The Weekly Screed (#808)

Where have all the soldiers gone…
by David Benjamin

MADISON, Wis. — Used to be, you couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting a GI. Well, a former GI. In the bygone halcyon days of universal conscription, every male had to do his hitch, or get really creative to duck Uncle Sam.

My dad, who was eligible for World War II, got a medical deferment. When the next war, in Korea, rolled around, he was healthy as a stallion, but got off again because he was sole support — a role he observed with a rascal air of devil-may-care — of a family of four. But Dad was an anomaly among the adult males in town, most of whom had served in some unit in some outfit that had done serious combat somewhere. Plus, we had the VA Hospital on the north side of town, crawling with vets, and Camp McCoy out on Highway 21, where you couldn’t swing a dead cat without, well, you know the rest.

Two features distinguished Tomah’s grizzled ex-GIs. One, they were alive and eternally grateful for that. Second, they said almost nothing about their service, perhaps out of modesty, more likely because they just wanted to forget, most likely because they didn’t have words to explain to “civilians” what they’d experienced in Bastogne, or Kwajalein, or somewhere in the sky above Italy.

They certainly didn’t need to explain GI life. Popular culture, throughout mid-century, was thick with references to basic and barracks, furloughs and foxholes, from Sgt. Bilko to “McHale’s Navy,” from here to eternity. Every kid in town knew the Army hierarchy from buck private to bird colonel. We were fluent in GI slang, from SNAFU to semper fi. Our comic book diet included monthly fixes of Beetle Bailey, Sad Sack and Sgt. Rock. One of the tunes that still goes through my head is a MAD magazine chicken-brass anthem, to the tune of “Anchors Aweigh” that begins, “Off we go, into the barracks yonder,/ Pulling an inspection again…”
 
And we played soldier more than we played cowboys-and-Indians.

In America then, military service was one one of life’s inevitabilities. Few of us imagined ever going to college. All of us expected to be GIs.

The veterans around us had lived through a perilous personal trial that had changed them forever, but few ever boasted or bitched, or even waxed nostalgic about their hitch, because all the other guys had marched to the same drummer. Historian Stephen Ambrose dwelt eloquently on the fact that in the great conflicts of our past, citizens were soldiers and soldiers were citizens. We all did it. We all had to.

My favorite movie GI is Captain Miller, the platoon leader in Saving Private Ryan. His real-life job is a mystery to his men ’til late in the film, when he reveals himself as a “schoolteacher” — an educated man in an 8th-grade world.

Capt. Miller’s presence on a bloody plain among ignorant men was a measure of the parity imposed on all American males by the draft. The U.S. military grew over the years into a crucible that defied class, ethnic, religious and — finally, by order of Harry Truman — racial barriers, more effectively than in any other institution. The Army remains today a sort of retreat from complexity where all men — and now women — are created, ordered around, broken down, built up, live and die in a community where, like it or not, we’re all in this together.

When my turn came around on the guitar, the war was Vietnam. The draft was still at work but it had loopholes. If you got into college, you had a reprieve of four or five years, long enough to find a doctor who could diagnose you into a permanent deferment. If you were rich, your old man probably knew a general or a senator who could stash you safely in the National Guard. The melting pot was going cold. The war became a meatgrinder reserved for the dumb, the poor and the pure.

But even in its waning hour, the draft had profound consequences. Many young men (like me) doubted, opposed or hated the war. But we couldn’t just leave it up to the jungle-bound suckers who didn’t have an angle. The draft made you decide. The draft forced you to think about your deeply held values, if you actually had any: Do you hate the war? Do you hate it out of principle, or just fear? Do you hate all war, or just this one? Do you love America? Do you believe in the military?

I had to face the old men of my draft board and answer all those questions. Plus this one: Kid, rather than go to war, are you prepared to go to prison?

Since 1970, no young man has been compelled to answer these questions. The greatest moral dilemma of my lifetime is now a mere hypothesis. No choice is necessary.

Now, with only a handful among us — the dumb, the poor, the pure — choosing to serve, most of us opt by default not to be citizens. We muddle along, dubious of our government but tolerant of the wars it wages on our behalf. To soothe our conscience, we’ve made those who bear our arms into generic “heroes,” without asking of them anything noticeably heroic. To be deemed a hero now is to simply put on the uniform. But now, the uniform defines you as a career soldier, the sort of mercenary myrmidon maligned throughout most of American history.

In the era of the citizen soldier, the principle was that we’d fight as long as must, then go home to families, farms and factories. We’d turn back into regular people. War was more a matter of necessity and dread than ideology and glory.

Today, we field a professional army whose members are remote from our families, our communities, our everyday lives and body politic. We idolize them ritually in flag-draped pageants before the football game, but hardly anyone knows them personally. Our new-breed of GIs (can we still call them such?) are deployed, re-deployed and re-deployed beyond the limit of emotional endurance, in a far hemisphere, among angry natives and bomb-strapped zealots. But our empathy is desultory.

Today, we don’t seem to be waging real war anywhere, although we drop tons of ordnance, vaporize civilians, obliterate neighborhoods, enrich the Warbucks plutocracy and shovel treasure into a ravenous Pentagon. We boast the biggest cannon-fodder industry in earthly history, a spendthrift foreign legion commanded ridiculously by a septuagenarian draft-dodger for whom glory is a ceaseless genital itch.

Am I alone in thinking that the draft wasn’t so bad after all? That maybe it was better — more American — when our GIs were milkmen and welders, paperhangers and schoolteachers, everywhere amongst us and, from the day they got in, they couldn’t wait to get out.