The Military

I saw a license plate cover on the way home today that said:

U.S. Marine Corps

Everything destroyed in 30 minites or next one is free.

I thought it was funny.

I've wavered a lot over the years in my feelings toward the military. I grew up during the 1960's when we were engaged in an unpopular war in Vietnam. Certainly opinions varied regarding the military even then, but the feeling that I picked up on the most was that anyone who joined the military was to stupid to think for himself, he'd been told that being a soldier was good when he was young, and he never questioned it as he got older.

In the 1980's, that attitude began to change. People started going out of their way to express respect and gratitude to anyone who was in the military, but I always felt that they were just being politically correct, that they didn't really respect the military, but that somehow respecting the military was part of the "new wisdom", and that they didn't want to appear stupid by contradicting that. I was probably wrong about that, but that's how I felt. Of course, I never contradicted anyone who said this because I didn't want to appear stupid, but I never really changed the way I felt about the military.

In the early 90's I started dating a women who would later become my wife, and who's family was very pro-military. Her father had joined the Navy at about the age of 14 at the beginning of WWII, and all of her brothers, and most of her sisters, had either joined or been involved with the military at one point or another. Of course, my wife told all of them about my feelings for the military, and there were a couple of discussions about it when I first met them, not bad discussions, but discussions nonetheless. This was about the time of the first Gulf War, and one of my wife's brothers was over there fighting.

Up until this time, I really hadn't had to examine my feelings about the military, but now I had to. Yes, I did believe the military was necessary, I thought there might come a day when we didn't need one, but right now we certainly did. Yes, if the U.S. was attacked, I would certainly go to war to defend her, even if I thought the enemy was justified in attacking us. I might turn around the next day and picket against her for whatever it was that caused them to attack us, but while we were being attacked, I would always defend. However, I would never allow myself to be used as a tool to enforce the greedy, power hunger goals of a corrupt administration. I would never give up my right to choose my own course of action based on my own sense of right and wrong.

That's the problem that I have with the military. Even after we were attacked on 9/11, and after we went to war in Afghanistan (a war which I whole heartedly supported, though I do have some issues about how it was carried out), I still could not praise individual military people. I have been involved with the Cub Scouts for almost four years now, and there are a lot of military families in our pack, yet I have never once thanked them for the sacrifices they made or the job that they did. The problem that I have with military people is that they have given up the right to judge right from wrong. They don't have the right to decide when they'll fight or what they'll fight for. It has to be this way because obviously that would lead to a very undependable army, but to give up that right is so obviously wrong to me that I just can't reconcile that with the idea that a soldier is good. I can never look at a soldier and thank him because there will always be in the back of my mind some disgust for the person for having done something so unclean.

Despite that, I am thankful that they don't feel the same way I do, because if they did, we'd all be in big trouble.