I love this article. Some people are surprised that I tried hard (and succeeded) to avoid army service (obligatory at the time), and that I'm not keen on people joining army by choice. It's hard to explain all the reasons clearly, but this post has the essence of it. The stupidity, the submission, the lack of responsibility, the disregard for life. The atomic bomb didn't even matter that much in this story.
"The stupidity, the submission, the lack of responsibility, the disregard for life."
This is absolutely nothing like my experience of life in the military (British Army). If you people think life in a modern western military is about stupidity, submission, lack of responsibility and disregard for your life you are so incredibly far off I don't even know how to start making you better informed.
My experience of military life was one of mutual respect, shared experience and delegated responsibility and at a level most civilians can't even understand.
You could have taken the squadrons and batteries I was in and put them anywhere in the world and asked them to do anything and we would have made it work no matter what. Try that with a group of civilians without the values the military has and see how far you get.
If you really think the military is like this, challenge your preconceptions and sign up to your country's reserves in your spare time for a year or two. See how far you get with stupidity, submission, lack of responsibility and disregard for people's lives.
I'll assume the parent poster is from the US, where conscription didn't end until 1975. In that case, the authors views are very much shaped by the Vietnam War. See https://libcom.org/history/1961-1973-gi-resistance-in-the-vi... for how the army then was quite different than your military experience:
> For soldiers in the combat zone, insubordination became an important part of avoiding horrible injury or death. As early as mid-1969, an entire company of the 196th Light Infantry Brigade sat down on the battlefield. Later that year, a rifle company from the famed 1st Air Cavalry Division flatly refused - on CBS TV - to advance down a dangerous trail. In the following 12 months the 1st Air Cavalry notched up 35 combat refusals. ... Soldiers went on “search and avoid” missions, intentionally skirting clashes with the Vietnamese, and often holding three-day-long pot parties instead of fighting.
A co-worker of mine, ex-Navy, said in the 1970s there were parts of the ship where officers wouldn't go alone, for fear of being attacked.
I think you can see how that experience leads to different views than yours in an all-volunteer, technology-focused military that isn't sending 10s of thousands to their death in an unpopular war.
> A co-worker of mine, ex-Navy, said in the 1970s there were parts of the ship where officers wouldn't go alone, for fear of being attacked.
>
Apparently they had a real reason to fear attacks. At least 230 American officers was killed by their own troops in the Vietnam War, maybe many more. It become so common that it is even a word for it: "Fragging". Interesting read at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fragging .
Since you found that interesting, you may be interested in the link I posted earlier. Not only does it cover fragging, but also near mutinies, strikes, and sabotage. Nearly 1/4 of the crew of the USS Coral Sea signed a petition against going to Vietnam -- something not mentioned on the ship's WP page nor a tribute page -- and the commander of the USS Constellation had to return to port or risk losing control of his crew and ship.
You were downvoted, but my experience (submarine fleet, USN) mirrored yours.
Likewise I wouldn't even know where to begin to describe it, so much of what I learned was tacit knowledge.
Though I wouldn't necessarily use the reserves as an example of what the active component is like, at least in the U.S. If you end up at a reserve unit that never deploys then you'd likely come away with a very different experience than going active duty (or active duty first and then falling back to reserves).
I'd also say that many people could gain a lot personally from what they'd learn with military service, but you have to have a compatible-enough personality. Most team-based constructs do not work nearly as well if the team doesn't have enough 'chemistry', and the military is no different (which is why we weed out recruits who 'fail to adapt').
> You could have taken the squadrons and batteries I was in and put them anywhere in the world and asked them to do anything and we would have made it work no matter what.
One of the features we generally associate with advanced and stable societies is the rule of law, which is essentially the opposite of being able to tell people under your command to do anything and have it be done.
To take an example from recent history, when told to go to Cuba and torture captured terrorists for information, those people should have refused to do it.
He was stating that they could be dropped of in a remote jungle and given an abstract command such as "turn this bundle of sticks into something habitable" and rely on ingrained problem-solving and teamwork skills to complete the goal.
Not that they could be told to napalm a small village and would carry out the order no-questions-asked.
How do you know that? He just says "do anything" without any qualifiers. I gather that you think it's implicit, but how? Is it just an assumption that if someone says "do anything" in that context, they actually mean "do anything good and worthwhile and not evil"?
What I really meant though was that as a group of people there was enough respect, tolerance, humour and self discipline in the group that we could put up with any circumstances that we were asked to.
If you took an office full of the average hackers on here and put them in a mildly uncomfortable situation, they'd be bitching and stabbing each other in the back in days.
I don't see the "of course". There are plenty of people in the world who value blind obedience and from what you wrote it seemed you were one. If you're not, fair, but... be more clear about it. :P
Are you allowed to decide what good and worthwhile and not evil when you are in the militar? Do you have much training about when you should not follow orders?
Yes you absolutely do have training on this. In fact it's required that this specific training is refreshed every year.
Every soldier knows that if they are told to do something and they think it isn't right, there is a whole chain of people they can raise this with. If the first person doesn't listen, you can raise it with the next and so on. There are also parallel chains of people (padres for example) if for some reason you can't speak to your commanders. Finally there is a group of people entirely independent from the military who are only a phone call away, if something has seriously gone wrong.
