I wrote something about a draft across the United States back in September. It was…slightly off-putting for me to read it again. I still can’t quite understand some of the issues that Democratic Representatives Rangel and others have chosen to make about the issue of the draft.
According to Rangel, the draft would conscript from all walks of life, from the highborn to the lowest of the low. And Rangel only began this conversation after a high proportion of lower-class Americans began dying in the Iraq conflict.
Issues of the draft aside, I keep pondering Rangel’s timing. His motives, his reasoning. After all, we are talking about a war that cost $500 billion dollars so far in real economic terms…in combination with George W. Bush’s tax cuts, Cheney’s overdrafts on the treasury, and Halliburton’s gouging the American taxpayer for $85,000 trucks abandoned in Iraq to looters for want of a spare tire, add all this up and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.
I have a credit card with Capital One that’s at $550. I’m slowly paying that down. Imagine, though, that my share of the Iraq war is over $2,500. Imagine that my share of debt to the United States treasury for the actions of George W. Bush exceeds what I allowed him to do.
What’s fair about that?
Well, nothing. Nothing at all. Bush’s compensation package is higher than most Presidents’. His benefits and his perks are high. For his environmental consciousness equates to installing multi-million dollar environmentally sound watering systems at his ranch in Crawford while still saying, “A Salmon is a Salmon”, and applying that to his policy of “protecting” salmon streams in the Northwest. According to him, as long as we have salmon, whether it be Chinook, North Atlantic, Alaskan, King Salmon, Steelhead or Brown Trout, it’s still a fish, and a damn tasty one at that. Who cares if the streams are low? Who cares if the fish have no water to live in? John Denver took care of all that before he plowed the ultra light into the ground, didn’t he? And when George talks of sacrifice, he doesn’t talk of sacrifice for himself, his compatriots, or his favorite fundraising friends, the “Haves, and Have Mores.”
That’s the best reason I could think of for having a draft.
But. As W, Donald Rumsfeld, Cheney and many other chicken hawks in the current administration proved, a young man with political connections, the son of a well-funded family doesn’t need to sully his hands with unnecessary combat. John Kerry, of course, never did. Nor did John F. Kennedy, John McCain, or the Kennedys that never made it back from World War II.
Nor did Phoenix Cardinals running back Pat Tillman need to go to war. But go they did. Even though JFK could have applied for a deferment. McCain could have sought a transfer to a less dangerous spot. They could have even attempted to join the Air National Guard in the time of “once a month, and most of the time you’re drinking anyway” National Guard service, as many privileged kids did to stay out of harms’ way.
So the argument that the country’s elite (or those who have never worked in a fast-food restaurant, flipping burgers, pulling chicken out of deep fryers, or rolling burritos) would send their children to war seems a little preposterous. Even in the times of the Crusades, a parent could always have their sons stay at home by paying for someone to fight in their place.
The reality these days is that the tax burden in the United States, as well as the body count burden, has always rested solely on the shoulders of those whose finances deem their lives and their flesh expendable. When Pat Tillman chose to serve in the Armed Forces for $19,000 a year, plus expenses, rather than fulfill a multi-million dollar professional football player’s contract, he converted his physical worth into that of cannon fodder for the United States government. He chose to place himself in danger – by simple virtue of placing himself in the field of combat.
In the terms of direct finance, the U.S. Army really would hate to lose any soldier. With four years of training, equipping, educating, and moving its forces around the world, each fallen soldier in combat is easily worth $250,000, if not more. Insurance policies on each soldier would perhaps be wise for the government to recoup some of their losses, but the life insurance paid per soldier is often a mere $50,000 to the widows and orphans.
Would the rich place such a price tag on their children? After all, if you make $10 million a year, chances are your kids are inherently worth more to you. You spend more on them. Give them better educations. Why would you spend hundreds of thousands on your children only to see them mown down by friendly combatant fire, an improvised bomb, or beheaded in a back alley by militants and terrorists? No, you spend just a little more money to keep your investment safe, even if your child insists on putting themselves in harm’s way.
What parent wouldn’t spend an extra $1,000 to keep their child alive? Or $10,000? Or $100,000? Parents in Iraq are desperately trying to keep kidnappers from taking their children and holding them hostage for $20K or more.
In the United States, in an involuntary draft system, a small envelope of bills left under a seat or a long lunch at an expensive restaurant, a golf membership at a club, and suddenly the people at the top of the list for good excuses becomes the bottom of the list through a franchised draft board member. It has happened before; it’ll happen again. Somehow, the President went from the back of the line for 1970’s Air National Guard to the front, and chances are it wasn’t due to his sparkling Yale academic record and demonstrated commitment to civic virtue on his permanent police record..
So the case that an involuntary draft in the United States would be fair and equal is wrong – because on the surface, yes. In reality, the wealthy have methods equaling Caligula’s for obtainment of their desires – even if those desires are simply to keep their children from being shot in the throat in a desert in the middle of nowhere, “serving one’s country”.
