Too few are carrying the burden of war
By Philip Gold* /
Guest Columnist
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Sunday, April 30, 2006
seattlepi.nwsource.com
Some issues don't go away, no matter how intently we ignore them. They don't go away because we know, in a dim, dark 3 a.m. kind of honesty, that our refusal to consider them can't go on forever.
Since conscription ended in 1973, we've been told that our volunteer military, no matter how competent and admirable, would be "unrepresentative." We've also been told that this military, its officer corps especially, would become "estranged" from the civilization it exists to protect. We've also told ourselves that it didn't really matter whether the military became a servant class, dutifully available for whatever missions might be sent its way, or a festering flotsam of fascism or (to some, even worse) fundamentalism. It didn't matter because our wars would be quick and victorious, our peacekeeping and humanitarian operations short and altruistic and pure.
It matters now. Who serves in our wars -- and who does not -- are issues that the American people cannot no longer refuse to face. Fortunately, a wave of new books, brought out by commercial publishers and written by concerned citizens for general audiences, is upon us.
The first two, "Wounded: Vietnam to Iraq," by Dr. Ron Glasser (Braziller), and "AWOL: The Unexcused Absence of America's Upper Classes from Military Service" (HarperCollins), by Kathy Roth-Douquet and Frank Schaeffer, are out now. More will follow.
(Full disclosure time. I've known Ron Glasser for several years. When I learned about "AWOL" a year ago, I tracked down Kathy Roth-Douquet and have e-mailed and chatted with her since.)
These books matter. Neither is academic or policy-wonky. Both are written by people with significant experience and personal involvement in their subjects. Both are intended to do something ever more rare in this country: speak to Americans in words of passion but passion informed by reason. In the end, both books are statements of belief in the essential honesty and goodness of the American people.
In 1968-69, Glasser was an Army doctor stationed in Japan. Overwhelmed by Vietnam medevacs, his hospital's commanding officer assigned him to help out in surgery. Glasser protested that he was a pediatrician. His colonel, a tough old Sherman Potter type, replied, "We'll let you treat the little wounds."
Glasser grew up fast. He also started writing. When he finished his Army tour, he tried to sell a book. No publisher would have it. Harper & Row said yes, then sat on it for six months, then called him to New York to tell him that it was brilliant but "the salespeople" didn't want it. Through a fortuitous sequence of events, George Braziller, head of a fine-arts publishing house, learned about the rejection. He read the manuscript that night and offered Glasser a contract the next morning.
Thirty-five years later, "365 Days" is still in print.
When the Iraq war started to sour, Glasser, now a prominent Minneapolis pediatric nephrologist, noticed that new kinds of wounded were coming back. Thanks to improved body armor and lack of enemy artillery and mortars, there were fewer traditional gunshot and fragmentation wounds. But because of the wide use of improvised explosive devices such as suicide bombs, there were far more serious wounds to limbs and closed head injuries. Gone was the "Million Dollar Wound" that got you honorably home but still reasonably intact. Now the military was doing amputations at a rate unknown since the Civil War and dealing with head injuries that could only be described as "polytrauma."
Glasser wrote about it in a July 2005 Harper's Magazine article. Braziller, now 90 and still running his shop, read it, then told him to crank out another book. Fast. Glasser wrote it in six months while maintaining his full-time medical practice.
"Wounded" tells it to the American people like it is and warns that these new wounded are going to require expensive lifetime care from a Department of Veterans Affairs that will be struggling with Vietnam vets for the next three decades.
Toward the end, "Wounded" shifts from medicine to note who's not coming home shattered in body and spirit: America's more privileged sons and daughters. The book does not demand a new draft or national service. It simply states that the present situation, where a small minority of volunteers carries the entire burden, is neither just nor, in the long run, sustainable.
"AWOL" makes the same point, in far greater detail. Kathy Roth-Douquet is a Bryn Mawr graduate with a Princeton master's degree and a law degree. A former Clinton White House staffer, she's now married to a Marine with two Iraq deployments, so far. Frank Schaeffer is a successful novelist who thought little about the military until his son put off college to join the Marines. Three well-received books ensued: "Faith of Our Sons," his own memoir; "Keeping Faith," co-written with his son; and an anthology of letters, "Voices From the Front."
Schaeffer and Roth-Douquet met at one of his book signings while her husband was in Iraq. A long-distance collaboration ensued. Schaeffer brought his literary stature and contacts. Roth-Douquet found time away from her duties as a squadron commander's wife, mother of two young children and part-time lawyer to pursue her old love of writing.
"AWOL" is personal, tales of two upscale overachievers who discover the humanity, the dignity and the value of the military world. It also explains the basics of that world. The primary audience is, as Roth-Douquet describes it, people who are both "inordinately influential and inordinately ignorant" of the military. It is a book for everyone who believes that the military is "not our kind, dear." It explains. It challenges. It cajoles. Its final message:
Sharing the military burden is politically desirable because the people will not forever sacrifice themselves on behalf of elites who don't. Sharing the military burden is politically wise because it makes this country less apt to launch off into ill-conceived adventures. Sharing the military burden is morally desirable because it produces better leaders and better citizens, or at least people a bit less given to conflating their interests and preferences with the entirety of the universe. Sharing the military burden is morally wise because ...
Why?
And therein lies the issue America dares not face. Whatever your opinion of the Iraq venture (which I've opposed since 2002), we're certainly in for decades of nasty happenings, at home and abroad. Add to this another reality now upon us, climate change and its potentially catastrophic long-term effects, and it's clear that national security now means something far more encompassing than it did during the Cold War, or even World War II. From Osama to Katrina, we're vulnerable as never before. For centuries, one of the blessings of being American was that we could make the same fatal mistakes, over and over. That's gone. It is time for the citizenry to re-engage in the common defense.
But what exactly, nowadays, is the common defense?
"AWOL" reaffirms military service as we now understand it: full-time duty in the active forces or part-time duty in the National Guard and the service reserves. Service, in other words, as the federal government has structured it, in no small measure for its own convenience. But there is another way of understanding military service. As the Founding Fathers did.
To the Founders, as to much of the world today, defense was a continuum, with individual and local self-defense at one end, major crises in the middle and federal foreign war at the other end. That's why the Founders cherished the militia ideal; it could function across the entire spectrum. But the Founders never intended that citizen obligation provide the federal government with a blank check on the bodies of the people.
The direct federal draft constitutes such a blank check, and is abhorrent. Wisely, since 9/11, the administration has refused to consider it. But they're making an even worse mistake. Since 9/11, the active forces have grown by only 50,000 people. Today, at the very moment when they should be expanding for the post-Iraq/post-Katrina world, they're actually shrinking. There are many reasons why, but one seems as clear as it has remained unuttered and unutterable:
The Pentagon has given up on the American people as a source of adequate numbers of qualified men and women. They're prepared to work the present force to exhaustion and death, while spending trillions on questionable weapons. They're inviting future disaster and, deep down, they know it.
And that is why it is now the moral responsibility of the people to create a new debate on citizen service. Not a rehash of old wars and old arguments, but a reasoned consideration of how to make the Founding Fathers' vision effective in the 21st century. Both "Wounded" and "AWOL" offer some ideas, but neither seeks to provide answers. Rather, these are "gateway" books. You read them to realize how urgent this issue really is. You pass through them on your way to addressing the hard choices ahead.
And as you do, you thank the authors for bringing you to it with intelligence, clarity and respect.
*Philip Gold's next book, "The Coming Draft? America's Military Meltdown and the Future of Citizen Service," will be published by Random House/Presidio in September. He may be reached at aretean@netscape.net. |
