Soldiers go to war, and sometimes they kill and die. We all know this. And yet, in some peculiar sense, it slipped our minds. In the last fifteen years, we have slowly lost our perception of the Army, the Air Force, the Navy, and the Marines as groups whose primary goal is to defend our country. The peacetime armed forces have become the largest vocational training school in the nation.
The average age of a new recruit this year was twenty, and many of them joined up for reasons that had nothing to do with combat, or even with patriotism. The stories take on a kind of Main Street sameness: dissatisfaction with a dead-end job, in a factory, a fast-food restaurant, a small office. Enlisting has become part of a great American postadolescence for some men and women not smart, not rich, or not directed enough for college. Looking to learn computers or communications, attracted by tuition grants, egged on by parents, they signed up.
The military knows this. Its appeals now have little to do with patriotism, no stern Uncle Sam with an I WANT YOU! above his inexorable index finger. They speak largely to self-interest, a kind of yuppie armed forces.
There’s a moment in the movie Private Benjamin, about a spoiled rich girl who becomes a better person in boot camp. “Excuse me,” she says to a sergeant, “but I think they sent me to the wrong place. You see, I did join the Army, but I joined a different Army. I joined the one with the condos and the private rooms.”
Last week in the same magazines that carried accounts of troop deployments, there were recruitment ads for women. “If you’re looking for an experience that could help you get an edge on life and be a success,” the ads say. They even suggest that the Army is a good place to meet guys, which I have to assume is correct.
Can the families of our soldiers be blamed if the events of the last month have left them dazed and confused? Can a father who wrote an opinion piece saying that he will not forgive the president if his son is killed in Saudi Arabia, who wrote of his son’s companions that “they joined the Marines as a way of earning enough money to go to college” really be blamed for his blind spot? Can a nineteen-year-old woman saying good-bye to her baby son who tells People magazine, “I never thought of anything like this when I joined up,” really be blamed for a statement that sounds so painfully naive?
Can grandparents who find it incredible that any employer would send both parents of young children simultaneously on a long and dangerous business trip be blamed for their distress? Those who see the world in black and white reply that the military is not just any employer. But that is precisely how it has positioned itself in recent memory.
It’s not just a job, it’s an adventure.
There is a schizophrenic quality to American feeling about this military action in almost every quote you read from average people. On the one hand, they say that we should be there, making short work of Saddam Hussein. On the other hand, they say they want no American lives lost.
Some of this is the natural sentiment surrounding war, and some is skepticism over our reasons for being in the Persian Gulf in the first place. But some is occasioned by modern military recruitment, recruitment that, under current circumstances, smacks of deceptive advertising. In times of conscription no soldier’s mother could fool herself about his ultimate purpose. We always knew that purpose was still there, but somehow it slipped our minds, the fact that “Be all that you can be” could be transformed into “to be or not to be” overnight.
Ever since the United States sent troops to the Middle East, American citizens have publicly yearned for decisive victory without bloodshed—that is, war without war. It would be nice to think that this reflects faith in the power of diplomacy, but it would not be entirely true. Thousands of American homes were unprepared for this eventuality. Thousands of parents sent their twenty-year-olds away to learn a trade. Now they find that they really sent them into battle. And I cannot blame them if some of them find that unreal, or even unfair.
NEW WORLD AT WAR
November 15, 1990
When the police arrived they found the three children alone. They were wearing dirty clothes because they hadn’t figured out how to do the laundry, and their father had tacked a note to the wall, telling them how to get cash with his automatic teller card. They were eight, twelve, and thirteen, and they were hungry. There was no food in the house. Their father had been gone a week.
He’d left for the Persian Gulf.
The case of Staff Sergeant Faagalo Savaiki is a worst-case scenario, an extreme illustration of the collision between a changing American way of life and the demands of war. He is divorced, his ex-wife lives in Hawaii, and she couldn’t manage to pay the airfare to Tennessee, which is where the children were living with their father. He’s back in the States now, charged with child abuse; the children are in foster homes, and the 101st Airborne Division, to which Sergeant Savaiki belongs, is still in the Middle East.
The world has changed since this country was last at war. It’s not simply the shifting sands of geopolitics. In the waning years of Vietnam we were approaching our two hundredth birthday, an adolescent country still devoted to muscling any comers aside and being the undisputed champion of the world. We’ve grown up since. And there is nothing quite so sobering as becoming adult and discovering the real world.
The if of war in the Middle East has turned in many of our minds to a when. We know that once upon a time there were formal declarations of such developments, but that seems so idealistic now. We remember, too, that once we believed we fought wars for reasons straight from the side of some marble monument. We are realistic about this conflict as only a grown-up, slightly world-weary country can be. We are going to war for oil, and, by extension, for the economy. The president trots out his Hitler similes to try to convince us otherwise.