True, males (note within this revision of the draft, no female has been mentioned. Fair and equal? Perhaps when combat uniforms have armored breast cups) who join the Army when they’d rather be going to school to become a lawyer often find themselves in a kill zone. Two recent deaths in Iraq included a would-be restaraunteur with two children he chose to support by enlisting; the other, a 2nd lieutenant who had barely held onto his bachelor’s degree in science long enough to crinkle the paper. Neither of these young men chose the military as a career; they chose the military in the first place to help them build a better life. At the least, the sons of rich men only need join to make a name for themselves, an honor ticket, an ability to say, “I too served in the military.” For a poor kid from the Bronx whose mother had no money to buy milk for cereal, the military with three squares a day might well seem the fastest way out of a grinding poverty.
But the idea of a drafted military does one very important thing – it takes men away from the places and things they chose. For instance, the poor kid from the Bronx may not have the opportunity to volunteer in the military, because the draft board managed to pull kids from every walk of life away from the schools and jobs they chose, filling all the available positions. The net result: the kid from the Bronx still eats cold cereal without milk, and a kid from the Upper West Side has to leave his job tutoring inner-city youth to fulfill a job he never chose. The net effect of the draft is to deny opportunities of an all-volunteer military to people who have few or no other possible life choices, while destroying the lives of the kids who never wanted to hold a gun.
Then we also have the underground railroads running North to the Canadian border of kids who fear the draft. The FBI opens a new division solely to track down border escapees. The prodigal sons of the United States become the illegal immigrants of Canada. And citizens who believe in the freedom to be from fear, or from draft
So how come, if the current system is so unfair, we keep bringing up the idea of hauling kids from college, from jobs, from families and opportunities. Excuse me. Men. That old adage above the Air Force Academy gates, “Bring Me Men” still holds true – if it can speak in a baritone, bass, or tenor, fine; soprano and alto, you can stay in a dress and wait for your man to come home. Either way, you’re pulling kids from the opportunities they created themselves and putting them in the way of someone else’s grand opportunity to make something out of their lives.
And you’ve got not just one, but two people who are not working in a job they’ve chosen, with no real expectations of quality service. It’s hard to establish a work ethic when you’re conscripted to do a job you never signed up for. And the quality suffers greatly.
An interesting side note: if the U.S. Military drafts, that also means that the soldiers’ bonuses go away. Training increases. No re-enlistments are necessary, because once you’re out of the service, you’re out, and you don’t need to come back. The military just doesn’t need that many boots on the ground in any case. Especially not if there’s only one Iraq or Afghanistan at a time. The world is simply not in the space of needing enormous military resources. Even China, with its vast army, could easily be defeated by conventional weapons and the removal of supply lines. A number for everyone just isn’t necessary, and it’s really less necessary for me to think that my child could be sent to war. A draft simply means that the Pentagon gets more warm bodies to put in camouflage at cut-rate prices. Cut-rate for everyone except the kids doing the dying. Is that fair? We draft tens of thousands of young men and pay them a pittance to die for the honor of the United States.
And yet – some part of me wonders. In the July 26 New Yorker, Karen Schaler quotes Donald Rumsfeld as saying, “We’re perfectly capable of increasing the incentives and the inducements to attract people into the armed services.” Apparently, that now applies to botox, face lifts, and breast augmentations. It’s not The Swan, but it’s pretty damned close.
“Anyone wearing a uniform is eligible,” Dr. Bob Lyons, the chief of plastic surgery at Brooke Army Medical Center, said recently, in his office in San Antonio. It is true: personnel in all four branches of the military and members of their immediate families can get face-lifts, nose jobs, breast enlargements, liposuction, or any other kind of elective cosmetic alteration, at taxpayer expense. There is no limit on the number of cosmetic surgeries one soldier can have, although, Lyons said, “we don’t do extreme makeovers in the military.” The commanding officer has to approve the time off for any soldier who is having surgery. For most procedures, there’s at least a ten-day recovery period, and while soldiers are recuperating they’re on paid medical leave rather than vacation.
A Defense Department spokeswoman confirmed the existence of the plastic-surgery benefit. According to the Army, between 2000 and 2003 its doctors performed four hundred and ninety-six breast enlargements and a thousand three hundred and sixty-one liposuction surgeries on soldiers and their dependents. In the first three months of 2004, it performed sixty breast enhancements and two hundred and thirty-one liposuctions.
Mario Moncada, an Army private who was recently treated for losing the vision in one eye in Iraq, said that he knows several female soldiers who have received free breast enlargements: “We’re out there risking our lives. We deserve benefits like that.”
The benefits from having your office pool specialist with a 44DD instead of her petite 34B? Possibly that might improve morale, but only among male soldiers, and only if we’re not being asked to refrain from gawking. Or if the new female uniforms have a V-neck instead of a button-up collar. I comprehend the need for many people to have surgery done – my father’s own rock-climbing accident at the age of 18 could have physically scarred him for life if it had not been for a brilliant facial reconstruction surgeon – trained in the Korean war. But his facial reconstruction, far from being paid for by the government came directly from the pocket of my grandfather. And – it was due to an accident in the mountains, not a perceived accident in the gene pool.
