“Saigon … shit. I’m still only in Saigon,” says a scruffy, broken Capt. Benjamin Willard, peering out through slatted window blinds while on the violent bender that opens Apocalypse Now. “Every time I think I’m going to wake up back in the jungle.” But when we see the Special Forces assassin travel deep into that jungle, he is clean-shaven. Even on a river boat, headed for the heart of the American military’s darkness, he takes the time to shave smartly and neatly. John Rambo, too, keeps his own facial hair to a minimum on his bloody forays into redemption and revenge. When confronted with the prospect of a “dry shave” by sadistic policemen in First Blood, he beats them up and escapes into the hills—where he continues to shave himself, presumably with a gigantic bowie knife.

You could consume more than half a century of American popular culture, from World War II to Korea to Vietnam to September 11, without encountering many bearded manly heroes; facial hair was generally reserved for wild enemies foreign and domestic, swarthy terrorists and libertine hippies. Even American westerns posited a surprising number of neatly trimmed frontier protagonists, reserving scruff for their foes. Italian-produced spaghetti westerns, which introduced Clint Eastwood’s perpetually unshaven man with no name, seem the exception that proves the rule, deploying beards as to emphasize that their protagonists are deeply flawed antiheroes, operating outside mainstream norms.



In the twenty-first century, however, America’s man of the hour is a follicle farm. Hipsters affect the lumberjack’s hirsute machismo. Genteel movie stars like George Clooney and Paul Rudd tantalize paparazzi with full, bushy beards. Police departments in Michigan and Texas have relaxed their officers’ notoriously strict grooming standards to permit beards and goatees. Faux-folksy politicians like Texas Senator Ted Cruz and former House speaker Paul Ryan attempt to transform their brands with a macho hairy mug—just as John Kerry and Al Gore did a few years earlier, with limited success. Our Hollywood war heroes, armed men who go bump in the night, grow facial hair so voluminous that perhaps their beards are what do the heavy bumping. Even that most American of fictional G.I.s, the idealistic Steve Rogers, returns from a depressive self-exile in Avengers: Infinity War with a sexy beard that says “Captain America has seen some shit.”

We worship the post-9/11 U.S. military operator. We are a nation drunk on its own “tacticool” culture.

The Guardian in 2013 hypothesized that human society had reached “peak beard”; though it may have appeared so, the ensuing six years have not dampened enthusiasm for facial hair. The razor industry nervously recorded a 5 percent decline in sales last year as men’s shaving frequency has continued to decline; producers of shaving accouterments have tried to cut prices and diversify into new grooming products, having apparently accepted that our beards are here to stay.

But why is ours such a hairy century? What began this trend, and what fuels it? There is an easy answer, though it leads to harder questions: We can thank the Global War on Terror—or the Long War, the Bellum Americanum, whatever you choose to call it—and the reluctance of military leaders to impose discipline on the most professional of the units that participated in GWOT, special operations forces. Generals preferred to allow those units to operate based on “big boy rules”—a devolution of authority empowering them to operate like Apocalypse Now’s mad Col. Kurtz, “without any decent restraint, totally beyond the pale of any acceptable human conduct.” The evidence of this is the proliferation of beards in the military, which now extends to civilian society. We worship the post-9/11 military operator. We are a nation drunk on “tacticool” culture.