s reputation and its culture of silence rather than confront the most serious offenses.
And Craven soon discovered that “the Forge,” as insiders called it, was no outlier in the world of military education. His Mother Jones piece became the springboard for his first book, a scathing indictment of U.S. military academies. God Forgives, Brothers Don’t: The Long March of Military Education and the Making of American Manhood, coming out on May 19, is a compelling, disturbing and timely read, reminiscent of the work of Sebastian Junger and Jon Krakauer.
The book is a compelling, disturbing and timely read, reminiscent of the work of Sebastian Junger and Jon Krakauer.
Craven earned his stripes as an investigative journalist covering military and veterans’ affairs for such publications as the New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, Politico, the Boston Globe and Wired. (He also works part time for the nonprofit Veterans Healthcare Policy Institute.) During Joe Biden’s presidency, he briefly had access to the U.S. Military Academy’s West Point campus. He was later banned after a visit to cover Trump’s speech to cadets; the U.S. Secret Service accused him of, as he told Seven Days, “acting suspiciously” and sent agents to his parents’ house.
In his book, Craven traces the history of military education in America from the Revolutionary War and the founding of military schools — notably, West Point and Valley Forge — and examines their approach to molding legions of impressionable youths into battle-ready warriors.
Military schools and their surrogates, such as the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps and private military academies, profess to instill a sense of duty, honor and self-sacrifice in their cadets. But Craven uncovered a far grimmer reality: a cult of toxic masculinity rife with cruelty, violence, racism, misogyny, antisemitism, substance abuse and Islamophobia.
“Military schooling,” he writes, “is an increasingly dubious, and, when poorly overseen, potentially dangerous form of teaching, one that has spawned polarization, male isolation and frustration, and a child abuse crisis hiding in plain sight. It’s also utterly ineffective at winning wars.”
Craven started writing God Forgives, Brothers Don’t in late 2022, long before Trump’s return to the White House. Yet the timing of the book’s release — nearly three months into the Iran war — is serendipitous.
The military mindset Craven describes is on full display in the current administration, including in Trump himself, who spent five years at New York Military Academy in Cornwall-on-Hudson. There, Craven writes, many cadets “made violence a core part of their identity.” One graduate whose schooling coincided with Trump’s described it as an “animalistic” environment that was “a lot like Full Metal Jacket.” In Stanley Kubrick’s 1987 film, a boot camp private is brutally hazed until he snaps, killing his drill sergeant and himself.
The mentality is also evident in the chest-thumping posturing of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, with his invocation of a “warrior ethos,” his contempt for the Geneva Conventions, his Christian nationalist tattoos and his quoting of a fictitious Bible verse lifted from Pulp Fiction. In a Seven Days interview, Craven described Hegseth as “a perfect encapsulation of the blowback from the forever wars.” (For more, see sidebar excerpt.)
The military mindset Craven describes is on full display in the current administration, including in Trump himself.
Craven shows that the culture of cruelty and secrecy in military education is no new phenomenon but one baked into its DNA. God Forgives, Brothers Don’t explores that mindset’s origins in the 1802 founding of West Point, when two men waged a battle for the academy’s ideological soul: early superintendent Alden Partridge — who later founded Norwich University — and Sylvanus Thayer, who deposed Partridge and became West Point’s founding father.
While Partridge was averse to harsh punishment and treated cadets almost like his own children, Thayer saw his method as too forgiving and weak. An admirer of Napoleon Bonaparte, he emphasized discipline and subordination and adopted an austere 15-hour school day that discarded the humanities in favor of math and science. Thayer also established a student hierarchy that forced younger cadets to defer to upperclassmen, accepting any orders or indignities hurled their way.
Craven writes:
Hazing was one of Thayer’s most well-devised ingredients in making a military man, something that scrubbed away individual identity, crafted institutional loyalty, and established generalized, easily directable strains of anger. The military needed soldiers with conditional morality and violent urges, instincts that hazing inculcated. Before they arrived on the battlefield, these boys had nowhere to direct their urges other than inwards, or at each other.
