Call to arms

Here's my soap box for the day. I think we need to bring back the draft. The most recent incident involving our soldiers abroad, i.e., the shooting of 16 innocent Afghan civilians, most of them women and children, "allegedly" by Staff Sergeant Robert Bales, points up one of the big drawbacks of our continuing to rely on a volunteer army. That army gets spread too thin. Bales had had three combat tours in Iraq -- being wounded twice -- before being sent to Afghanistan. He didn't want to go, had thought he wouldn't have to go, but go he did...and, apparently, snapped.

A number of possible contributing factors to this mad act have been mentioned by the press: the severe wounding of a friend of Bales' a few days before, the fact that Bales resented having been passed over for a promotion, an apparent problem dealing with anger, as indicated by his having had to take an anger management course for an assault case that was later dropped, when he was a civilian, possible marital tensions. While any or all of those may have contributed to Bales' going over the edge, I suspect that a major contributor was that he was simply worn out with what must have come to seem like pointless war.

Of course, other soldiers also put in multiple tours, have problems in their marriages, lose friends in combat, and do not snap and go murder a bunch of women and children while they sleep. But many of those soldiers do come back with various mental problems, which adversely affect their attempts to adjust to life after combat duty.

I don't see anything wrong with a country requiring a period of public service duty of all of its able-bodied citizens, female as well as male. I'm not a proponent of females doing combat duty, but there are many other ways they can (and do) serve. And I think being in the military for a while would do most young people a heckuva lot of good. Get them out of the damn malls, and off their i-phones; teach them discipline, responsibility, how to defend themselves and others, have them meeting and having to work with/get along with all kinds of people.

I do realize that there are some people who are wholly unsuited to military life. I would have been one of them -- I'm sure if I had been drafted I would have spent an inordinate amount of time in the brig, for insubordination, since I would have balked at any order I considered stupid or unreasonable. Perhaps young people should have a choice: working for two years in something like the state version of the old CCC, that exists in many states (see Note of Aug. 3, 2008), or spending those two years in the military. At any rate, serving their country. Then we really would "all be in this together."

A surfeit of heroes

There was drastic flooding in the Lake District of England recently -- global warming strikes again -- and I saw Prime Minister Gordon Brown, on BBC World News, expressing condolences to the family of a local constable who was swept to his death when a bridge he was on broke under the force of the water. The policeman had evidently detected that the bridge was not in good shape, and had been directing motorists away from using it. Gordon Brown stated that Pc Barker was a hero, performing heroically when he died. I think what PC Barker was was a traffic policeman doing his duty, who died tragically in the line of duty. I really question whether he was a "hero."

Like the word awesome, I think the word hero is vastly overused these days. Every member of the military who goes off to Iraq or Afghanistan is automatically a hero. I don't buy that. What they are are soldiers (or marines, or airmen or whatever), doing the job they were hired to do. That job is an extremely difficult, dangerous one, but it is one they signed on for (if we still had the draft -- which I'm inclined to think we should bring back -- that wouldn't, of course, be the case). I don't think doing a difficult, dangerous job that you agreed to do automatically qualifies you as a hero.

While the little paperback dictionary that sits beside my desk claims that one definition of hero is 'a man who performs brave deeds,' I'm inclined to think that the brave deeds he (or she) performs should be under particularly dire circumstances, that true heroism involves performing above and beyond the normal call of duty. The job soldiers in hot spots like Iraq and Afghanistan have calls for them to be brave virtually every single day. But that's the nature of soldiering; that's what it's all about. That and following orders, which occasionally (possibly even frequently) serves as an effective substitute for bravery. The men and women who agree to do this, possibly to the death, and then go out to these god-forsaken places where they're encumbered with hot uniforms and all this heavy equipment in 106 degree heat and do it...they should certainly be honored for their efforts, and dedication to duty, we as a nation should certainly express our gratitude whenever we can, and our tax dollars should certainly be used to insure that they receive any medical care they might need as a result of their efforts, and dedication to duty.

But we shouldn't be calling them all heroes. If everyone is a hero then no one is; the word loses meaning. And my guess is, most soldiers feel that way, too.