©2005 UrbisMedia
Back in 1968, when I and my family flew out to San Diego to begin my job as an assistant professor at SDSU, we were accompanied by a contingent of young Marine Corps recruits, mostly from the southeast. Most of them had never been on a plane before, or even out of their home counties. They were excited, and maybe also anxious. They drank a lot on the flight, which increased their bravado and highlighted their naiveté. They were going to be Marines and kick “Charlie’s” butt over in Nam.
The last I saw of them was when we were collecting our baggage. A drill sergeant had them lined up against the wall and was already hammering them, right in front of crowds of civilians, about being wimps and pussies, and other epithets designed to anneal them into the few and the proud and the whatever. They looked embarrassed and scared. They were going to the Marine Corps Recruit Depot, and I was going across town to a campus that was as politicized over that war as we are over this one. If I needed any indication of that I got nit from the television in the motel room where we spent our first night in California. The Democratic National Convention in Chicago was on and police batons were cracking heads in the streets.
I recall that flight with the young recruits every time I see one of the slick PR campaigns that the Armed Forces runs in television, or in magazines. One has a computer-generated knight in glimmering armor slaying dragons who morphs into a Marine in that spiffy uniform. Another has a muscular rock-climber alone on a sheer cliff, confidently pulling himself to victory at the summit. He’s an “Army of One.” (An “Army of One”?! What PR idiot conjured that one?) That’s right; you’re so tough you can win a battle alone. Then the Navy has silhouetted fighters lifting off a carrier deck into a splendid sunset as though the pilots are off on some sort of irenic adventure “off to see the world.”
There are a “few good men” and a few of them are in the Marine Corps, as there are in the other branches of military service. They are men and women who are ready to put their lives on the line to protect their country, and most of them deserve our support and respect. But they are also sworn to go and do as their Command-in-Chief bids them to do, and to regard that fight as a good, just, and appropriate one. That is the dilemma that American’s military has faced in every conflict since WWII. We were not threatened by North Korea (although we may yet have that honor); not by the North Vietnamese, and not by the Iraqis. These were fights our politicians picked and, bound by duty – and sometimes inspired by their own tunes of glory – our military have gone , fought and died in them
These recruiting ads would be laughable were it not for the fact that they will entice the desperate and the gullible to enlist. They are designed mostly for the type of young men, still boys really, who were on that plane in 1968. Many of them then, and too many still, have little promise for much else in life, from hard life family farms and decaying small towns, or from inner cities. That uniform, that paycheck, that student aid, can be hard to resist. But they also cannot resist, that is to abjure, the sworn duty to go into battles their commanders, comfortably “in the rear,” send them to.
Each American soldier in Iraq looks likes “an army of one,” decked out like a terminator with body armor, heavy boots, night vision goggles, and high-tech weapons, computers and communications . The contrast with an enemy in a gallabiya and flip-flops, with a Kalishnikovc could not be more striking. The army of one has tanks, Bradleys and HumVees, the “insurgents” have home-made IEDs and left over RPGs. The other difference is that the “insurgents” and angry Iraqis know what they are fighting for; the Americans have to be deceived into they are fighting for.
Conventional news media showed almost nothing of the anti-war protests on the second anniversary of the Iraq War, almost nothing of the growing numbers of veterans who have come out against it, some losing their pay and benefits for speaking their minds. These dissenters know their Commander-in-Chief has lied to them and to the country. They also know that there is no such thing as an Army of One; but they know that caskets are made for Casualties of One, by One, by One . . .
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©2005, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 4.2.2005)
GRASS , Carl Sandburg
Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work – I am the grass; I cover all.
And pile them high at Gettysberg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:
What place is this? Where are we now?
I am the grass.
Let me work.