Another Day in the ’Box

[aadler]

 
Catching up for the moment.

I had a birthday recently; I didn’t say anything about it, but our Executive Officer apparently keeps up with such things, because she not only sent me a congratulatory e-mail but cc’ed it to the OIC and NCOIC of my detachment, and they spread the word. (And when I called Susan in the evening, on the same weekday I normally phone her, she remembered it without being prompted.) Since I enlisted, every even-numbered birthday has arrived during a deployment, with this the second one taking place in Iraq. No presents, though one of our lower-enlisted brought me a couple of cans of non-alcoholic Coors from the chow hall, but it was a decent milestone.

Today, however, is a really important day: my son’s birthday. I hadn’t really given it much thought until it arrived, but that matters considerably more to me than does my own.

My job requires me to keep up with the news, so there’s a television in the office tuned to the Armed Forces Network. Today, some woman on CNN was taking a brief look at the Afghanistan-Pakistan situation (though the newsroom kept using their Iraq graphic), and she said something outstandingly asinine. Paraphrasing, since I don’t remember the exact words, she opined that in today’s economy a lot of people were looking at military life to maintain their health care benefits, plus the different services offer a panoply of bonuses to keep up enlistment numbers; if the Obama economic plan works, she wondered, would the improvement in the economy make military life less attractive by comparison, with the military becoming ‘victims’ of the economic recovery?

Oh, so many thoughts.

First, we should be so lucky. The Obama ‘plan’ is a solid recipe for economic disaster. There may be a minor interim semi-recovery — simply because economies do fluctuate — but things are going to get a hell of a lot worse before they get appreciably better.

Second, those of us in uniform don’t join for the money. As a Reservist, I’m surrounded by people who take a pay cut every time they’re called up … and, even in those cases where the pay is an improvement on their civilian earning power, there’s still the minor matter of people trying periodically to kill us. Usually from ambush or remote control, removing even the satisfaction of direct combat. Yet re-enlistment rates go UP whenever our military forces are engaged in an actual war; today, the same CNN broadcast noted that all of our armed services, including Guard/Reserve as well as full-time components, have met their recruiting goals at or over 100%. (The Marines, notoriously the toughest service and the ones thrown into the worst combat, routinely break 110%.) One of our own people just re-enlisted in-theater — days after a rocket attack that killed one soldier and wounded two others, so he wasn’t under any illusions about easy duty — and that kind of thing is far from uncommon.

Another man in my unit is the fourth generation of his family to serve; his grandfather was a survivor of the Bataan Death March. In my own family, my youngest brother was the first able-bodied male on either side — maternal or paternal line — to not join one branch or another of the armed forces, for as far back as we had family records. When my unit went to Afghanistan, following our first tour in Iraq, roughly a quarter of us were there because we had signed voluntary waivers allowing our early redeployment.

We’re not in it for the money.

Third … when we’re considering the Afghanistan mess, the growing instability in Pakistan, and Iran’s unrepentant drive for nuclear weaponry, speculation about economic good times messing up our recruiting numbers is way, way, WAY down the list of things we worry about.

And that, I think, should do it for now.