Since the dawn of psychoanalysis, soldiers returning from the warfront have been diagnosed with various ailments that are all essentially the same. Rot-footed men from the trenches of France had shell shock, your grandpa who was based in Okinawa had exhaustion, and Vietnam and Iraq/Afghanistan vets have Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. These conditions are diagnosed because war is deeply disturbing; no matter how noble the cause, most human beings are not able to fully reconcile their being the cause of the death of another human being with their personal sense of right and wrong. Besides, the only thing that breaks up the killing during war is long stretches of tedium, spent worrying about being killed or about contracting a horrible exotic disease. During the American Revolution, however, a time when guns were so inaccurate that soldiers invented kinds with bayonets tied to the top because it was just as easy to stab someone to a bloody mess as it was to shoot them, a time when lice was considered as serious a combatant in the field as any Redcoat, a time when fathers brought along their ten-year-old sons to the battle fields, our first American heroes did not suffer from exhaustion or PTSD. Instead, they had booze.
According to some 18th-century British surgeon, the American soldiers responsible for the fireworks and the barbecues going on tonight each drank, on average, a bottle of rum every day during the war. In the soldiers’ journals, most entries mention the consumption of liquor, beer, or some combination of the two. It also seems like the more temperate of the soldiers, the ones who wrote letters to their wives and washed their own clothes with something other than Georgian-era hopskip, were regarded by the other men as the nerds who snuck into their six-year frat party. So while the Brits were sipping their taxless* tea and talking about Pah-liament, us American boys were guzzling down the hooch and (eventually) kicking ass. No one in Britain anticipated that a bunch of drunk hicks could possibly overthrow the oppressors of like, the entire world.
After the war, once everybody was all good and American, the soldiers who survived just toddled back to their tobacco farms in a drunken stupor. Honor our heroes today by telling the cops to lighten up and let you do that beer bong at the fireworks show. It’s the way they would have wanted it.
*Actually, the British were taxed for their tea, too.
1776, by David McCullough