The military is as changed as the rest of us. A support group in California reports that many of the soldiers writing home ask about public opinion, about whether we’re for them or against them. They remember Vietnam; they know that uncomplicated patriotism is no longer our style. Eleven percent of our armed forces personnel are female today, more than a tenfold increase over twenty years ago. If heavy fighting begins, a significant number of casualties will be women. People who yearn for the good old days are sure that women in body bags will convince us that women have overstepped their bounds.
For those of us who believe sons are as precious as daughters, it will simply provide further illustration that war is hell.
There are still plenty of military families with a The Best Years of Our Lives quality, the mother waiting with the children for Daddy to come home from the Gulf. But the number of single parents in America has doubled in the last twenty years, and 55,000 of them are in the service, along with an undetermined number of two-soldier couples. When they joined up, they were told that they had to assign guardianship for their children; there is no blanket combat exemption in an all-volunteer army for someone with babies to care for or someone raising children alone.
Most have found temporary homes for their children with relatives. But at least two mothers ordered to the Mideast have left the Army, one because her children would not stop fighting with the cousins with whom they were bunking, and another because her parents became too ill to care for her baby daughter. Both women are fighting to be given honorable discharges.
The military is providing more counseling for its families than ever before. The relatives left at home, from Staten Island to Seattle, are tying yellow ribbons around trees and telephone poles. This will be a different war, in some ways, than any we have fought before, because this is a different kind of country. Our reality has outstripped the traditional stories of brave men going out to fight and die for a great cause while their women wait staunchly at home and provide security and normalcy for the children.
We have become more complicated than the scripts of old movies. Now we have brave women going out to fight and die for a cause none of us are sure about while their children struggle to feel secure with grandparents or aun
ts or uncles. Or a father who instructs the children in how to use his bank card and then leaves for Saudi Arabia. There is neither the kind of acceptance that lulled many of us at the beginning of Vietnam, nor the rage and betrayal that lit up the end. There is a quiet disillusionment: Ah, this again. And for what?
THE QUESTIONS CONTINUE
November 25, 1990
It’s hard to imagine that there was an American household this Thanksgiving that did not have at its holiday table a liberal helping of war talk laced with confusion, skepticism, and doubt.
Even in Dhahran, a truckload of soldiers driving past a group of reporters opened fire, armed with loaded questions. “I want to go home!” two of them shouted. “This isn’t our war! What are we doing here? Why are we over here? We aren’t supposed to be here—this isn’t our war!”
It’s hard to know if the president is really listening to questions like those, shouted out by two young men who may die for his decision. The threat of war sends presidents into a dizzying spiral of self-justification; George Bush could soon become as isolated from real public opinion as Lyndon Johnson became in the shadow of his war and as Richard Nixon’s war kept him insulated from beginning to end.
Many of the questions have been inspired by the president’s public fumbling for the right answers. First we were defending the sovereignty of little Kuwait. Then we were repelling Saddam Hussein, the new Hitler. (This appears to be the standard by which all foes will herein be judged; whether they are properly Hitlerian or not. Madmen too; they must be madmen.) When these reasons proved too broad, we segued to oil and jobs. The president made a package of all, combined them with the impending threat of Iraq’s nuclear capability and offered this to the troops on Thanksgiving Day.
Vietnam hangs like Marley’s ghost over these holiday celebrations, ready to provide us with the present and future contained in the past. For the president, this is as much a millstone around his neck as all the chains and cashboxes were around Marley’s. But I wish he could be taken by spirits, as Scrooge was, into taverns and kitchens and city streets to hear public opinion that is not handpicked or filtered through the screen of advisers or reporters, to know the consumers of his foreign policy.
What he would see are Americans talking, talking, talking. Arguing. Anguishing. Wondering. Wishing. Remembering past mistakes and vowing not to repeat them. We will not blame the troops this time for doing the politician’s business; we know it is possible to support the soldiers and repudiate the policies. And we will talk about the politician’s business as our own—before, not after.
We know from experience that the reasons to sacrifice our children’s lives must be clear and compelling. The economic consequences of a stranglehold on oil are the most tangible but the least effective rationale for this war. If the president knows the American people at all, he certainly knows one thing: they never have been and never will be people who will knowingly trade their sons and daughters for economic stability.
The president left Saudi Arabia still trailing more questions than answers: if we are going to war to counter the threat of atomic weapons in the hands of a madman, does that make us the nuclear policeman of the world, ready to step in whenever some despot becomes technologically sophisticated and border-oblivious? Can we live as a country with the knowledge that once again the children of the poor and of people of color will be killed for the convictions of well-to-do white men? And how much of the decision to go into combat will be reasonable, how much the president’s subconscious fear of the wimp factor that has dogged him, and has always dogged our feisty nation? Will this be a war built, on both sides, around that thankless business of saving face?
George Bush tries often to be consumer-responsive. Critics think this makes him unprincipled, and admirers believe it means he’s pragmatic. It is a problem when he misreads the consumer.
Because he thought baby boomers were looking for the same thing in a running mate that they wanted in a sports car—recent vintage, good looks—he impulsively chose Dan Quayle. He overlooked the value Americans place on intelligence and experience. He cannot act impulsively again. He cannot overlook how smart and experienced the consumers are.
