Armor

The suit of armor is a keystone trope for the Grunt. Why?

First, it solves the squishiness problem. By replacing weak flesh with clean, powerful steel, suddenly the fear of random death (like from a stray piece of shrapnel) is dampened, which reactivates the power fantasy of combat.

Second, it heightens the depersonalization drama. Once you are in the suit, your face is hidden. (The classic "fishbowl" helmets, seen in many sci-fi movies, are not regulation equipment for Grunts.) But becoming faceless is not always a bad thing. We start policing the emotional displays of boys at quite a young age, and the implied solution is for them to construct a stoic and impassive shell which betrays nothing — neither vulnerability nor rage. A suit of armor + helmet strikes the proto-Grunt as ideal. Not only will it defend against external assaults, but it can serve as a bomb coffin, a sort of pressure vessel that can withstand explosive internal forces without subjecting bystanders to any shrapnel.

This is initially quite adaptive: the Grunt is spared the pain of strong emotion, and the Grunt’s intimates get a good soldier. But after awhile, you end up with a close cousin of the Grunt: the Tin Man, or empty suit of armor.* Having banished those powerful feelings that churn in his heart, the Grunt, like the Earth without its molten metal core, loses its magnetic field. His inner compass no longer works, and self-direction becomes difficult. Enter the Commanding Officer: Grunts are dying to take orders. Blurry individual goals are replaced with group objectives. Enter The Glorious Sacrifice for the Good of Mankind: Grunts are dying to die for something.

Bugs

One question every Grunt story must answer: who are we shooting at? Bugs are best, and not just because Alien popularized them. The Grunt, in his powered exoskeleton, swarming the battlefield, mindlessly following orders, getting squashed underfoot by air strikes, recognizes that bug. That recognition makes for a natural adversary, a way for the Grunt to vent his self-disgust on a horrifying, inhuman monster. Their inhumanity is crucial: you’re allowed to exterminate a bug without justification, and Grunts relish the chance at some savage, consequence-free slaughter.

The Superior Officer

Grunts are, of course, order-takers, and chafe at that. The war he’s fighting is never his idea, but rather something cooked up by some asshole in an air-conditioned room far from the front lines. There’s bone-deep resentment that comes with having your fate resting in the soft hands of some politico, or foolish general.

A lot of class resentment hovers in this relationship. The Grunt is not happy about being used like a tool, and the resentment is sharpened by the fact that they are taking orders from someone who exerts a completely unphysical power over them. It’s one thing to be dominated by a ferocious enemy combatant, who’s another blue collar worker — that’s a fair contest — but to be manipulated by an even squishier commander is beyond frustrating.

As such, it’s a reliable hit with Grunts to highlight some successful insubordination. At some point in almost all of these stories, somebody’s going to decide that damnit, there’s only one way out of this mess, and that asshole on the radio can’t see it. Aliens has a great moment when Ripley seizes command of the situation from the gormless Gorman and races to save the dying squad of Marines.

The Graven Name

The most important inner relationship for the Grunt is between his name and body — these are weakly tethered, and when they disconnect, odds are good you’re looking at a Grunt-friendly story arc.

Draft Card

Grunts are a product of mass societies with large standing armies. More primal, tribalistic violence won’t trigger Grunt resentment so strongly. At those small scales, all fighters are individuals, and most likely fighting for something they have a direct stake in. But when a young man turns eighteen in America he will receive, amidst the birthday cards, a draft card from the Selective Service agency, notifying him that he’s now eligible to die for Uncle Sam right alongside every other young man in his cohort.

If required to register with Selective Service, failure to register is a felony punishable by a fine of up to $250,000 and/or 5 years imprisonment.

-- The Selective Service System

The call of duty has no force without a name. Legal threats ensure that the young man will surrender his.

During the Vietnam War, the Supreme Court had to rule that burning one’s draft card was not free speech. When the highest court in the land makes it illegal to burn a piece of paper, you know that paper is a powerful symbol. Narratively, consider what sort of thing can start to pry a young man’s name from him, initiating the process of becoming a Grunt. Is there a ritual associated with it?

Halo

After a long slog through development hell, the Halo TV show premieres this month, and I’m betting it will work. Just going off the trailer, it’s tapping into all the psychology I’ve described. Look at these snippets of dialogue:

As an IP, Halo has always gone above and beyond for the Grunt. It gets all the props right: the armor design, the gunplay, the vehicles, and the gadgets. But just as critically, Halo gets the feelings right. It tells a very hopeful story, which can be rare for this persona, and is obviously appreciated.

