Here's to us, and them's like us...

Damned few left.



That's an old toast in the mess. I've raised it for eighteen years now. From when I wasn't really one of, "them's like us", to now, when I know too many of the, "and most of them are dead" which gets tagged on at the very end.

I've raised it in more places than I can name, from quiet little tête à têtes with a couple of friends in quiet bars, to a boozey evening when a major was crying on my sleeve; asking me to tell him none of the soldiers in his unit committed torture, to glorious routs with Ukrainians and Russians who'd grown up expecting to meet me not in the bar, but across the battlefield.

I spent 16 years in the Army, most of it spent in the Calif. Army National Guard. My career was one of luck (the good, the bad, the indifferent). I had more good luck than bad. I fell into my unit (two weeks earlier, and I'd have spent my career as a legal clerk, two days later and I'd not be a plank owner in C Co. 223rd Mi Bn (L). If I'd ended my career a month sooner, I'd not have been with it to the end of it's time in Glendale.

If I'd not gone to DLI, to study Russian when I did, I'd not have ended up instructing interrogation. If I'd not gotten an ADSW job with the Operations staff of the 40th ID, I'd not have spent the huge amount of time I spent on active duty from 1999-2007.

In 16 years in the Guard I spent, at a rough guess, eight years of it in uniform. All because I, at 25, picked the right week to walk into my recruiter's office and ask her what she needed to do to sign me up. It was probably the easiest enrollment she had.

Why did I do it? Dammifino.

I could do a song and dance number and try to tell you what was in my head. That was at least one lifetime ago, and there's been a lot of living (and some dying) between here and there. So I can't really say why I joined.

Why did I stay?

Because, I suppose, of, "them's like us." I've met them in all the services I've gotten to spend time with. Greeks, Ukrainians, Albanians, Russians, Germans, Moldovans, Georgians, Swiss, Italians, Brits, Romanians, Bulgarians, Poles, Austrians, Swedes, Spaniards, Canadians.... Then there were the Americans, from Algeria, El Salvador, the Philipines, Mexico, Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Argentina, England, Honduras, Guatemala....

I can't swear that I've served with someone from every state in the Union, but it's pretty good odds I have. I've worked with soldiers, seamen, airmen, Marines and Coasties.

They weren't saints. Some of them were provably evil. And all them, were "like us". There is an essence of being a betting chip in other people's politics which changes the way one looks at the world, and how one sees the other people who are in that category.

I've said it before, when I sit down to share a drink with another soldier, we can be as friendly as anything, and we both know that nations don't have friends, they have interests. If the balloon goes up, we might be trying to kill each other the next time we meet.

The other thing we come to realise is the world outside doesn't see us. We aren't real to them. We are images on the news, or icons in a speech. The flesh and blood, the fear and love, the anguish and the joy... our families see some of it, but those who aren't close to us... they see a uniform with a, "soldier" in it. That we are people, just like them, is beyond their ken. They project their beliefs onto us. I've been asked how I, "could do something like that" (i.e. consider killing people). I've been called a liar, when I said I wouldn't torture. Not because the people who said that thought I would, no they were convinced I was lying about being an interrogator; because I said torture is no w)ay to get reliable information, and I won't do it.

What brings this out of me now?

Jim Wright, at Stonekettle wrote a piece about the people he sees who claim to love America, but can't articulate anything but what they hate about the way it is now. You know the type. His takedown (America... you keep using that word)* is better than I'd have done (even if I think there are bits which are painted with strokes a bit too broad).


He got the usual.... "why do you hate America nonsense one should expect when one makes that sort of comment.

He also got a note from me, telling him I appreciated it.

He followed it with a piece about how he wrote it, and what it was. He copped to using a strawman... like the first post, that word, it doesn't mean what you think it means.

It's the third piece though, the one about what he loves about America.. that's what sparked that self-indulgent explanation of how I got to be who I am today.

I love America. I do. For all the camaraderie, and the good times, and the stuff I'll sit around the VFW and talk about (the way I recall it, not the way it was), there is no way in the world I've have raised my right hand again (and again, and again... I took the oath four times) if I didn't love the idea of America.

So he wrote America: Land that I love. When I dropped him that line, after reading the first one, he asked me to read the third, and tell him what I thought. This is my answer.

He hit it on the head. I agree with every sentiment in that last post. I had to read it in chunks. I was choked-up and teary-eyed in the middle.

A counterpoint to America is being passed around and posted here and there, mostly on conservative orientated forums†. I’ve received a hundred or more copies. I find it odd that many folks love America so darned much, but can’t take time to articulate their own reasons why so instead they forward something they found on the internet penned by somebody else. Seems to me, if you love America that much, you ought to be able to say why in your own words.

Regardless, the very first thing listed in nearly every single one of those letters is military strength.

