I’ll take Athens. Continue reading
Just about the most disturbing thing that I have ever heard was broadcast last week on the radio show This American Life, which you can listen to here. A soldier in his early thirties disclosed that, after three tours in Afghanistan, he really regretted not having killed any of the “bad guys” there. He insisted that everyone in the Army knows who has a kill and who doesn’t. He also reported that the training that he received was in large part designed to overcome the innate psychological barrier against taking human life and to turn killing into a goal. He rejected this intellectually, but he still felt a primal and almost irresistible urge of some kind to find out what it was like to kill someone. The urge remained even after he had completed his term of service and returned to civilian life.
What a contrast to my own military experience from October 1970 through April 1972. In those days half of the enlisted men in the Army had been drafted, and a good number of those were college graduates. Most of the rest of the guys had either joined up to escape from some problem in civilian life or had been bamboozled by a recruiting sergeant into thinking that they could get something out of the Army. At the time the country was still mired in Vietnam, but no one whom I knew thought of the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese as “the bad guys.” The truly bad guys to us were the government officials who forced us to give up the best years of our lives to this inane institution and the lifers who made the whole thing possible. There certainly were a few fellows who enlisted out of a sense of duty, but in most cases it was a duty that had been inherited from parents and/or siblings who had also been in the military.
Another gigantic difference is the way in which the rest of the country treats the military today. I remember in 2003 as we began our ill-fated invasion of Iraq that nearly every football game on television included a tribute of some kind to the American military personnel. That was almost eleven years ago, and the attitude of the media has hardly changed one iota. On Friday I heard on the radio that veterans can now obtain a special driver’s license or ID card with a flag on it to indicate that they have served in the military. The Secretary of the State went on the air to encourage merchants to offer discounts to anyone who had one because “they have done such a great job.”
I just do not get it. By what conceivable standard has the military done a great job? It is a positive development that soldiers no longer roll grenades into the tents of the commanding officers, or at least the instances of “fragging” are now lumped in with other incidents of “friendly fire.” On the other hand, unless you are a Shiite partisan, Iraq seems no better than it was under Sadaam. Moreover, Al Qaeda is reportedly stronger than ever, and Afghanistan is, well, Afghanistan. The expenditure of hundreds of billions of dollars, thousands of American lives, hundreds of thousands of lives of non-Americans, and untold numbers of physical and emotional casualties has produced absolutely no good at all as far as I can tell. And don’t tell me that the problems remain because we did not have the political will to finish the job. If it takes longer than a decade to accomplish something, you cannot expect the public to keep writing blank checks. Both the Nazis and the Japanese were defeated in far less time. Simultaneously!
It defies credulity how much the American military itself and the citizenry’s attitude toward it has changed in the four decades since I was involved in it. An overriding concern of every male in my generation was the specter of the draft. Some people, including most of the major politicians of the last two decades, took extreme steps to avoid being drafted. Others, including myself, did not try to avoid the draft, but only because we thought that we would probably figure out a way to avoid facing combat.
The enlisted men in the Army were treated like dirt. The starting pay was $125 per month. For that the soldiers were continually subjected to humiliation and mindless labor. I hated every single minute that I was in the Army even though I had one of the cushiest assignments imaginable. The effect on the Army was pernicious. Both the people who did the fighting and the people who supposedly supported them were angry and resentful. Just about the only thing that Donald Rumsfeld and I agree on is his assessment that the American military of the era of the draft was not an effective fighting force.
We have a totally different military today. An astounding 168,000 members of the armed forces are married to other members of the military! In my illustrious military career I met very few people who were married at all. Men who were married with children were exempt from military service, and married people almost never enlisted.* I never encountered a single person who had a spouse in the military.
Everyone in the military is now paid good wages, easily enough to support a family. The troops are provided with a lot more support than we had. I wonder if the drill sergeants even tell recruits about the infamous Jody these days.
The National Guard and the Reserve were a joke in the old days. They helped in emergencies like hurricanes, but mostly they were known as a way for the rich, influential, and the merely lucky to pretend to be in the military. There was never even a suggestion that they might be sent to help out in the war. Now they are deployed in combat almost as often as the regular GI’s.
The Vietnamese War was much more deadly than the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Over 50,000 American troops perished in Vietnam, more than ten times the number killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nevertheless, the troops today who kill bad guys using drones and bombs are considered heroes, whereas the poor slobs who got caught in ambushes in the rice paddies were considered … hardly at all.
One thing that the current engagements have in common with the War in Vietname is that they were both based on The Big Lie. In the seventies the lie was known as the Domino Theory, which held that losing in Vietnam would somehow impel other countries to embrace Communism. For many years Americans seemed to buy into this theory, but by the time that I was in the Army hardly anyone of my generation was willing to put his life on the line to hold the line before Communism reached Thailand or Burma.
The lie behind the War on Terror claimed that the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan were somehow preventing terrorists from staging future attacks on the United States. The evidence against it is at least as strong as the evidence against the Domino Theory, but only now, more than a dozen years after it was promulgated, are the people who have served in the military beginning to question whether the invasions were worth the cost. For years it was considered unpatriotic even to mention the cost.
And what of blood lust? I knew a few guys in the Army who were “gung-ho.” They were the subject of widespread ridicule. The sergeants did not try to get us to hate the Viet Cong. One sergeant even told us never to call him Charlie. He said that he deserved the respectful appellation Mr. Charles. What the dedicated sergeants tried to impart on us was how worthless we were and how hopeless their job of trying to train us was. Half of the sergeants, however, were as lackadaisical as we were. They were just counting their own days.
I certainly had no desire to kill anyone. In fact, I mentioned once or twice in Basic Training that I would in no circumstances do it. At the end of our eight weeks of training period one guy came up to me and said that he did not believe me when I said it, but after eight weeks of being with me he changed his mind.
I never changed mine.
* In Basic Training I did meet one very poor guy from Mississippi who sent every paycheck back home to his wife.
