Happy Dependence Day!

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Happy Dependence Day!

In my younger years I was seduced by images of war and combat. When kids my age were watching Ninja Turtles and Dick Tracy, I was memorizing lines from Patton and The Longest Day. When I was in high school and my grades were falling faster than a bunker buster, I didn’t bring my homework to my fast food job. I packed a copy of Black Hawk Down. I was that kid; so sure my future was in the military that I damned any other possibilities. Some were wearing letter jackets and Texas A&M sweaters; I was wearing my dad’s worn Navy field jacket. So it should come to no surprise that I wasn’t the popular kid in class. Sure, I had a few friends here and there. But I had no sense of belonging. I felt like I was riding out my time until I could join the Army. A band of outsiders! If movies have taught me anything beyond the fact that Hong Kong cops don’t play by the rules, it’s that soldiers come from different walks of life to come together and serve a purpose greater than themselves. Remember what JFK said? Ask what you can do for your country. It was 2003 when I was graduating, and we were just invading Iraq. Support for the war was overwhelming back then. I was a 17 year old who thought it was a swell idea. Soon it’d be my chance to experience war with my own eyes and heart. How exciting it must be! I’d go from a hapless kid to a respected man in twelve months.

Recruiters across the country must be thanking their lucky stars for Hollywood. Half their job is done when a middle class high school dropout buys Band of Brothers on DVD.

There’s a cold hard fact that hits everyone when they get to their unit fresh out of basic training. In the great scheme of the Army, you’re nothing. You’re puke. You’re not a patriot serving your country, you’re unproven waste of space. Shit! That wasn’t in the brochure. After awhile you start to form those cliché bonds you see in 50s war movies, though it only applies to those of the same rank or just a little lower and higher. My team leader knows what my favorite movie is, but I doubt my battalion commander can put a name to my face. That’s how it has to be. Do you think Bill Gates knows the hopes and aspirations of the guy who empties the trash in his office? The higher the rank, the more impersonal it gets. To some general I’m not Alex, reader and movie aficionado. I’m Rifleman in Company B, Third Brigade, Second Infantry Division, First Corps, America’s Corps, The Only Corps! To a dude who has lieutenants make his coffee, it must be startlingly easy to hand down orders and directives that destroy plans you thought you had for the future. That’s called thinking out of your pay grade.

Ask anyone besides Donald Rumsfeld about the progress of the war and they’ll tell you: it’s going badly. Most people would elect a biracial lesbian president before having us stay here one more day. Too bad the group that was elected to be the voice of the people has been mute for four years. Every month the bombs in the road get bigger, every month the enemy gets wise to our tactics and exploit them, to the chagrin of colonels with slipping track records. People with sixteen, seventeen years in the Army are getting out a few years short of retirement. They’d rather not risk another deployment that is now fifteen months long, because you can’t enjoy retirement benefits when kids are stomping on what used to be your intestines after a five hundred pound bomb disintegrated the Humvee you were in because, oh beans, the Army thought it was too expensive to put armor underneath it. That money was better spent putting Velcro pockets on our new uniforms.

We roll our eyes every time we hear the term ‘re-enlistment brief.’ Ugh. Since before we deployed, we’ve been collectively forced to attend a meeting every few months where some dude lays out the news: stay in the Army, and you’ll be handsomely rewarded. $15,000, college time, Airborne school, the works. Serve your country for a few more years, come on. They have a big sheet with everyone’s name, kind of like a grocery list. They check yes, no or maybe next to your name. When you tell them no, it was always the same chilly reply: you’ll fail on the outside. You’re just a vet with no skills, who would hire you? Before we left we must have had the lowest re-enlistment rate in the division. The only people convinced to re-enlist were those with families, who couldn’t risk getting out and suddenly not having a monthly check and health insurance. For the single guys, forget about it. Three or four years were enough for us. I knew the military life wasn’t for me.

Four years of war and this Army is a skeleton of its former self. Equipment is broken or obsolete, thousands are dead and wounded and many of us can’t wait to get off the Hindenburg. For awhile, deployments were kept to a year, with at least twelve months back home to recuperate, to get new equipment, to bury the dead. To keep the surge going, deployments have been extended to fifteen months to keep the year at home from shrinking down to nine or less months. The number of people getting out was devastating, so the Army needed a new plan to keep people in. New slogan and advertising campaign? Check. Stop loss program? Check. Bigger bonuses? Check. Guaranteeing non-deployable positions at training posts and recruiting stations, acknowledging people are scared stiff to go to Iraq? Check. Still the numbers are low. After watching too many 80s gang movies, someone thought of such a simple, foolproof idea: good ol’ fashioned blackmail.


Rest of article at: http://armyofdude.blogspot.com/2007/07/happy-dependence-day.html