Oh, there was one other military thing my dad did, he was called to alert around the Cuban Missile Crisis. Luckily the unit he was assigned to was attached to the armory in his hometown (later mine) in the county outside Philly, where he was at the law school at Penn. So he commuted between studenting and unit leading, scheduling drills so everyone in the unit could kind of maintain their previous lives a bit.

Also, he made sure to do the training and file the paperwork to get his men as many pay-boosting qualifications and promotions as physically possible, which I’m sure was good for morale. When he was called out on having an absurdly over-ranked platoon he said that in the case of a war the whole unit could be broken up and used as NCO cadres for fresh draftees.

Oh: here’s another story - his unit was called on to present some sort of maneuver demonstration for visiting bird officers with mortars and grenades, they impressed the hell out of the brass with their accuracy by sneaking out to the grounds overnight and wiring it with explosives to be set off remotely.

When I was thinking of going Army OCS – well, let me back up, obviously it was OCS and not ROTC because I was fine on tuition and beyond that the pitch seemed to be “hey kids, do you wish your college experience was more like boot camp?” and no, no I did not. And obviously OCS and not enlistment even at E-4 because bitch please.

When I was thinking of going Army OCS he shared a bunch of these stories and gave me two tips for running an infantry platoon.

First off, for coming in as a fresh wet thing, “Act like you know what you’re doing, and let your sergeant make all the decisions.” While I’ve never applied that, just knowing it led to this situation here, where the first time I met a bunch of Iraq war veterans in a bar, they bought me drinks.

Second off, that you should cross-train as many men as practical as machine gunners and medics, at least one in each squad.

I didn’t join, and by now I think it’s too late for me to go in as officer anyway. I asked a bunch of people I knew who had signed on my idea, and the answers were “no”, “no”, “fuck no”, and “if you don’t give this idea up immediately I am going to personally drive up from Pendleton and kick your ass”. They’re probably right, and I think a big part of it’s that with the New Professional Army even in peacetime the Army doesn’t have that fun, F-Troop/Beetle Bailey “college experience for people in the wrong class to go to college” thing going anymore.

It comes back to Vietnam, of course. With the epidemics of fragging and order refusal, the brass realized that if you take a random sample of the lower classes circa 1970, trained and armed them, assigned fresh college graduates to rule over them and sent them out into the bush, they would persecute war, yes, but specifically race war.

And that while losing Vietnam might augur poorly for the free world, losing the goddamned U.S. Army was a hell of a lot worse. Which is why non-elite units weren’t deployed again (beyond vacation tours in the military colonies of Germany/Japan/South Korea) until they’d been professionalized in the ‘80s. Which is why that dismissive “pff, the Reagan actions were just morale-building exercises” attitude – well yeah, morale needed to be built. Not much of that was regular Army anyway. Air Force and Navy maybe but they didn’t have the same problems - on a base or boat, people could keep eyes on you.

The first Gulf War was the coming-out party, and then with the Cold War over and no need to take what they could get and find a place for it – there’s always that danger of going full Prussian, too much like a civil service bureaucracy with guns. Promotions in accordance with time served and graduate degrees acquired from institutions that exist to grant degrees to enable promotion. I hear SOCOM and Petraeus were shaking that up, which is I’m sure why the iron trianglists putsched him and McChrystal out.

Maybe making combat units mixed-gender and gay as they wanna be *will* result in collars being loosened, god I hope so. Barring that maybe we should bring back a peacetime draft. I say that, starting to be too old for this shit, but anything truly worth raising levies for I’d probably join up anyway. Used to be down with the whole “down with deadly government enslavement” thing, but more and more I identify with my hero d'Annunzio, barnstorming for Italian entry into WWI, telling the crowds “yes, a lot more likely than finding heroic glory you’ll die in a meaningless battle, and no, despite what we say we won’t actually remember or value your sacrifice at all, but COME ON, peasants! It’s not like you’d be doing anything worthwhile with your life otherwise!”

Yes with age comes an enthusiasm for gathering up young men and sending them to their deaths for a cause in which they have no stake, but the ideal from which that degenerates isn’t peace but young men enthusiastically rushing to their deaths.

I woulda loved to go Blackwater, if only they hired fresh and did their own training. I mean hell, they have their own training camps, they can, but they go along with the whole “no raising your own private armies with no loyalty or affiliation to the state” thing, which is No Fun.