You can hear the hope in the theme song. A carpetbagging artist would never come up with a Gregorian chant for a story about shooting plasma rifles and stomping xeno-Goombas (known as — what else? — Grunts). But the wordless spirituality of the song, drawing so much emotion from reverberations, makes perfect sense: imagine these sounds bouncing off the walls of the Tin Man’s empty suit of armor. That’s his wispy soul, reaching for something purer and more noble. There’s something angelic yearning to be expressed in the Grunt, as demonstrated by the surprisingly rich vein of YouTube videos in which a dude breaks out the Halo theme as soon as he sets foot in a room with sufficient reverb.

Halo’s marketing has always centered around the pathos of the steel-cased angel. Starry Night starts with two kids under the stars, pondering extraterrestial life. The boy says he hopes they’ll get to meet the aliens. Smash cut to the girl, who’s been replaced by a helmet. Her scream morphs into the sound of a falling mortar. A flicker of bright light, and the hero is in his armor, on the battlefield. He dons his helmet, grabs his rifle. Is he dead? Not yet — and then it’s back into the fight.

Remember Reach again tugs on the heart strings with some delicate piano work. This time we catch our heroic Grunt midway through a touchdown run, a football/bomb tucked under her arm. She falls halfway through — but another Grunt, this one with a jetpack, picks up the rock. He soars into the clouds, delivers it to the belly of the enemy warship, and blows it to hell as a lone woman hums. “Remember Reach” fades in.

It’s a great example of the kind of memorialization I discussed in the Tombs & Medal section.

Warhammer 40k

Warhammer 40k is Halo’s polar opposite. This space marine story is dark, vicious, and unredemptive... but equally appealing. Here’s an extremely sound recruitment pitch to the Grunt:

“They shall be my finest warriors, these men who give of themselves to me. Like clay I shall mould them, and in the furnace of war forge them. They will be of iron will and steely muscle. In great armour shall I clad them and with the mightiest guns will they be armed. They will be untouched by plague or disease, no sickness will blight them. They will have tactics, strategies and machines so that no foe can best them in battle. They are my bulwark against the Terror. They are the Defenders of Humanity. They are my Space Marines and they shall know no fear.” — The Immortal God-Emperor of Mankind, Warhammer 40k

Power, freedom from bodily weakness & fear, defending humanity, loss of agency — all familiar impulses to us by now.

Now if you want to sample a pure Grunt narcotic, check out The Astartes Project.

This is a staggering piece of work from a lone creator — not only does this dude know his way around a 3D modelling program, he knows his way around the Grunt’s id. His Space Marines are fast, huge, and fire boltguns that are heavy on the bass. They move with single-minded purpose, conquering a Gigeresque battlespace with no muss and no fuss — the space marines of Aliens are childish next to them. They exhibit zero distress, even as they are being mangled by telekinetic alien orbs. Near-death experiences are shrugged off. These shock troops are incapable of being shocked.

This clip is a great example of what Astartes does best:

Grunts are both extreme and extremely logical in the application of violence, which is unusual. In the animal kingdom, most violence is predation. That’s natural & individualized — a shark only takes orders from its appetite, and if its belly is full, you’re not a priority. Outside of predation, animal violence is largely a tool for establishing the in-group dominance hierarchy. Stags lock antlers, rams butt heads, silverback gorillas and alpha wolves fend off younger challengers, etc. This is more like prizefighting than warfare — the point isn’t to kill your rival, but to defeat and diminish him. Not so for Grunts. They do not commit violence to impress, or to win status — but to exterminate. That’s because Grunts fight so far outside the domestic sphere that their only spectators are their squadmates and the enemy itself. As such, a premium is placed on efficiency, and Grunt stories that can deliver no-holds-barred, hyperlogical violence will undoubtedly strike a chord.

I’ve used that word, exterminate, a few times now, and we should acknowledge that other, even darker personas will come sniffing around when such a spectacle is on the menu. Fascists, for instance, love exterminating their enemies. Games Workshop, the company that publishes Warhammer, recently had to send a memo clarifying that they are anti-fascist, after a player turned up to a tournament wearing a Nazi insignia. (Tough day in the PR department, I’m sure.)

They state, in bold type, that “Like so many aspects of Warhammer 40,000, the Imperium of Man is satirical.” And for all I know, it could be. But Astartes certainly isn’t. (Games Workshop hired that artist, Syama Pedersen, to work for them. 10M+ views on YouTube will do that.)

