Serving the Nation

Frank Schaeffer is a Boston-area novelist - a self-described "Volvo-driving, higher education-worshiping" American brahmin, whose kids went to private schools and whose neighbors regarded military service as...something other people do.

Then, his youngest boy joined the Marine Corps.

It had been hard enough sending my two older children off to Georgetown and New York University. John's enlisting was unexpected, so deeply unsettling. I did not relish the prospect of answering the question "So where is John going to college?" from the parents who were itching to tell me all about how their son or daughter was going to Harvard. At the private high school John attended, no other students were going into the military.

"But aren't the Marines terribly Southern?" asked one perplexed mother while standing next to me at the brunch following graduation. "What a waste, he was such a good student," said another parent. One parent (a professor at a nearby and rather famous university) spoke up at a school meeting and suggested that the school should "carefully evaluate what went wrong."

"What went wrong". Amazing.

And yet Schaeffer finds he's learned a lot from his son's experience:

My son has connected me to my country in a way that I was too selfish and insular to experience before. I feel closer to the waitress at our local diner than to some of my oldest friends. She has two sons in the Corps. They are facing the same dangers as my boy.

And the big lesson:

Have we wealthy and educated Americans all become pacifists? Is the world a safe place? Or have we just gotten used to having somebody else defend us? What is the future of our democracy when the sons and daughters of the janitors at our elite universities are far more likely to be put in harm's way than are any of the students whose dorms their parents clean?

I feel shame because it took my son's joining the Marine Corps to make me take notice of who is defending me. I feel hope because perhaps my son is part of a future "greatest generation." As the storm clouds of war gather, at least I know that I can look the men and women in uniform in the eye. My son is one of them. He is the best I have to offer. He is my heart.

He's right, of course.

Last week, I briefly mentioned the idea of instituting National Service - the sort of system they have in Switzerland, Israel and (to some extent) Norway, where citizens serve a period in the active military (Switzerland - about a year), and then in the reserves for most of their adult lives. Everyone in the nation shares the burden and duty of protecting the country - the sons of janitors and the daughters of diplomats.

Several people wrote after last week's brief reference, saying that there were many sociological and military reasons not to do this. And they're all correct - the astounding proficiency of our current military is a direct result of it being all professional, all volunteer.

That being said - our military, and the attending burden and duty - are predominantly the province of the lower-middle and lower classes. And I've wondered for years - had Chelsea Clinton been a reservist in a motor pool, had the children of our congresspeople and diplomats and bureaucrats and spinmeisters been combat engineers and army truck drivers and tank repair girls, would we have intervened as blithely and cavalierly in Somalia, or Haiti, or the Balkans?

I have no answer to that, of course.

Read the whole article - it's worth it.

Posted by Mitch at November 26, 2002 10:35 AM