Some perspective on military valor

I grew up during the Cold War and graduated from college in 1962, just in time to be drafted into the army to fight the commies who we believed were about to start a Third World War, this time with nuclear weapons. Everybody knew everybody in my small town in Connecticut and I was able to wrangle the information out of the local draft board (there was a draft in effect) that my number was coming up sometime in the fall, possibly as early as late September.

I was too pain-averse to smash my instep and running off to Canada required more pluck than I had at the time, so my ears perked up when I learned that if I enlisted I had a decent chance of getting into the Army Language School in Monterey, California. It would mean an extra year - three, instead of two - of military service and I would still have to carry a gun, and go through basic training.  

I dodged the Cuban Missile Crisis only to be faced with the new war in Vietnam. I no longer saw a choice, so it was sign on the dotted line, take the bus to New Haven, learn that my heart murmur was benign and start my days at Fort Dix, New Jersey where I crawled under barbed wire on the ground.  When my superior would scream in my face, "What's the spirit of the bayonet? I would scream back: "Kill, kill, kill!"

But at least I didn't have to go to war.

Over my college years, which included a junior year in Munich, I had developed a facility for and fascination with language learning and the field of linguistics. Getting to go to the Army Language School seemed too good to be true. I ended up studying Russian and was sent to Berlin, initially to listen in on Russian soldiers in the field in East Germany. Eventually, though, my knowledge of German got me transferred to the political section to listen in on the cadre that was paired with East German officials who really ran the show. Not a bad way, all told, to spend the extra year it cost me to avoid the draft.

I've written much elsewhere about the importance to my life of that year - which became closer to two years in the end - in Berlin. I formed not only a passionate love for the city, established a close bond with a favorite aunt - my Tante Frieda - and formed friendships with guys I came to define as "chosen family."  Watching the wheels go round up close in the American military, I also developed a political consciousness that I would carry with me for decades. It included a seething loathing for what I saw as American bullying. When I left the army and came to live in Berkeley, California, I was a walking stereotype of a leftie pinko banging on about American imperialism and the cruel folly of America's role as world policeman. I saw so much stupidity and corruption in the army that I could barely see straight. At one point my mother wrote me that she was proud that all three of the McCornick boys - me and my two cousins - were wearing a uniform and serving their country, Billy in the Marines, Brian in the Air Force, and me in the Army. I wrote back to my mother that if she mentioned that fact again I would tear up the letter and never read anything she wrote again.

That wasn't me at my worst. That came later, when I was at a Chinese New Year's parade in San Francisco, where I settled after I got out of the army. A military band came by and I found myself shouting "PAID KILLERS!  PAID KILLERS!" at the top of my lungs.   A woman standing next to me began shaking with rage.  "My son's in the army. And he is not a paid killer!" she said.

I've spent the last fifty plus years wishing I could find that woman and apologize to her. I was 26 at the time and convinced that America was not just on the wrong track, but an actual force for evil in the world. And I made no distinction between national policy as established by people at the top and the people in the trenches whose only option was carrying out the orders from above. I've had a lifetime to modify the convictions I held so fiercely in the 1960s.

And I have modified them. I came in time to distinguish between people with the power to call their own shots and those who appear to have been born to be cannon fodder.  No great feat, actually, especially because I grew up in a half-German household during and just following the Second World War. In time I came to see Germans not just as perpetrators but as victims of the war, in part because of Tante Frieda, who had lost her hearing crawling from one bomb shelter to another. I took that same perspective toward the Russian soldiers invading Ukraine when I read that Putin was drafting both prisoners and people from non-Slavic minority areas. 50,000 of them have died so far and counting, in addition to the 30,000 Ukrainians who have lost their lives trying to keep their country whole. I have a profound respect for military valor, and really do regret being so naive in my twenties.

So here I sit, now an old fogey in front of a computer screen hoping my country can escape the folly of putting back into the White House a man with so little character that he refuses to have his picture taken with soldiers with missing limbs. He sneered at war hero John McCain for spending much of his time as prisoner in a cage in North Vietnam  ("I like people who don't get caught") and just today joked that the rich Republican donor he's giving a Medal of Freedom to is much better off than recipients of the military Medal of Honor, because the latter are riddled with bullets.  I assume the guy was trying to make a joke. Either way, the insensitivity is stunning.

I know many worry about handing him the code to nuclear weapons.  I worry more about giving this lowlife the power to send young people to war.