Craven goes on to explore how military academies weaponized Christianity, embracing a “Christ the conqueror” theology that stripped away the meekness of Jesus in support of a hard-core, violence-affirming dogma.
Military schools were deeply infused with white supremacy from the antebellum era. Southern academies such as the Citadel in South Carolina and the Virginia Military Institute were established largely in response to fears of slave rebellions. Even after the armed forces integrated in 1954, racism persisted. At the Cam Ranh Bay naval base in Vietnam, white soldiers celebrated the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. by raising a Confederate flag.
Similar attitudes still pervade military education, argues Craven, who named his book after a West Point football team motto adopted in 1996. The academy dropped the slogan “God forgives, brothers don’t” in 2019 when it turned out to have roots in the neo-Nazi Aryan Brotherhood of Texas.
On the surface, Craven may seem an unlikely candidate for exposing the ugly underbelly of U.S. military academies. He’s never served in the armed forces himself. When we met at his house in Barnet — he divides his time between the Northeast Kingdom and Brooklyn — he had a scraggly beard and wavy brown hair tucked into a ball cap; the elbows of his red flannel shirt were shredded as though he’d just been dragged by a horse. His arms sport several antiwar tattoos, including the words “Peace Piece,” the title of a Bill Evans song; and a Molotov cocktail bearing a peace sign.
Craven grew up in Peacham and Barnet and attended St. Johnsbury Academy. His parents, Jay Craven and Bess O’Brien, accomplished filmmakers who cofounded Kingdom County Productions, were Vietnam War-era peaceniks.
The young Craven watched classic movies with his parents, notably All the President’s Men, about the reporters who exposed the Watergate scandal. Craven saw it for the first time in elementary school.
Though the film is a romanticized version of journalism, he said, “That pretty much sealed the deal. It was thrilling to me.”
Craven relished the idea of covering the metro desk or courts and cops as a gumshoe reporter. His journalistic ambitions were nurtured by his father, who for years has written a column for the Caledonian-Record.
The summer after eighth grade, Craven and his father took a trip to Ireland, where their rental car was stolen and recovered. Later, Jay let Jasper recount the story in his column. By high school, Jasper had his own column in the Record called “A Teen’s Time to Talk,” which featured his musings on adolescence.
Though Jasper occasionally helped his parents on projects, he never wanted to make movies himself, having witnessed the financial perils of independent filmmaking. Still, his rearing by professional storytellers left its mark. More than his father’s cinematic work, Jasper said, he took inspiration from Jay’s politics and anti-war activism, about which he loved hearing stories. As he put it, “Henry Kissinger was shouted at at our dinner table a million times.”
Coincidentally, Jay, who grew up outside Philadelphia, nearly attended Valley Forge Military Academy, a fact that Jasper didn’t discover until he wrote the Mother Jones story.
If Jasper Craven’s father influenced his politics, his mother’s style of documentary filmmaking taught him how to listen to interviewees and be compassionate in intense situations. O’Brien’s films broach such difficult subjects as addiction, sexual abuse and eating disorders. Craven vividly remembers touring with her to screen Here Today, her 2002 documentary about heroin addiction in the Northeast Kingdom. As is typically the case, O’Brien brought the people in the film along for the screenings.
“It was really good for me to be hanging out with these people who were from a completely different socioeconomic class, who’d been through hell, had found redemption and were working really hard,” he said. “That allowed me to be open to people and be curious and nonjudgmental.”
While studying journalism and political science at Boston University, Craven covered Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) for the Barre-Montpelier Times Argus. At the time, Sanders chaired the U.S. Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, which exposed Craven to the many challenges vets face when reintegrating into civilian life.
After graduating in 2015, Craven took a job at VTDigger. In 2016, he reported on the Vermont elections and Sanders’ run for president, then began covering Washington, D.C.
