America’s Legionnaires
Editorial for the Oregonian, published September 19, 2002
I entered the U.S. Air Force in 1972, fresh on the heels of the end of the draft and a proud member of the newly formed and greatly heralded volunteer force.
Over my 21 years of service before I retired, I watched the volunteer force grow to be a truly professional military, an image bolstered most notably by the incredible performance during Operation Desert Storm — the Gulf War.
Desert Storm’s lack of American casualties, however, was a fluke. We saw what could have happened only a few years later in Somalia, when the ragged citizens of a Third World country steeped in warfare and armed with primitive weapons brought us to our knees in spite of our modern equipment and well-trained personnel.
More recently, we’ve seen the admittedly impressive show in Afghanistan. Even there, however, all the high-tech equipment in the world still hasn’t been able to find the people we’re really after. And more Americans have died.
Now there is talk of invading Iraq. Not just attacking, but invading with an American force that to date has no allies willing to go in with us.
Officials seem to agree it will most likely cost the lives of a great number of young men and women. And therein lies the problem.
It is now easy for the majority of American people to say they support this action and that action and call for the troops, even if it means Americans have to die — because it is no longer their sons and daughters who will be on the front lines. It largely will be the sons and daughters of families whose resources were limited enough that the promise of free training, medical care and a college education moved their children to enlist.
I am not questioning their patriotism, just the process that moved them to potentially being in the crosshairs and that allows the rest of us to so easily call for their use and, by extrapolation, the deaths of at least some of those who go to war.
In 1999, African Americans constituted 20 percent of the Army’s enlistees, although they composed only 14 percent of the population. In the same year, recruits from the economically poor Southern states represented the highest percentage of all recruits entering the military.
It would seem that the military is moving, by default if not by design, to be a force made up of the poor and less-vested elements of our society. I believe that has much to do with why it is so easy for us to call for their deployment and employment when we feel outraged and injured or afraid.
If that is true, and I believe it to be so, then we have converted patriotism and war-making into an abstraction, practiced in a way akin to the French Foreign Legion. The strategy enables our citizens to wage war without the fear of facing it themselves, relying on a cadre of individuals who see military service as a way to aspire to a better life or to achieve forgiveness for past transgressions in trade for their promise to put themselves into harm’s way in our place.
No one can fault our military for the great job it has done, continues to do and will most likely do again. But if we truly are at war, and I think few people doubt that we are, we can certainly fault ourselves for standing safely on the sidelines and allowing our children to do the same, while the less fortunate among us and their children guard the lines of freedom.