But to honest, I can't even imagine being asked to do anything wrong by anyone I ever worked with. And if I was I'd just clarify with them what they meant. Nobody in the military shouts 'sir yes sir!' like in the movies. You just normally ask people to do something and if they have a question they just normally ask you it.
where do you think? you just follow the same desire to belong by being efficiently obedient. that's exactly what the post you're replying to said.
ironically, the short story starship troopers tried to highlight that same point, and it also is seen as enlistment propaganda because that whole thing is so effective in us humans that while you're reading it you fall prey.
> "If you think the military is awful, sign up!" Why would anyone ever do that?
So they could prove it for themselves, and be able to explain from a position of authority as to why the military is awful.
My experience from the military was far different than what I expected and that's despite having lived my entire childhood with a father who had joined the same Navy I did.
If nothing else it helps to understand better that thing you are criticizing, just like we don't typically hold a lot of respect for MBAs with no tech background who think that coding is easy, programmers are replaceable cogs and IT is just a cost center.
I value not being placed in a position where I have to follow orders or go to prison above adding credibility to my criticisms. I can't understand why you might think it would be the other way around.
When my father finished high school in the middle of the Vietnam War, his choices were basically join up, get drafted, or hoof it to Canada. He wasn't prepared to abandon his home and family in the US forever, but he also wasn't interested in shooting anybody, and volunteers got more control over their assignments: he volunteered.
By what means I do not know, he arranged to make it through two entire wars, Vietnam and Gulf War 1, without ever being told to do anything but fix trucks in friendly territory. In the Gulf War, in Frankfurt, West Germany, he was the only one left behind when his entire motor pool unit deployed to Iraq. He did the whole unit's paperwork by himself for months, but he still came home to my mother and brother and me every evening.
He retired after twenty-one years, and now he's a senior sysadmin for a local ISP with a great massive beard and a peace sign on his bumper.
I'm going to send him the article. I think he'll enjoy it.
They treat you like an idiot when you first get in because for all intents and purposes that's exactly what you are, and exactly what they have to work with - a kid who will be entrusted with quite a bit of power, and you have to learn to respect the chain of command and listen to orders to avoid costly (and potentially life-threatening) mistakes. I hear that as you gain responsibility and rank a lot of the stupid things about the military start to be less of your concern, but I never stuck around to find out.
Don't try to rationalize it. There are plenty of jobs that incorporate high responsibilities in dangerous environments. Most of them work perfectly fine without the disregard for humans, the submission and the stupidity. Respect has to go both ways, not only upwards in the chain of command.
> You don't think the chain of command respects those under it?
There are plenty of things to suggest that, yes; from this particular article to, just for example, the news coming out of Guantanamo, or the way that military whistleblowers are treated, or the fallout from military atrocities in Vietnam (invariably blame was heaped upon the soldiers on the ground and not allowed to sully the sleeves of the officers who gave them their orders).
Of course "the military" is not a monolithic entity, and good people can both go into it and come out of it. But your "only chefs are allowed to judge food" argument is fallacious. At its worst, the military can and does do horrible, horrible things, and you don't need to serve to be able to see that.
No different to how any other institutional whistleblowers are treated.
>the fallout from military atrocities in Vietnam (invariably blame was heaped upon the soldiers on the ground and not allowed to sully the sleeves of the officers who gave them their orders
Do you live in an alternate reality? The only people court martialed over My Lai for example were officers, including a Colonel and a General (who was demoted).
So you think your cherry picked examples prove your point?
The military is made up of PEOPLE. Those people place themselves at great risk for little pay in horrible circumstances. They do a job that very few people are willing to do and your only opinion is a holier than thou diatribe against the US military IN PARTICULAR.
Why not use examples of the atrocities committed by other governments, terrorist orgs, even whole nations? There is a lot of evil in the world, my friend. You'd do well to avoid painting the hundreds of thousands of people in the services with the same brush you use for those who violate every principle we stand for as a nation.
Perhaps I should have qualified that more than I did. As I said elsewhere in these comments, my father served in the U.S. Army for 21 years, and he's one of the finest men I've known. Militaries, like all human institutions, are made up of good people and bad people and people just trying to get by, from the lowest ranks of the highest.
I do think the chain of command is inclined to respect the majority of soldiers who do their jobs competently and don't cause trouble--people like my father; it's not necessarily a bad thing. But the chain of command doesn't like it when people rock the boat, even if they have a good reason; and it doesn't like it when people make their superiors look bad, even if they did it while following orders.
Of course I'm generalizing. Certainly officers with real integrity exist at every level. But I do think my examples demonstrate that there's a real cultural problem there, and I don't think enough is done to address. The fact that even worse groups also exist doesn't excuse that.
And yes, I'm speaking of the US military in particular. I don't know enough to either praise or condemn any other. I'm not railing against terrorists and rogue states, because there's no reason to point out that water is wet. No one expects terrorists to be decent people. But we should expect, and demand, better of the people who are tasked with keeping us safe at night, who are supposed to be the best of us.