In 2018, Craven, Anne Galloway and Mark Johnson coauthored a searing seven-part series for VTDigger about the “Top Gun culture” of misogyny, harassment, substance abuse and retribution in the Vermont Air National Guard. Among the more damning stories Craven contributed was one about a wing commander who flew an F-16 to D.C. for a romantic rendezvous with a female Army colonel who worked at the Pentagon.
“These were not easy [stories] to put together, and there was a lot of pushback along the way,” recalled Jim Welch, longtime editor of the Burlington Free Press and USA Today, who help edit the series. “Jasper was as good an investigative reporter as I’ve worked with.”
Johnson, a veteran radio and print journalist whom Craven considers his mentor, agreed.
“One of his strengths among many is, he’s really good at developing sources,” Johnson said. “He just loves getting up in the morning and finding that next great story … For him, journalism isn’t a job. It’s a calling.”
Craven’s book makes the case that reforming the dysfunction in U.S. military education will require a paradigm shift away from a centuries-old culture of blind obedience and violence toward one that embraces transparency, critical thinking and more humane definitions of manhood. Retired Air Force brigadier general Martin France offered a sketch of the latter, telling the author that the goal of military education should be producing “sentient beings who understand just war theory, the laws around conflict, [and] the orders that they are morally obligated to disobey,” rather than just “flesh-and-bone drones.”
God Forgives, Brothers Don’t may face criticism for minimizing the many benefits of a military education. In the book, Craven acknowledges the “most beautiful facets of military life,” such as opportunities to develop lifelong friendships, physical and mental discipline, social status, and a powerful sense of belonging and purpose. For many economically disadvantaged youths, he notes, military service remains a viable avenue out of poverty.
In the end, though, Craven sees those benefits as a “bait and switch,” arguing that the positive traits taught at military academies are “calibrated to enhance the aims of the military state, not the man.” All too often, they come at a steep physical, psychological and societal price. ➆
From God Forgives, Brothers Don’t
American masculinity is predicated on the wobbly assumption that man is violent by nature. In a 2025 speech before every senior American defense official, Trump’s self-styled “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth passionately defended this premise and derided pacifism as “naive and dangerous.”
“It ignores human nature and it ignores human history,” Hegseth argued. “Either you protect your people and your sovereignty, or you will be subservient to something or someone. It’s a truth as old as time.”
Hegseth has some history in his back pocket, but not much science. Men have fought many wars, that is true, but those leading them have never relied on innate aggression to naturally show itself. Rather, they have cultivated violence, often in closed and highly controlled educational environments. And often for years.
Since America’s founding, military brass have painstakingly developed and refined a military curriculum that breeds loyalty, teaches obedience, and constructs violence, all the while convincing the public that conflict is a hardwired male instinct. One early West Point superintendent briefly let this assertion slip when he acknowledged that a cadet’s “cruel” and “brutal” behavior is not “inbred,” and, in fact, could be “absolutely eradicated.” But it never has been.
Instead, the military’s muscular masculine archetype has become one of America’s most coveted assets. Like warfare itself, it is ever evolving. A diluted form of military manliness can be replicated in the civilian world, though it is always a clear knockoff. It lacks the high-and-tight haircut, the posture, the gaze, the mythic war stories of conquest, destruction, and dominance. Those who secure the genuine article make a devil’s bargain. As sociologist Ramon Hinojosa writes, “the irony is that by accessing the resources of the military to construct a hegemonic masculinity, [men] will be subordinated and/or marginalized.” The male military identity is ultimately false, and fleeting, for it is meted out in small doses by men in power, who, for institutional purposes, always withhold unconditional acceptance. Military masculinity is unsustainable. Real self-actualization is never achieved.
Many men nonetheless fight their way to the top of the military hierarchy. Some do so by toeing the line. Others become intoxicated by the obligatory respect and conditional salvation that their status confers. Some live with shame about the things they had to do to get there. Many in this latter group come to see the tragic fact at the heart of the military system: the military does not make them stronger; it alters and degrades them, sometimes forever.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Brass Tactics | Jasper Craven’s new book chronicles a culture of abuse in military schools and its toxic effects on American masculinity”
This article appears in May 13 • 2026.
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