“What are we doing here?” the soldiers in the truck shouted. And there are millions more like them here at home. Traditionally, a war begins and public opinion follows. And that opinion is bolstered by patriotism and loyalty, the feeling that American soldiers dying thousands of miles away deserve our unquestioning support at home. It’s happened backward this time. We are envisioning the body bags, and that is a very, very good thing: If the president thinks a declaration of war would mute the questions of the people, he has misread his consumers.
IN THE SHADOW OF WAR
January 13, 1991
On the imitation-wood-grain surface of the table lay a pile of fliers, small print dominated by letters two inches high: STOP THE WAR NOW! Like Proust’s madeleine, it flung me back, to hundreds of undergraduate bulletin boards, dozens of speeches, but especially to one march in 1972. I held my notebook like a shield between my face and the angry man, on his way home from the night shift, who was watching people move down the avenue beneath banners of peace. “Put down that they’re disgrace to this country,” he shouted over the noise of the chanting “Put down that I’m a veteran of World War II.”
By the imitation-wood-grain table sat a man, narrow as an exclamation point, telling why he came to the first meeting of the New York City chapter of the Military Families Support Network. “I’m a World War II veteran,” he said softly. “My youngest son is in the Gulf. I keep thinking there’s going to be a war. There must be another way of dealing with this. It seems to be going on every twenty years. It has to stop.”
Today we wake in the shadow of war, some from the sound sleep of onlookers, others from the long restless nights of parents, wives, husbands, and children of soldiers. The antiwar effort now is immediate and powerful, as though it were a kind of retribution. This time, the activists seem to be saying, we will get it right. There are marches and vigils planned aplenty. There is an 800 number that provides information on resistance and a 900 number that arranges overnight delivery of letters to senators and congressmen. Nearly every leading religious denomination and several powerful labor unions have come out in opposition to war in the Persian Gulf.
This is not because of great similarities between Southeast Asia and the Middle East. It is because of great differences between who we are now and who we were then. With the end of the Cold War, the bust of our economic boom, and the disintegration of our families, we are a nation struggling to understand itself. One of the most powerful events of our national history was fermenting and souring twenty years ago, a war that divided and defined us in ways we came to hate.
Our national character has changed. Our notions of masculinity, always linked to our notions of face and force, are different today. The woman thing, as the president might call it, has shaped this development. Statistics show a gender gap: 57 percent of men in a recent Times poll favored military action if Iraq does not withdraw from Kuwait by Tuesday’s deadline, while 37 percent said we should give sanctions more time to work. The results for women were almost exactly the opposite: 36 percent voted for immediate action, 56 percent for patience. Our earliest image of this conflict was of women in camouflage fatigue kissing their children good-bye; say what we will about the idea that fathers are as important as mothers, it made some people think on a more human scale about what war means. (Memo to Senator Alfonse D’Amato: Forget the rhetoric about “our boys” during debates and fast-forward to 1991.) Last week a group of feminists demonstrated, personifying the button making the rounds: WE’RE GOING TO WAR TO DEFEND PEOPLE WHO WON’T LET WOMEN DRIVE?
To the extent that we still think of men as resolving differences through force and women through talk, there is a feminization of national feeling. Macho is no longer our national pastime, and there seems to be a declining number of little boys exhorted to “go out t
here and fight like a man.” So far, there have been no “Love It or Leave It” bumper stickers. “I love my country, but …” began two of the testimonials at the Military Families Support Network meeting.
We no longer have illusions about war. We have seen the carnage on CNN. Some protesters are sending the White House black plastic trash bags, to remind the president of how people come home from combat. The shadow that hangs over us all seems to be the shadow of another war. But it is really the shadow of what we will think of ourselves when this is over. Dorothy Thompson, for many years America’s most prominent woman columnist, wrote a column after World War II about disarmament. “You cannot talk to the mothers with planes and atomic bombs,” she wrote. “You must come into the room of your mother unarmed.”
Some of her editors found her sentiments treacly and hard to take. Those sentiments need to be updated in one respect: many of the fathers now feel the same way. Some people consider this a failure of will. I think it’s progress.
PERSONALLY
January 17, 1991
Woman walks into a bakery, where there’s a sign announcing that the price of bagels will go up a nickel on January 15. “War and an increase in the price of bagels on the same day,” she says.
“I hope he backs down,” says the baker.
“Who?” says the woman. “Saddam Hussein or George Bush?”
“Either one,” the baker says.
Bagels were more expensive yesterday, and war broke out. Real life was peculiar, with an edge of sadness and of slow motion, and a sense of New Year’s Eve gone nuclear: only one shopping day till Armageddon. “Now it is our job to shift without too much awkwardness …” Bob Costas said Saturday on NBC Sports, segueing from reports of the Gulf War to a football postmortem. That is what it is like. Dinner and war. Homework and war. The mundane and the horrible.
Thinking Out Loud: On The Personal, The Political, The Public And The Private (v5.0) Page 14