Preparing for graduation at West Point, where your first job is the front line (snippets)

[The Straight Story]

Sometimes, though, after taps is played each night at 11:30, talk in the barracks turns to who is to blame for the mess in Iraq. “People don’t attribute the mistakes to any one person in particular,” says one cadet. “Well, okay—Donald Rumsfeld. And there’s a disappointment with the civilian leadership overall.”

.....

Zambarda loves a good argument; often playing devil’s advocate, he constantly turns issues over in his head. He reads the Times every day, and has been closely following the debate in Congress over setting a deadline for withdrawal. “As far as setting a deadline, it’s a step in the right direction,” he says. “It’s forcing the government to evaluate; what is the exit plan? As long as it doesn’t come to the point where we’re leaving the soldiers hanging out to dry.” Still, he says, “if I really wanted to make policy decisions, I should have been a politician. My job is to execute the orders, the lawful orders, of those above me.”

....

Rosenberg recently went back to Hunter, her old high school, to talk to students about what it’s like to be a cadet right now. Mostly the students were respectful; the faculty was another story. “One of the teachers, when I walked down the hall in my uniform, yelled, ‘No blood for oil!’” she says, her face reddening. “Um, I had nothing to do with that. Then I talked to my old art-history teacher, who’s a sweet guy, and I wanted to tell him I’m taking a bunch of art-history courses now. He was like, ‘Oh, so you’ll know what buildings are before you drop bombs on them.’”

...

Kate Rosenberg interrupts. She wants to make it clear she didn’t vote for George W. Bush, either time. Asked what she’d tell Cheney if she somehow got five minutes alone with him at graduation, she shakes her head slowly, biting her tongue so as not to cause any trouble for Marya.

....

Lately, with his deployment looming, the possibility of being wounded occupies Zambarda less than the concern that he’ll need to shoot someone. “I just went to a class a week ago on the moral justification for killing,” he says. “No one wants to deal with, for the rest of their lives, having killed someone. That’s scary. Some people accept the idea, that it’s my job, I’m the Army. But for anyone who’s in the Judeo-Christian tradition, there’s a lot of ‘Thou shall not kill.’ How do you deal with that? It will plague you for the rest of your life. We went over a lot of theory. Whether it proved to me whether I should feel justified killing someone or not—that’s not as important as that it got me thinking.”

whole article is here:
http://www.usma.edu/publicaffairs/directorscorner/07may01-NYMagazine.htm

Good reading.

[AndyTiedye]

1. Key Word: LAWFUL Orders