We have the strongest and most powerful military the world has ever seen. We also have, I believe, the best men and women in our nation serving in our military. They stand ready to do whatever is asked of them, and always have. And they are very, very good at their jobs. But they are not all heroes. They are not all brave. They are certainly not superheroes. They are, in general, ordinary average people who, like most of us civilians, go to work every day and do their best to do a good job.
I know. I was one of them for 20 years. I was certainly not a hero. My courage was never tested, but I have no reason to think that I was any more courageous than a guy working an assembly line in a factory, or a single mother waiting tables to provide for her children. To tell the truth, I wasn't even a very good soldier (technically, an airman.) I was just a guy trying to do a good job. Most of the people I served with were the same.
The difference between an American soldier and a civilian is this. What our soldiers do, they do at our behest, and on our behalf. In order to do their jobs, they give up many of the very freedoms they are sworn to preserve. They have to. It's the nature of the beast. We ask them to undergo unbelievable hardships on our behalf and they do it because it's their job.
I'm not in any way trying to belittle our military personnel. I have the greatest respect for them, particularly those at the lowest levels, the squadron and company levels. They are the ones who shoulder the load — whether it be patrolling hostile territory, flying combat missions, or providing the necessary support to them. I believe that the American military can be, and is, one of the greatest forces for good in the world and it is all because of the men and women who serve. What concerns me is that when we fetishize them, when we make them out to be more than they are, then we also dehumanize them. We make them less than they really are and, in the process, relieve ourselves of our responsibilities to them.
It becomes too easy to ask too much of them. It becomes too easy to see them as the solution to our problems. Trouble in Africa? Send in the troops. Trouble in the middle-east? Get our boys in there, they'll soon sort it out. Trouble with Russia? We'd better get some troops over there in case those Russkies need sorting out.
Of course, as Donald Rumsfeld said, "You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time," so never mind that they don't have the proper equipment and if it ends badly for some of them, well, we can just blame the government. It's certainly not our fault. It's too easy to abdicate our own responsibility, too convenient to forget all that "government of the people, by the people, and for the people" business.
We are the government. We are the "people" that our similarly fetishized founding fathers were writing about. We are the ones who allow ourselves to be manipulated into electing the nitwits and scoundrels who get our soldiers into these messes. Who push them beyond human endurance and then, when things go wrong like they did in 1998 when my friends died needlessly, say "pilot error," and let it go at that, blaming the victims of the hierarchy's blind ambition and our own apathy and blissful responsibility free ignorance.
It is way past time for us, the people, to take up the reins of government again and there is no better time to start than this election year. If we truly support our troops, we need to stop saying we support our troops, and start doing it. We need to elect leaders who will lead them properly, and use them judiciously, rather than seeing them simply as a means to some nebulous end. Leaders who understand that force should be used only after every diplomatic avenue has failed. Leaders who will see to it that every service member gets the support and help they need both during and after their service.
Let us have the decency to realize that they are not superheroes, blessed with supernatural abilities and protections. They are not Jesus in body armor with an automatic rifle and cool sunglasses. They are just as susceptible to exhaustion, to fear, to despair, as we are, and on our behalf, asked to rise above all that and do the impossible.
Because the real cost of constant war isn't just measured in dollars and cents, it's not even measured in blood and destroyed lives. It also has to be measured by what we're asking them to fight for. We need to ask ourselves; are we still worth fighting for, or are we selling out the principles we ask them to fight for?
We've got to make sure we don't lose the things that make this country worth fighting for. Things like freedom of speech, of action, of thought. The idea of innocent until proven guilty. The idea that anyone can make it in this country, regardless of their race, creed, or color. The idea that all men are created equal. The very things that we ask those very ordinary soldiers, airmen, sailors and Marines to do extraordinary things, even at the cost of their lives, to preserve. We owe it to them to keep this country a place worth coming home to. It does no good for them to win the battles, if we here at home lose the war
They are the ones who pay the price for our apathy, for our irresponsibility, for our cynicism and moral cowardice, in blood, in broken bodies and broken minds. They are the ones whose families are destroyed on our behalf. They are us, and when they bleed, when they die, a little bit of us bleeds and dies with them. Their loss is our loss. It's time to stop losing.
