OCTOBER 1, WEDNESDAY

THANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVICE

When I graduated from the College of Wooster in 1959 there was nothing that I felt like doing next. I didn’t want to go to graduate school and I didn’t want to get a job. So I decided to join the Army to get out of the way what I thought was two years of required military service. I had a selective service card and understood that sooner or later I would have to enlist. This was after the Korean War and before the Vietnam war. It never occurred to me that I would have to go off to war and try to kill someone as directed by my commander in chief.

First I spent the summer after graduation hitchhiking around the the country with a stop in San Francisco to help my Woodstock, India friend, Ray Smith put together a Sears and Roebuck kit house.

And then in the fall I enlisted in the army. I went through basic training, then further training to be a medic, including how to jab each other with needles to simulate vaccinations, at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio and then I was shipped off to Germany on a troop ship and stationed for two years in yellow barracks in Aschaffenburg, Germany.

There is more to my time in Germany that was pleasant, but today I was reminded of my army experience by the speeches that Pete Hegseth, Secretary of War, and Donald Trump, Commander in Chief (and bone spur draft dodger) gave the 800 highest ranking officers in the military.

Pete Hegseth’s speech apparently directed the military to be more manly, to be prepared to do indiscriminate killing without fear of breaking some rule of war and to get into manly fighting muscle bound fighting shape, no beards, no big bellies, no wimps, no trans people, no women, to man up in an army that has shifted from hand to hand combat to drone technology with no muscle required.

What I remember about the military was the top down obedience demanded of the army with no individuality allowed. It was the American extreme of authoritarianism to defend democracy, which seemed ironic, since no individual choice was allowed, in which everything was dictated, ranging from exactly when you could change from winter to summer uniforms, regardless of the temperature outside, to exactly how you should be buttoned up. Everything was dictated from the top down, in the case of these speeches from from Trump, whose big idea was to train troops by unleashing them on American cities, through Hegseth and his dictation about being manly.

From my perspective all of this manliness in the army was mind numbingly unbearable. It started with the yellow barracks with nothing feminine accepted. The yellow walls, the lack of beauty of any kind, no flowers, nothing sensuous or alive. I was US51433638, a number, without a personality, a clerk because I could type. But even more crushing was male domination. Good Morning, Sir, and a salute for every officer, with every action of everyone dictated from above. My one relief as a soldier was that I was so far down the ladder that I never had to give a command to anyone. What I finally resolved was that everything that was unpleasant about the army came from it being an all male place. Along with every other enlisted man I knew the exact number of days until I would be released, 125 days and a wake-up, a last day which didn’t count.

So when I visit the VA Hospital and encounter the phrase, over and over, “Thank you for your service,” I cringe, because I was the world’s worst soldier, the exact opposite of Hegseth’s manly fighter. When shouted at in basic training, “What is a bayonet for?” I would shout back, “To kill, to kill” knowing that I was being brainwashed and that it was all nuts, and that bayonets were a thing of the past.

And that is what I thought again today as I heard about Hegseth’s lectures to generals, with much more military experience than him, to man up and return to 1990, and from our half crazed Commander in Chief sending his troops off to defeat the sinister enemy lurking in our cities.