John Steakley, Armor

Originally published in 1984, this is a seminal Grunt novel. My memories of the text itself are foggy — it’s been 25 years since I read it. But let’s take a second to appreciate the marketing material for what it is: a pinpoint strike on the Grunt’s palate. First, the title is perfect. Now here’s the blurb:

The military sci-fi classic of courage on a dangerous alien planet

The planet is called Banshee. The air is unbreathable, the water is poisonous. It is home to the most implacable enemies that humanity, in all its interstellar expansion, has ever encountered.

Body armor has been devised for the commando forces that are to be dropped on Banshee—the culmination of ten thousand years of the armorers’ craft. A trooper in this armor is a one-man, atomic powered battle fortress. But he will have to fight a nearly endless horde of berserk, hard-shelled monsters—the fighting arm of a species which uses biological technology to design perfect, mindless war minions.

Felix is a scout in A-team Two. Highly competent, he is the sole survivor of mission after mission. Yet he is a man consumed by fear and hatred. And he is protected, not only by his custom-fitted body armor, but by an odd being which seems to live within him, a cold killing machine he calls “The Engine.”

This is Felix’s story—a story of the horror, the courage, and the aftermath of combat, and the story, too, of how strength of spirit can be the greatest armor of all.

And here’s the first page. Have written the previous 3,000 words before looking at this, let’s say I feel like this profile is onto something. All emphases are mine.

He drank alone.

Which was odd since he didn’t have trouble with people. He had always managed to make acquaintances without much effort. And, despite what had happened, he still liked people. Recently, he had even grown to miss them again. Yet here he was, drinking alone.

Maybe I’m just shy, he thought to himself and then laughed at such a feeble attempt at self-delusion. For he knew what it was.

From his place at the end of the long bar he examined the others in the crowded lounge. He recognized a handful from training. Training was where it had begun. Where he had felt that odd sensation descending upon him like mist, separating him from all those thousands of others around him in the mess hall. It was a dull kind of temporal shock at first, a reaction reverberating from somewhere deep within him. He had somehow felt ... No, he had somehow known that they all would die.

He shook his head, drained his glass. If he was in the mood for honesty he would have to admit that his chances were no better. No better at all...

It’s all there: disconnection, horror of mortality, lack of plot armor.

The Buddy Bot Genre

These are Tin Men stories first and foremost, but when it comes time to send that machine to the dump, Grunts are going to lean in. Because nobody does a heroic sacrifice better than the hollow Tin Man. Whenever there’s an unexpected shortfall of emotional intensity from a character, the audience naturally compensates — it’s what makes understatement so effective as a rhetorical device. Watching a numb character destroy themselves for the sake of others works unbelievably well, because it’s so tragically misguided. In a story, you can have a T-800, this cybernetic organism with a true deficit of emotion. But in the real world, all the "cyborgs" you see are people who have been cleaved from their own emotional experience, and that’s a sad situation. It is particularly profound for the Grunt, who may believe that only through a heroic sacrifice will he truly matter to others.

For this to really work, the Tin Man needs to acknowledge both the gravity of what they’re doing and the impossibility of them reclaiming their embodied emotions. “I know now why you cry. But it’s something I can never do.”

This is the rare moment when the Grunt’s act of insubordination is tragic, not triumphant. Edward Furlong, with the greatest cracked vocal performance in child actor history, begs the cyborg to stay. “I order you not to go!”

Vader in the Hallway

Darth Vader is an exemplary Tin Man/Grunt. Terrifying, part machine, tightly controlled by his commanding officer, but underneath that chitinous & insectile mask is a squishy and scarred man. I'm not a Star Wars guy, but I credit the original trilogy for unmasking Vader. To build an iconic villain and undo him so quickly takes guts.

But Rogue One recognizes that, deep down, nobody wants Vader to be humanized. Keep the helmet on, please, let’s preserve the fantasy of an implacable lieutenant that can crush an underling’s trachea with a thought. And not only does Rogue One do that, it lets Palpatine’s doberman off the leash in a spectacular and violent way, with the hallway slaughter.

This is why I think Rogue One enjoys such a good reputation among the recent Star Wars movies. It deploys this moment of fan service tactically, with real awareness of the audience’s emotions. The scene comes right on the heels of the protagonists’ noble, Grunty deaths, as they are annihilated in a flash of light. (No one makes it home, but they manage to get the Death Star plans out, which makes their sacrifice all worth it.) But instead of sending the audience out on that sorrowful beat, the filmmakers take us into a pitch black hallway. Cue the respirator. Cue the red lightsaber. The movie uses a vicious display of force from the villain — a pure Grunt power fantasy no different from Astartes — as a way of equalizing the helpless vulnerability that the death of the protagonists evoked. That way, everyone walks out of the theater leveled out.