firecat

Although no one in my immediate family was/is in the military, other people in my extended family were and are.

http://ricks.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/12/08/you_can_go_strangle_yourself_with_that_yellow_ribbon

Long article, by a Marine who served four tours in Iraq, on conditions in the US armed services. He is in favor of reinstating a draft. I can't say that I am, but I would almost be in favor of it if I thought it were the only way to get people in power to pay attention to what's going on in the armed services. (He thinks it would.)

Trigger warning, discusses violence, harassment, PTSD.

Excerpt:

For those who cannot listen to an argument without attacking someone's personality or politics, here is my background up front. I am a white male. I'm a middle class kid who grew up working on my grandfather's potato farm in Southern Idaho and lived in suburbia while attending badly run and academically useless public schools K-12. I'm a Generation Y, ivy-league educated, FDR liberal, environmentalist, atheist vegan. I graduated with a BA in English and History in 2002 from a private college I busted my ass to get into on an academic scholarship. I enlisted as a private in United States Marine Corps after 9/11 but I wanted to be a jarhead before that for these reasons: 1) I could not afford graduate school without the GI Bill; 2) I wanted to repay the government and country that gave my grandfather free farmland and an education after his war in Korea; and 3) I wanted to be there for my friends. I was a grunt and a scout sniper. I served four voluntary tours in Iraq. On the last two tours, I burned into my inactive reserve time and took someone else's place so they wouldn't have to go. I'm currently using the New Deal-GI Bill to pursue my graduate studies and I am a small business owner. But guess what? I'm average. This was just a job and a means to an end just like most the guys I served with. Despite the physical injuries I sustained and the PTSD I will live with forever, the lies I was told by military and civilians alike, I do not regret being there for my Marines and my Iraqis.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

firecat

Thanks for writing all that. You're absolutely right. We'll have to figure out another way to make the people running the wars pay for them.

From:

elf

I did note that the author is a white, straight, male, probably Christian... was never the target of the worst of the military's problems.

He's got some very good ideas, but I think he's picked the wrong point to focus on. The issue isn't how people get into the military; it's how they're treated, and how they treat others, after they're in... changing the filter system won't fix the underlying problems.

The comments in favor of mandatory service... ugh. It's obvious they've got a mental image of "the military" that's oblivious to the actual diversity in the US, and think that if they draft young men (I think they're only talking about drafting men?), those men will just stop being autistic or gay or allergic-to-peanuts or Muslim or whatever other trait is currently convincing them that the military would be a really bad career.

From:

firecat

The comments in favor of mandatory service... ugh. It's obvious they've got a mental image of "the military" that's oblivious to the actual diversity in the US, and think that if they draft young men (I think they're only talking about drafting men?), those men will just stop being autistic or gay or allergic-to-peanuts or Muslim or whatever other trait is currently convincing them that the military would be a really bad career.

Assuming it even occurs to them that autistic, gay, allergic-to-peanuts young men exist.

I think I would be in favor of...not mandatory, but strongly encouraged...non-military community service. But only if it could be done with sensitivity, which it probably couldn't.

From:

elf

I could accept "two years of mandatory civil service, from everyone." And then it becomes the gov't's job to find some work for everyone--much of which would hopefully seamlessly connect to a standard career, rather than the current arrangement where, if you're doing "civil service," that's a job with no connection to the private sector.

Hold those two years to the lightest standards of the current civil service jobs--35 hour work weeks, several weeks paid vacation a year, off on all gov't holidays. No cushy desk jobs for senators' sons while the children of immigrants pull 60-hour weeks in factories with 5 days off/year.

Or whatever. That's just brainstorming. I don't mind the idea of "more people should be directly contributing toward the country's well-being;" I just don't trust the current crowd who'd be deciding how that should be done.