Crotchety Old Rant - Part 2

Well, it seems the Iran war fever has broken for a little bit, our Republican brethren having turned their attention to explaining how Mittens could simultaneously be the CEO and the Not CEO of Bain Capital, and also why The Mitster will only deign to release two years of tax returns.  Contrast that to his father, the late, lamented, George Romney, former Michigan governor and 1968 Republican presidential candidate - yeah that one, the one who came back from Vietnam and said he'd been brainwashed by the military (i.e.: they thought we were winning) - who released 20 years of tax returns without even being asked.  As they say, 'now there was a man.' 

But I digress.

The issue here is The Draft, conscription, whatever you want to call it.  Once in the early '80's I was a computer lab partner with a twenty-something kid in grad school who called it slavery.  This, of course, after I'd served my six and a half years theoretically protecting his lily white ass from the Great Commie Menace.  I nearly decked him, except that he wouldn't have understood why.  And besides, he was bigger than me.

There were a lot of guys in the Navy bigger than me.  And lots of guys smaller.  From different parts of the country.  Different colored.  Different religioned (for lack of a better word).  I served with black guys from the inner city, fishermen from Louisiana, and 18 year old hillbillies who came from so far back in the hollers that they had barely any teeth in their heads.  I once listened to a petty officer first from northern Maine taking orders from a lieutenant (jg) from south Texas and neither of them - or anybody else in the vicinity for that matter - had the slightest idea what the other one was saying.

And this was a good thing - a very good thing.

The draft forced middle class northern college boys like me to work with the sons of southern dirt farmers, New York deli owners, Midwest foundry rats, and the occasional rich brat from Marin County who arrived in Pensacola for flight school driving a brand new Datsun 240-Z (yeah, you know who you are.)   As cliched as it sounds, we were forced to deal with / put up with / rely on each other, to know who you could trust and who you couldn't, who would bend and who would break, who could lead, and who couldn't find his way out of a paper bag.  Sometimes the star was white, sometimes black, sometimes catholic, sometimes a jew, sometimes rich, sometimes poor, sometimes his teeth were perfect, and sometimes he had no teeth at all.

The draft forced young Americans of different classes, races, and religions to work together in an environment of real physical risk - as opposed to, say, an office, where the greatest physical risk is choking to death on your chateau briand at lunch (big shout out right here to Tom Wolfe and The Right Stuff).   Anyhow, you get my drift.   This crotchety old man thinks there'd be a little more respect and understanding between Americans of different classes and political persuasions if they had been forced to spend a couple years working with each other in the military.  And who knows, maybe some Americans would think twice before they talk about shipping our children off to war.