Military Recruiting Update through July 2011

All services are meeting their recruitment objectives for the current fiscal year ending September 30. In fact, only the Army National Guard is below its expected quota to date, but it is still anticipated that they will make their mission in FY-2011. [With the end of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" September 20, now is an opportune time for LGBT veterans interested in serving to contact a National Guard recruiter.]

What an improvement from the dark days of 2005. Clearly, there are economic reasons, but we hope that all Americans are also realizing that we have individual and collective responsibilities to our country.

Final Salute: 2006 Pulitzer Prize to The Rocky Mountain News

This is an awesome photo, by Todd Heisler, illustrating Final Salute, by Jim Sheeler, a reporter for the then-Rocky Mountain News. They won Pulitzer Prizes in 2006, Sheeler for Feature Writing and Heisler for Feature Photography. [The Rocky Mountain News ceased publication in 2009.] The story was also published as a book with the same title.

Since c. 2007, as directed by Congress, however, the Pentagon has chartered aircraft to deliver Our Fallen Heroes from Dover Air Force Base in Delaware to their final resting places. But there's something about this scene that ensures that Americans are reminded of the costs of our country's decision to engage in military action overseas.

Glimpses of War, published by The Washington Post

The Washington Post just published Glimpses of War [front page, center, above the fold], about distant thanks to our servicemembers from the American people they serve.

On the home front, reminders of the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq come in small doses. [ . . . ]

After almost 10 years of fighting, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq surface on the home front in fleeting, sentimental and sanitized glimpses. Camouflage-clad soldiers lug rucksacks through civilian airports at the beginning and end of their leaves. Their service is celebrated in occasional television commercials, dutifully praised by political candidates and briefly cheered at sporting events.

Troops often question why more ­have not answered the call to duty and why their sacrifices are so poorly understood by the people they serve.

"For most Americans, the wars remain an abstraction," then-Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said last year. "A distant, unpleasant series of news items that does not affect them personally." [ . . . ]

'Grab Some Buds'

Mike Byrne, the creative director at a Manhattan advertising agency, was rushing through airport security on his way to a Chicago Bears game two years ago when he happened upon a scene from the war: A returning soldier on his mid-tour leave was being swarmed by his wife and children. [ . . . ]

"I literally had to fight the tears, man up and keep walking," he said. "I was like, 'That is amazing.' It never left me." [He created an ad on this theme: Budweiser: Coming Home.]

OYE Comment:

Read the whole article. There's more that was too much for us.

Update: Letters to the Editor in response.

An Empty Regard, published by The New York Times

The New York Times focused on our longer-term theme in An Empty Regard, front and center in The Sunday Review.

[ . . . ]

The new cult of the uniform began with the call to “support our troops” during the Iraq war. The slogan played on a justified collective desire to avoid repeating the mistake of the Vietnam era, when hatred of the conflict spilled over into hostility toward the people who were fighting it. [ . . . ]

As the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have dragged on, other purposes have come into play. The greater the sacrifice that has fallen on one small group of people, the members of the military and their families, the more we have gone from supporting our troops to putting them on a pedestal. In the Second World War, everybody fought. Soldiers were not remote figures to most of us; they were us. Now, instead of sharing the burden, we sentimentalize it. It’s a lot easier to idealize the people who are fighting than it is to send your kid to join them. This is also a form of service, I suppose: lip service. [ . . . ]

“America needs heroes,” it is sometimes said, a phrase that’s often uttered in a wistful tone, almost cooingly, as if we were talking about a lonely child. But do we really “need heroes”? We need leaders, who marshal us to the muddle. We need role models, who show us how to deal with it. But what we really need are citizens, who refuse to infantilize themselves with talk of heroes and put their shoulders to the public wheel instead. The political scientist Jonathan Weiler sees the cult of the uniform as a kind of citizenship-by-proxy. Soldiers and cops and firefighters, he argues, embody a notion of public service to which the rest of us are now no more than spectators. What we really need, in other words, is a swift kick in the pants.

OYE Comment:

The basic problem with such faux, yellow-elephant hero-worship, no matter how justified in individual cases, is that our heroes become too distant from the rest of us, to the point that real Americans can no longer see themselves as inspired to emulate them by signing up themselves.

It's a responsibility of our national civilian political leadership, current and future, to inspire their followers, the American people, to do great things.

Now that "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" is on its way out, it's time for all Americans, everywhere on the political spectrum, if eligible themselves, to Be A Man! Enlist. If not personally eligible, encourage your eligible relatives and friends, your circles of influence, to Always Aim High.

Update: Letters to the Editor in response.