I love America for her military might. I’m proud that America can kick ass. I’m proud that we have the mightiest warships and the fastest fighter planes and the biggest tanks. I’m proud that we’ve got all the nuclear bombs. America, hell ya!

This puzzles me. What happens if somebody else builds a bigger aircraft carrier? A faster fighter? A tank with a bigger gun? Will you be less proud of America then?

I’ll tell you what I love about America’s military strength, I’ll tell you what makes me proud of my country.

Ten years now we’ve been fighting two highly unpopular wars. Ten years. A decade now, and more. And today, as I write this, we’ve embarked on yet another one. This generation, these eighteen, nineteen, twenty year old kids, with their goofy haircuts and their tattoos with the rings through their eyebrows and studs through their tongues? Yes, that generation, the Me Generation, the one we call selfish and lazy and fat and self-involved and long, long removed from the Greatest Generation of all, yes that generation. Well, Sir, they come of their own free will to join the unpopular fight. There are few recruiting commercials on TV, no posters in the train stations, no draft – certainly nothing like in previous conflicts. And still they come. They’re hard and they’re smart and they are out there right now, in the dark and dangerous corners of the world fighting under the Stars and Stripes and some have gone back four and five times and more. And still they come, rallying to the banner of our nation and the trumpet call of duty. Our forces are engaged across the globe, they are tired and sore used. And still they come, these proud young people. We are stretched thin, bruised and bloodied. And still they come, every day there they are in the recruiting stations signing the instruments of enlistment. We are hardfought and hardened and weary beyond belief. And still they come, knowing that they may never return. Their comrades in arms, their brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers, their friends, have been killed, maimed, blinded, disfigured, and still they come, risking all to stand between hearth and that desolate shore.

I’m not proud of some airplane, some ship, some bit of technology, or some fucking war – I’m proud of them.

I’m proud of those kids, who of their own free will stand into harm’s way each every single goddamned day, again and again and again, and when they fall others take their place. Not all of them are Americans, not yet, but they all serve America freely and of their own volition. I’m proud of their shear raw courage, their guts and determination, their commitment, their belief, and the fact that America still produces men and women of such resolute character in boundless surplus. I was proud and humbled to lead them, and I’m proud that they will lead the next generation.

But you know what else I’m proud of? I’m proud of the ones who didn’t go. The ones that protested the wars. The ones who demanded peace and railed against the wasting of their countrymen. The ones that stood firm in their conviction and gave voice to their dissent. I’m proud of their passion and their willingness to stick up for their beliefs. Their courage and determination and commitment are no less than that of their warrior brothers.

No nation made up purely of soldiers can survive, when there are no more enemies, it will turn upon itself like a crazed badger clawing out its own guts.

No nation of pacifists can long survive either.

America must have both the warriors and the peacemakers if she is to be truly great, and both are equally important.

One letter said, I love America because we won the Cold War. We won the Cold War? Won? We didn’t win, the Soviets forfeited. Nobody won the Cold War, least of all the human race. Thousands died, and for what? We spent trillions, and for what? We laid waste to vast swathes of the Earth, and for what? We built weapons that could destroy the world a thousand times over and which we still live in fear of, and for that you’re proud? We could have had colonies on the moon and Mars by now, we could have been halfway to the nearest star, pushing the boundaries of the human spirit and ensuring the survival of the entire race. We could have fed the world forever, we could have ended hunger and poverty and disease and remade our planet into a paradise for all of mankind. These self-righteous sons of bitches who speak to me of my divine judgment – I wonder what their defense will be when asked why they could have changed the world, and didn’t.

No, I’m not proud that we “won” the Cold War.

But I’ll tell you what I am proud of, I’m proud that when the wall finally did come down, when the Soviet Union did finally crumble into dust, we extended the hand of friendship to our erstwhile enemies. Sixty years of hate and fear, of mistrust, of suspicion, won’t vanish overnight. But with every single day that passes we move further from the brink, and despite the hatemongers and the warhawks and the fearful pundits who would gleefully reignite the Cold War in all its mad insanity, one day friendship will be the only thing our children remember. I spent much of my life staring down the loaded gun barrels of Soviet battle cruisers, my son will fly free to the stars with Russian shipmates.


Read the whole thing... all three parts, but if you can't read the other, read the last one.


*the interrogator in me is amused. I've never known a good interrogator who wasn't at least passing familiar with that movie. The greats I've known, they could all go on long riffs. I've done Monty Python-esque runs in odd moments of steam venting when teaching, when someone made a reference and the lot of us took off.

†There's a strange sort of fame. I've only had the occasional individual who thinks my point of view so horrid as to make it a bête noir. No no one has ever made replying to me the subject of an internet e-mail campaign.