OPINION:
It was an ugly reality far removed from the minds of glitterati gathered for the White House Correspondents annual bash. But on that very same weekend, wounded veterans were dissed at a retreat in Florida by fraternity bullies from two universities. The Zeta Beta Tau brothers spat at the wounded veterans , even urinating on the American flag. Collegiate authorities made the usual apologies for bad behavior but steered clear of the underlying problem: The American military is increasingly segregated from the society it defends.
On campus, the cherished legacy of draft-dodging, left-leaning professors has been compounded by new orthodoxies. Military service is at best an aberration while military history is the only species whose extinction we applaud. So if you dare to wear a uniform on campus, then you are probably auditioning for the theater club’s re-make of “A Few Good Men.”
If you can’t handle that truth, then consider another outrage closer to home. A student group at the University of Maryland has “indefinitely postponed” the on-campus showing of American Sniper. That film, the most popular war movie of all time, relentlessly depicts a war avoided by most Americans. Some of them were presumably among those 300 University of Maryland students who signed a petition, “American Sniper only perpetuates the spread of Islamophobia and is offensive to many Muslims around the world…”
When the university predictably caved, it provoked a still-growing backlash. “Shame on the University of Maryland for listening to those voices!” cried Reverend Franklin Graham. He even suggested that those students might find Moslem countries more to their liking. Well, maybe so, Reverend, although the Moslem students at Maryland and elsewhere fully share the new American orthodoxy that military service is mostly what other people do.
So how about that larger national sin, the one fully embraced by both Democrats and Republicans, the bi-partisan, bi-cameral disgrace that fights the nation’s wars using Other People’s Kids? I coined that term a decade ago to underline a harsh reality: Fighting protracted wars with a limited, all-volunteer force of OPK inevitably means sending heroes like Navy Seal Chris Kyle back to the conflict four and five times. Today, less than half of one percent of Americans ever volunteer to serve in uniform: Ninety-nine percent of us are only too happy to send someone else’s sons or daughters to do the fighting and the dying.
The first-order effects are especially pernicious because since Vietnam we have known that PTSD increases in direct proportion to the soldier’s combat exposure. Regardless of variations like soldier and veteran suicide, PTSD is much like radiation, where increased exposure also involves a rising curve of risk. We knew that going into the protracted Wars of 9/11 while deluding ourselves that an all-volunteer, hi-tech and highly professional force could defeat religiously-based insurgencies. But that highly professional force is also hugely expensive so, even amidst the new threats from ISIS, President Obama is reducing the US Army to its lowest levels since 1940.
However, the new orthodoxy of non-service is having even greater second-order effects on the American polity. The churlishness of Zeta Beta Tau and similar “brotherhoods” is merely symptomatic of the growing national disease in which service to self trumps every other consideration. Band of Brothers: Well what’s that? When military service became a career choice rather than the shared obligation of citizenship, we effectively insured that our future leaders across American society would know the tragic history of unpreparedness only as footnotes from their history electives – not from personal experience.
The upwardly mobile ranks of Capitol Hill, White House and media staffers now share a rich legacy of military illiteracy: They don’t know very much and most of what they do know is often wrong. Even as we mobilize the National Guard - for riots from Baltimore to Ferguson or to reinforce the Texas border – can we even consider the unthinkable?
Maybe we don’t need a return to the draft but we surely need to demand some form of national service, even volunteering for the National Guard. As you watch those rioters, can you envision the need for a way-point, teaching practical, life-lessons that our schools no longer have time for? Anything which might demand that our young acquire skin-in-the-game before leaping unscathed from carefree adolescence to a lifetime of white privilege spent mostly in service to self?
If you can, then let me offer an old soldier’s rueful wisdom, a bit of doggerel dating back to the Napoleonic Wars:
In time of war and not before
God and the soldier all men adore;
But when the war’s over and all things righted
God is forgotten and the soldier slighted.
Ken Allard, a retired Army colonel, is a military analyst and author on national-security issues.
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