Whiles Any Speaks

I generally seek to live my life so that regrets play no large part. For the most part, with a few notable exceptions, I have managed this fairly well. Recently, one of those exceptions has been playing on my mind. I regret that I have not served in the armed forces.

When I was a boy, I dreamed of being a US Marine. One of my older brother is a Marine. He served for 30 years before retiring as a Sargeant Major. I always idolized him for that, although in fact, I really didn't know him all that well as he is some 15 years older than me. Of my 5 brothers, 2 others served in the Air Force, so military service was seen as honorable in my family, although not necessarily expected.

Upon graduating High School, my focus was on college. In college, my focus was on graduating, and toward the end, on getting married. During that time I went through an unfortunate pacifistic phase -- one I view now as typical of the intellectual exploration of the young. Naive but understandable. In addition, of the few times I mentioned the possiblity of military service, my fiance reacted strongly to the negative. So I did not pursue it. This was in the late 80's and there was no pressing reason, in the national perspective, for a guy like me to pursue military service.

The Gulf War gave me pause, but of course it was over almost as soon as it began. Pretty soon I had surpassed the cutoff age for enlisting. It was now a moot point.

Then came 9/11 and the aftermath. A few years ago, I heard that the Army had increased the maximum age for enlistment to 42. That year I turned 43. Nevertheless, although the point is still moot, I regret now that I did not enlist.

There are many many good reasons for me to have NOT enlisted. I won't even recite them here as I'm sure you can guess them. I am fully aware that war is not a game, and I do not think I am overcome be romantic notions of military glory. Yet there is something deep inside, or hidden way back in my brain that wishes that I had stepped up and done my duty.

I've been thinking of Shakespeare's St. Crispin Day speech from Henry V.

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.

I'm afraid I do now "hold my manhood cheap" when I think of those who are now
in Iraq and Afghanistan or wherever they are posted around the world, working to insure my safety and that of my children. I loath and detest the fact that we fight in Iraq, and think we should never have gone there. But now that we are in it, we must finish it and finish it properly. I regret that I cannot be a part of that, even though I
know that to do so would be a terrible disruption and would put my life at risk.

Yet when others are doing so, and I am not, I feel cheap. Can't help it. I just do.

Dead End

I just finished an article from Harper’s Magazine from the February 2007 issue called Dead end: Counterinsurgency warfare as military malpractice. The thesis is that all current counter-insurgency doctrine is fatally flawed because it fails to account for the true terrain of a counter-insurgency – the people. Failing thus, it fails to solve the essential problem of counter-insurgency. The central problem is not at it’s core a military problem, but a political one. If the counter-insurgency fails to control (notice I did not say win over) the people, then the effort to stop the insurgency will fail. This has been amply demonstrated in Afghanistan (both now, 25 years ago, and 150 years ago) Vietnam, and of course, Iraq.
But here is the bite. There is a viable solution to an insurgency that requires (comparatively) few troops. The Romans used it to great effect, as did the Ottomans and the Nazis. That is to out-terrorize the terrorists. I say that it is viable because it is affordable (in the sense of outlay of treasury, troop deployment and lives of soldiers) and has been proven effective. To put it simply, the occupying troops utilize selective and total retaliation against the civilian population for any perceived cooperation with the insurgents. Pretty soon, the civilians stop shielding the insurgents. There is no profit in it. Without the skeleton and armor provided by the civilians, the insurgency crumbles.
This we will not do. Nor ought we. And here is our true failure.
Our failure is not that we fail to oppress civilians. Our failure is that we want to wage war without taking responsibility for the outcome. The end of the article briefly outlines one other option – military government. We have also opted out of this approach.

“That decision reflects another kind of politics, manifest in the ambivalence of a United States government that is willing to fight wars, that is willing to start wars because of future threats, that is willing to conquer territory or even entire countries, and yet is unwilling to govern what I conquers, even for a few years.

Recall the outcome of WWII, and you will realize that we actually RULED part of Germany, most of Italy, all of Japan for years. We made no bones about it. We invested and did it right and created from the ground up the infrastructure for democracy. Democracy cannot be merely planted, it seems. It must be planted and carefully cultivated for it to be able to take root. This is our failure. By looking for the quick fix, the weeds are choking out the wheat, and unwilling to take the mower to the whole lot, we will eventually have to abandon the entire field to the wild thistles, brambles and witchgrass.