May 26th
Memorial Day is over. It is instructive to look back at the
public’s attitude toward military service people over the years. The 16 million
veterans serving in WW 2 never heard “Thank you for your service.” I never
heard that during the first sixty years following my discharge from the AAF.
The veterans then did what we thought we needed to do. There was no more expectation
of a thank you then than for our children to thank us for their dinner.
The Korean War
(excuse me, police action) was about the same. Except that MacArthur was so
full of himself and eager to bomb China that Uncle Harry had to cut him down a
bit. There were 5.7 million veterans of that war and those veterans were
largely ignored when they came home. They got the GI Bill and other help but no
one thanked them for their service. A few people thought that we had no
business opposing the North Koreans or their assistants the Chinese when they
invaded South Korea; if they thought that did they kept quiet about it.
The next major conflict was in Viet Nam and that was a very
different scenario. We began there by
trying to salvage French interests. (French Indo-China) This escalated while we
were told that the whole region would become communist if we did not roll back
the North Vietnamese. Perhaps another hundred thousand troops would be needed. There
were never enough; by 1968 the number of troops in Viet Nam was over half a
million and 65 percent of those were draftees. The draft was enormously unpopular;
if you were smart enough and reasonably wealthy you could get a deferment until
you finished college and if you majored in religion and became a preacher with
your own church your deferment was permanent. If that didn’t work you moved to
Canada.
A large part of the problem was that the administration was
not telling the public the truth about the war. This, along with other
problems, led to the war’s unpopularity. The unpopularity finally led to some
members of the public literally spitting on returning service men. Poor training
and poorer leadership sometimes led to barbaric actions in Viet Nam by American
soldiers. The public, after learning about the My Lai massacre, was not
favorably impressed by American troops. In one case a young woman meeting her
husband’s casket was told that he deserved what he got! There was no “thank you
for your service” for these returning veterans
Now comes the all-volunteer army; on closer examination the “volunteering”
is really bought and paid for. The government now provides enormous incentives
to young men and women if they volunteer for military service. If you serve for
three years, even if you see no combat, you are entitled to 27 months of
college tuition (that’s four years of college). There are other incentives as
well. Keep in mind that the odds of being shot if you serve three years in the
military are slightly less that the odds of being shot if you were a civilian
of that age. Even so we should thank
these volunteers for their service just as we should thank the Chinese for buying
the bonds that finance our wars, wars that we refuse to pay for with increased
taxes, thanks to Grover Norquist.
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