Janis Garcia, a former lieutenant commander and jag attorney in the Navy, who is married to a retired Navy fighter pilot, says she grew up hating the way she looked. “I wouldn’t even smile in my own wedding pictures.” She checked in to the Naval Medical Center in San Diego for a nose job, a chin realignment, and a jaw reconstruction, free of charge. She also had her teeth straightened. “It changed my appearance drastically, and I became a more confident person,” she said. “It literally changed the direction of my life.” The doctors told her the work she had done would have cost her nearly a hundred thousand dollars. And yet I still ponder why I am being asked to pay, out of pocket, for a FORMER lieutenant commander and attorney to feel good about the way she looks. Or she can whore herself in public like The Swan contestants to feel beautiful.
I don't think that matters anyway - regardless of the way she looks now, in ten years she'll need a refit just to keep from looking like she had major surgery. Humans were meant to be ugly. Look at our genitals. You can't tell me that a penis or a vagina is inherently a thing of beauty. It's contextual, and only within sexual boundaries. It's like a baby turtle or a sea anemone. They ain't pretty on their own, but in the right setting, it's the most wonderous thing you've ever seen.
The point is, some folks are just ugly, and what happens when you kids turn out ugly too? Plastic surgery for them, as well? In the U.S. Military, apparently yes. Thousands of military brats can have their mommies and daddies help them to a better nose / teeth / cheekbones / breast size / penis shape just by serving God and Country in a uniform.
Look, if she’s a lawyer, she can damned well afford her own plastic surgery, even if she does it in a blue suit with shiny gold thingies on it. She's hardly on the front lines. Me, I’d prefer it if that money went to buy a few extra bulletproof vests for soldiers in Iraq than to pay to implant a poor, simple-chested private with enough silicone to run my PDA. Some people say “But gosh, they’re keeping us safe from harm!”
I hardly think that the average Army Ranger gives two bullets shot in the air what his face looks like when it’s pressed against the sand. The individuals receiving this benefit are either those who require it as a result of wounds received in action or those who pay for it. I should never pay for a colonel’s daughter’s breast implants, nor a private’s wife’s nostril reduction. And frankly, if a lieutenant is too damned fat for his self-esteem, then he’s too damn fat for the service. From what I remember, there’s such a thing as EXERCISE – a refresher visit to boot camp might help strip the pork rinds from the Fatkins service members and women – not a liposuction on the taxpayer’s dime.
Of course, the theory that having someone to practice on is always good for a few more heartstring pulls. And yet…I wonder. With all the outsourcing that the military seems to be doing today, from the transportation of their equipment down to the food runs for the soldiers in Iraq, it hasn’t once crossed anyone’s minds to hire civilian hospitals to perform the extensive reconstructive surgeries incurred in battle? Perhaps at a cheaper cost – and allowing both the civilians and the military to have their boob jobs done off-base? Dr. Shaun Parson, a prominent cosmetic surgeon in Arizona, says that cosmetic surgery and reconstructive surgery are two separate specialties. “If the Army is doing breast augmentations, it’s doing it to practice breast augmentations, period.” Not reconstruction from a legitimate wound – an augmentation. Stuffing the bra, as it were.
Big boobs in the office pool or not, I don’t WANT a conscript defending his homeland, or fighting in an unjust war. I want someone who has joined of their own volition, who firmly believes that the republic for whom he or she fights is a just and noble cause. Patriots fight better than conscripts or mercenaries. Just ask the British navy, whose ranks were filled with gallows bait, debtors, and pressed men from the land.
During Vietnam, the columnist Nicholas von Hoffman wrote, "Draft old men's money, not young men's bodies." His point was that in America, when you want more of something -- even soldiers -- the way to get more is to pay more. Unfortunately, we are currently led by people who prefer it the other way around – draft young men’s money AND their bodies. To say nothing of the wives, girlfriends and sisters who could also fight and pay with them. Of course, we’d never want a woman to be in harm’s way, nor should we expect her to give her life for the freedom that a man would.
There is no democratic method for going to war in the United States. With the blank check Congress issued George W. Bush to fight with the Patriot Act and the approval to war in Afghanistan, nothing can stop Bush except the next election. Regardless of whether a draft is necessary or not, Bush is the person with whom this abuse of authority, this reckless slaughter of Iraqi and Afghani civilians, and the deaths of over 1,000 U.S. soldiers has resided.
The best thing that could happen for the United States is simply this: Bush fails to be elected. Kerry steps into power. The U.S. Military is brought to heel. Some self-respect returns to Americans. The dead of the twin towers finally stop turning in their graves at the travesties enacted in their names. We return to some form of world peace; peace that would never have been broken had a man of “All Hat, No Cows” swaggered into a Presidency wearing a diaper and a severe case of attention deficit disorder.
