Billy, Don’t Be a Hero
I spent a part of last night with the Number Three Surrogate Daughter. She turned 21 last week. She is emancipated and finally able to control her own choices. She is finishing her undergrad and wanting to get her Master’s? Her Doctorate? In psych. By joining the Navy as an officer/doctor. The Military will pay for the degree in exchange for six years of her life.
I love her dearly and want to be proud that she is capable of considering this choice. But I am afraid that I have become an old woman, set in her ways, and those ways were forged in the 60s. I was too young to have participated in the televised youth movement; I watched it on tv from my living room in a tiny, coastal sub-tropical town, so far removed and yet so far ahead of that movement that I can never vote Republican, nor embrace the concept of the military. I knew the last draftees and the first young men to die (in droves) of AIDS.
I know that this is my problem, and I have no right to try and pass them on to her. She’ll just be one of that tiny minority of good people who enlist for the more noble reasons. And I can be proud of that.
I totally understand.
I’d really worry about any young woman who joins the military, though. She’s statistically in more danger from her fellow soldiers/sailors/etc. than she is from the enemy in a conflict situation.
The misogyny rampant in our military makes me ill.
Another quick note: Have you seen the news stories on the problem of gangs in the military? How the military has begun recruiting gang members and offering them a “morality waivers?”
The army has some NERVE running broadcast ads based on supportive parents’ testimonials, because what parent would support their teen daughter’s decision to join an organization ACTIVELY RECRUITING gang bangers?
Lying sleazebags. Our military is an embarrassment, top to bottom.