American G.I.: Fighting with honor but dying for what?
The crawl on CNN told me this morning that just over 1600 American soliders have perished fighting in Iraq. CBS' 60 Minutes last Wednesday informed me that untold tens of thousands return home with PTSD and unable or unwilling to seek mental health. Military recruiters are failing to reach monthly quotas as young adults decide against enlisting. America's ability to fight two fronts is reduced to just an academic exercise among West Point cadets and civilian armchair generals.
In a recent Op-Ed piece in the New York Daily News, one former policy writer suggested that to improve military enlistment, we should remind parents and young adults the importance of serving one's country as an honorable, higher calling.
I think our leaders would have better results if they hadn't committed the following acts of betrayal to our troops:
1. Overestimating Iraq's WMD capability (um, none?) and connection to terrorism (um, none?).
2. Entering Iraq with no strategy to deal with the insurgents. Bombs keep exploding. Pipelines keep going up in flames. Americans keep dying.
3. Insulting European allies for resisting the war and then humbly requesting reconstruction aid.
4. Lying about how certain American soliders fought and died. Remember Jessica Lynch, the young private who was part of a lost convoy that got ambushed and was lionized for shooting her weapon until there were no more bullets in her gun? Except that, of course, she hadn't and she told everyone that she was severely injured and unable to pull the trigger even once. And there's Specialist Pat Tillman, former Cardinals football player who quit sports after 9/11 and went to Afghanistan to fight and got killed in a shootout with the Taliban? Except that he had actually been killed by one of his own compatriots, but that story wasn't released until after a very public mourning service.
5. Curtailing services provided by the Veterans Administration and closing hospitals across the country.
Where is the nobility in fighting this war? The cause is missing. Soldiers are sent to fight an enemy they can't find. We have few friends there. The public is misled about how Americans are really dying. And when soldiers come back home, we don't spend the time or resources to take care of them.
We are wasting the honor, energy and lives of nearly 150,000 soldiers in a land and war that has no meaning. Why is it, then, that politicians find it difficult to urge more Americans to enlist?
Right up until our modern age, the sons of nobility led their troops and died on the same battlefield as their common recruits. Why, then, should the children of our new ruling class, the politicians, not do the same?
Enlist and show us how courageous you are.
In a recent Op-Ed piece in the New York Daily News, one former policy writer suggested that to improve military enlistment, we should remind parents and young adults the importance of serving one's country as an honorable, higher calling.
I think our leaders would have better results if they hadn't committed the following acts of betrayal to our troops:
1. Overestimating Iraq's WMD capability (um, none?) and connection to terrorism (um, none?).
2. Entering Iraq with no strategy to deal with the insurgents. Bombs keep exploding. Pipelines keep going up in flames. Americans keep dying.
3. Insulting European allies for resisting the war and then humbly requesting reconstruction aid.
4. Lying about how certain American soliders fought and died. Remember Jessica Lynch, the young private who was part of a lost convoy that got ambushed and was lionized for shooting her weapon until there were no more bullets in her gun? Except that, of course, she hadn't and she told everyone that she was severely injured and unable to pull the trigger even once. And there's Specialist Pat Tillman, former Cardinals football player who quit sports after 9/11 and went to Afghanistan to fight and got killed in a shootout with the Taliban? Except that he had actually been killed by one of his own compatriots, but that story wasn't released until after a very public mourning service.
5. Curtailing services provided by the Veterans Administration and closing hospitals across the country.
Where is the nobility in fighting this war? The cause is missing. Soldiers are sent to fight an enemy they can't find. We have few friends there. The public is misled about how Americans are really dying. And when soldiers come back home, we don't spend the time or resources to take care of them.
We are wasting the honor, energy and lives of nearly 150,000 soldiers in a land and war that has no meaning. Why is it, then, that politicians find it difficult to urge more Americans to enlist?
Right up until our modern age, the sons of nobility led their troops and died on the same battlefield as their common recruits. Why, then, should the children of our new ruling class, the politicians, not do the same?
Enlist and show us how courageous you are.
posted by Alan at 1:19 PM
2 Comments:
Perhaps it's time we make a distinction between a citizen and a civilian. Only citizens can vote and run for office.
This would be the military recruitment slogan: Join up now. Service guarantees citizenship.
Hey you know I had to add a Starship Troopers reference.
I'm actually surprised at how serious your blog got all of a sudden.
It was a really hot, humid day and my head was hurting from the weather b/c I don't have central A/C in my office, so I decided to vent a little.
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