In the wee hours of the morning, back in the day when on the midnight shift on top of Devil's Mountain in Berlin, where we would go to listen in on the commies planning the takeover of the world, I would often find myself alone in the break room with an African-American sergeant pressing me to re-up. He would get points for every one of the troops under his command who re-enlisted. It was annoying, but even though I was still not out even to myself as a gay man, I was drawn to this very engaging soldier, for his looks and for his obvious intelligence, so I guess I appeared to him to be worth working on.
The army was the first place I got to know black Americans. There were one or two in my home town and one in my college class (he got chosen class president - we were nothing if not "liberal" back then), but I had never had any kind of close relationship with black people. New England was still pretty lily-white in those days.
I absolutely loathed being in the army. I volunteered, but only because I would have been drafted, and by volunteering I got to go to the Army Language School to study Russian. It was a good choice, and I managed to avoid the danger spots of Cuba and Vietnam by joining the Army Security Agency and spying on the Russians and the East Germans. During basic training I remember a time when we were taught how to fix bayonets onto our rifles and lunge at dummies. "What's the cry of the bayonet?" our trainer would call out. And we were supposed to shout - three times, at the top of our lungs - "Kill, Kill, Kill!"
As wet behind the ears as I still was in those days barely into my twenties, I still had a voice in my head that spoke to me, "You've got to be shitting me!" The idea of a career in the army would have made me roll on the floor if I could have generated a sense of humor about it. Instead, it called up a sense of fear, anger and confusion. No way this sergeant was going to get me to re-enlist.
It finally sank in to this man that he was barking up the wrong tree with me. He sat back, finally, and said, in sad resignation, "You and I come from different worlds. You're white. You can do anything you want. For me, the army saved my life. It gave me an education, it gives me a decent income, and I have a future here. I think there's probably no way for you to appreciate that."
This was an important moment for me, the first time I became familiar, through direct experience, with systematic racism in the United States, and its consequences. And the first time I understood the concept of cannon fodder.
I was listening this morning to a report on the toll the war in Ukraine is taking on Russian soldiers. What caught my attention was the mention in passing that many of the soldiers fighting on the Russian side are not ethnic Russians.
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| Dmitry Medvedev at a Buddhist temple in Buryatia in 2009 |
More significantly, they tend to be poor. And that means they are in that category of folk most likely to be attracted to the military as a means of escape from poverty. And increasing awareness of this fact seems to be coming to the attention of their brothers and sisters across the border in Mongolia, who are beginning to show signs of solidarity with Ukraine.
I hаve no way of measuring the degree to which these developments might affect Putin's effort to trash and subdue Ukraine, or how it might affect his possible future goals of moving on to Transnistria, or the Baltic States, but it's probably a piece of the larger puzzle worth paying attention to.
The word's apparently getting around. Мaybe you saw these guys in front of San Francisco City Hall a couple weeks ago.
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