Isolated Traditions

Regular readers of this blog know that one of my continuing themes is that a smaller, post-Vietnam, post-draft military is caught in this bind: it is more dependent than ever on the press to tell its story to a public less and less likely to know military people or understand military issues, yet the members of the press are as unlikely to have had much contact with the military as any other member of the public.

So I was quite struck by the cover story of this week's Newsweek. While it's very topic, in a sense, centers precisely on the fact that military service is more and more confined to an increasingly isolated segment of the society, it seemed to me not only quite fair, it actually included some important information all too rarely included in recent coverage.

Just look:

The father-son tradition of inherited sacrifice and honor goes on and on, and now includes some mothers and daughters as well.

But it also underscores the isolation of the military from the rest of society. Increasingly, it seems, America is divided between the vast majority who do not serve and the tiny minority who do. The shared sacrifice of World War II is but a distant memory. During World War II, 6 percent of Americans were in uniform; today, the Pentagon says, the figure is four tenths of 1 percent. On military bases, wives warily watch for a pair of somber-faced officers emerging from a car, a sign that bad news is about to arrive at the front door. At military hospitals, young men and women missing limbs are an increasingly familiar sight. But for the rest of us, going about our daily lives, it can be hard to tell there's a war on.

Soldiers are widely honored, not scorned as they were during Vietnam. But mothers, horrified by grisly TV images, do not want their children to join up. Since February, the Army—Regular, Reserves and National Guard—has been missing its monthly recruiting goals by as much as 42 percent. On the other hand, re-enlistment rates are up, especially for those serving in combat arms in Iraq. Incongruous as it may seem for the millions whose closest brush with battle is on cable, soldiers and Marines on the front line are proud to be there and willing to serve again. The overall effect is to heighten the sense that the military is becoming a proud cult that fewer and fewer outsiders want to join.

I have to admit, I winced at the word cult. Nonetheless, it's rare enough to see the simple fact that those who have served in the current combat zones find that service rewarding at any level acknowledged, much less that they find it so rewarding that recruitment is more of a problem than retention.

I do also wish that the article had mentioned, as Secretary Rumsfeld did in his briefing today, but as few reporters ever seem to figure out, that as retention holds for the active duty force, recruiting will, ironically, be hurt for the Guard and Reserve -- since it is those leaving the active duty forces who always make up an important part of the recruitment pool for those forces.

In any event, this comes towards the end of the article, and it's particularly interesting given reporting this week regarding how hard military life is on marriages (not to in any way dismiss the importance of that information):

Marine Corps duty is especially hard on families. A Marine could once expect to be home 18 months for every six months spent deployed abroad. Now he or she is gone half the time. And yet General Conway, who is now the chief operations officer for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was surprised to learn that young married Marines re-enlist at a greater rate than unmarried troops. The only explanation is that for many, the Marine Corps is a world in which they wish to raise their families, despite the dangers and frequent moves.

One other piece of information, which came way at the beginning of the article, and frankly surprised me in scale, I hope will be widely picked up:

General Odierno is one of about 300 Army generals in the U.S. military. About a third of them have sons or daughters who have served or are serving in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Too often the brass are portrayed as unthinking, unfeeling, or both. I certainly do not for a minute believe that our generals have to have a child serving in a combat zone before they care about the institution, the war, or the troops serving under them. But maybe this will give those who still need more evidence of the level of investment these folks have something to think about.

Comments

[Richard Aubrey]

It's worse, or better, depending on how you look at it.
With base closings, the remaining troops are concentrated in and around fewer locations. That so many of them are married means a different impact in the area than the bars and strip joints that was all the zillions of unmarried guys needed off post.
Retirees who like the commissary and exchange privileges and the access to medical care at base hospitals also tend to be in the area, especially as the the bases are usually in low-cost-of-living areas.
Local schools and churches are unlikely to have the extreme lefty views that some "blue" areas find so appealing.
I once served in a unit which had missile batteries (Nike Hercules) in isolated areas, where there might have been twenty married guys living thirty miles from any other military facility. Their concentration, and thus impact, was minimal in the area.
So military kids are going to be raised in strongly military areas, even if their parents always live off post. Kids whose parents are not serving but who live in the area are growing up in a milieu which is strongly military and will be influenced differently than most kids.

The offsetting factor is the huge number of Guard and Reserve folks going overseas. Their experience is longer, and more intense than the usual two weeks at summer camp, and they are spread out. Although they are not concentrated, their influence, because of their visibilty, is greater.

While I have no problem with a group of people who think of service as a good thing and a duty, I do worry about their isolation.

Frank Schaffer (sp), a writer whose son went into the Marines, wrote about it. The reaction of his precious friends (one wanted to know what the private school had done wrong that such a thing should happen) is priceless. And Schaffer himself admits he could never identify with military families until he became one, a strange admission for a WRITER, for heaven's sake. That's isolation.