Today is Veterans Day. I am a veteran, but the holiday means little to me. I hated every minute that I was in the army, and I was the happiest man in the world when my military career terminated on April 5, 1972. In those days veterans were widely considered the class of men with insufficient brains or gumption to avoid the draft. The first time that I ever heard anyone say “thank you for your service” was on our last tour of Italy in 2011.

The eighteen months that I spent in the army was the strangest period of my life. It seems, in retrospect, as if it were a totally different life altogether. I lived in conditions that were essentially quite similar to those of college. However, I was forced to do a job that I hated and to wear a uniform with polished boots and brass. The worst part for me – apart from the shots they administered to us every Wednesday in basic training – were the inspections, or at least the threat of inspections. I don’t mind being judged on performance, but I strongly object to being judged on appearances.

The guys that I knew in the army by and large fell into two categories. Half of them were like me, recent college graduates who had been drafted. The other half were people who, for one reason or another, had no real alternative. I met only one or two enlisted men who had the slightest interest in a military career. In fact, nearly everyone knew exactly how many days that remained before his glorious ETS (end of term of service) date.

Only a couple of the guys were married. There must have been at least a few women in the military, but I cannot remember meeting a single female member of the armed forces. The first half of the movie Stripes reminded me of my own experience in the army, but the part about the two hot female MP’s was a complete fantasy. In those days the females in the army were totally segregated, and they were called WAC’s. There was an old saying that the only difference between WAC’s and pigs was that pigs did not have pimples.

How different things are today! A few years ago my dad and I were sitting in the Burger King at the Kansas City airport. A few tables away were seated a mother, father, two kids, and a pair of grandparents. Both the father and mother were in uniform. Evidently they were both about to be deployed, and the children were to be left with the grandparents.

As bad as conscription was, at least it seldom broke up families. I could imagine the grandparents telling the kids that their parents needed to defend our country against the bad people who had attacked America. At the time most of the people being deployed were headed for Iraq, which, of course, had absolutely nothing to do with any of the men who hijacked the planes in 2001. So, it occurred to me that all over the country adults must be using the Bush administration’s ignominious lies to justify to the youngsters the extended absence of their parents. I had no notion of why the parents had enlisted, but if it was to protect Americans from terrorism, they had been bamboozled. This realization really made me sad.

I hated the draft, but it made a better person of me. I had lived only in suburbia and academia. In the army I got to meet a lot of black people, Puerto Ricans, and Mexicans, and I learned how to interact with them. One of them was a golden gloves boxer who took out a guy twice his size with one right cross. I met hillbillies and Cajuns, too, and their cultural background was even more different from mine. I met a guy from Mississippi who sent every penny from his extremely meager paycheck back to his wife and kid. I was close friends with another fellow who confided to me that he joined the army to get away from the temptations of heroin. On the other hand, I knew another guy who volunteered to return to Vietnam because he wanted to make drug connections there. Most of my friends were very intelligent people with college degrees who faced the grim and degrading prospect of two years of grunt work under the supervision of people who in any other line of work would have been their subordinates.

I don’t think that people in today’s military have that kind of broadening of consciousness. I suspect that nearly everyone who enlists today is “gung ho” and buys into what the military brass is selling. I seriously doubt that very many people with the background that I shared with the draft dodgers like Clinton, Bush, Cheney, Lieberman, and Romney would even consider entering a recruiting office.

What puzzles me now is the apparent change in the public attitude toward the military. Whenever I see a “Support the Troops” sticker or see a militaristic tribute on ESPN, I wonder what message is actually being transmitted. Do these people mean that we should support the militarization of the United States? If so, what is the reasoning? If not, what the heck is the message?

It seems clear to me that occasionally the military is critical, and occasionally it might be useful. On the other hand, we should definitely not trust the military to determine for the citizenry when those occasions have occurred. On Veterans Day I pay tribute to those brave men who saved the day in World War II and the unlucky people who were coerced or tricked into serving in the many subsequent adventures undertaken by politicians and generals.