> "But we should expect, and demand, better of the people who are tasked with keeping us safe at night, who are supposed to be the best of us."
The vast, vast, vast majority of people who serve in the armed forces of the US do so honorably and with a level of commitment that belies the importance of their jobs. They're young kids, not even old enough to drink, and in large part they come from circumstances where they had little opportunity or were surrounded by an environment that didn't respect following the rules, doing good work, and working well with others.
SO when you talk about the cultural problem you believe exists within the military, I'd like to remind you that the military is largely composed of people who are not far removed from the civilian culture they grew up in. You get former gang-bangers in the Army, religious nuts in the Air Force, and so on.
So if there are problems in our military culture, it's because there are problems in our culture as a whole. The military doesn't change points of view, correct deep psychological problems or reverse trauma, eliminate racist leanings or homophobia. It does NONE of those things. What it does effectively is train people to work as a team and follow rules to get things done. It's VERY effective at that.
To take one of your examples: Guantanamo. When was the last time you heard the actual voting public railing to get that gulag closed? Did you hear about a write-in campaign to Congress? How about a media blast to educate the public about what it's really like there?
You didn't. That's because the public wants it to exist. Congress made it impossible to close Guantanamo based on the politics of giving people actual trials in the USA.
You seem to labor under the idea that the military goes off on its own and decides to do things that shock the conscience. It doesn't. It follows orders from the civilian leadership. The CIVILIAN leadership. And that leadership often sucks ass. From the President to the Congress, getting good leaders that care about how the military goes about doing its job and HOW it does it is so rare as to be an anomaly in my country's history.
Also, http://www.travelbughawaii.com/Ioke.htm, about a few contractors which had to shelter during Hurricane Ioke in Johnston Island's only surviving building, the windowless concrete Joint Operations Center, in August 2006.
I volunteered for the service because I though it was 'cool'. Not just any cool, Marine Cool!. And I agree with everything that you just said. The majority of my fellow Marines/brothers were very uneducated (drop outs, barely passed their GEDs, their recruiters 'helped' them get in, etc). But as I got to know them they wanted to kill 'rag heads' and other bad guys. They just didn't care. They hoped they would get their orders and off they go. Some officers were younger than me. I'm not that smart of a guy (I question from time to time) but some of the orders these guys would give didn't make any sense, and I suspect it was for their own ego to prove something.
Anyways, my 4 year experience wasn't terrible but it did teach me a lot of what not to do and how not to behave. I just can't figure out why so many people want to kill. What in their lives happened that they one day wake up and want to kill. And by that I mean in every legal sense defined to be within the code of conduct. It's very easy to hide behind 'fighting for my country', 'fight for freedom' etc.
I too would do the same if drafted for national service. I'd rather sit in a prison than fight because someone told me to. I'd defend my country at the border but nothing more. If I don't have that choice I'd rather not fight.
In the UK, we have a nut job politician[1] who recently tried to bring national service back. There are several crackheads trying to roll this back in periodically sponsored by the likes of Help the Heroes, Clarkson, Daily Mail, The Sun and a rather moronic populous. It's all propaganda driven by the armed forces themselves and utterly sickening to watch service glorified like it is.
One of the 'advantages' of national service is that it spreads the cost of war more equitably to the country. For that reason I support it. I was of the right age to have gone to Iraq or Afghanistan. Many of my friends did. I actually considered joining at a couple points.
My parents were very much in favor of the wars. They also were 100% adamant that I could not join the military.
With national service, that choice doesn't really get to get made. I feel that over the last 10+ years, the wars were out of sight and out of mind for a lot of people because their kids weren't at risk. I feel like the questions would have been a lot harder on the gov't if we still had a draft going on.
Interestingly, the US armed services absolutely 100% do not want the draft. They get less oversight without a draft. The all volunteer force is higher quality and there are fewer issues with people going AWOL, and people are more likely to stick around so training costs are lower. I think the people that don't want a draft are those that could be drafted (totally understandable, I wouldn't actually want to go to a war myself), and those that like their wars without having to deal with the costs.
I find it frightening that people support slavery because of vague and unsupported ideas about how it will influence public opinion.
I can kind of sort of understand the people who say that the draft should be used for national defense when fighting a critical war. I disagree, but I can see their point of view. But I can't understand at all the idea that we should force every person of a certain age (I'm assuming we won't leave women out anymore) into involuntary servitude because it might get people to think more carefully about waging war.
Yeah it would be great if nobody agreed to commit any violence ever.
But until that point, it's nice to have some soldiers on our side who can liberate your country if the other side does decide to fight, or special forces to rescue you if you get kidnapped in a failed state by some people who decide to fight. And let's hope they're intelligent, disciplined, responsible and care about your life.
What I find so disturbing about this article is that the kid enlisted in the military for no other purpose than to get food and shelter. Wow.
I enlisted in the Navy and I had a very clear objective: get some structure in my life and grow up, go to college maybe, and generally be of some use to society. I'm actually thankful to the Navy for giving me some very solid lessons early in life but I'm ashamed to admit I didn't see it then like I see it now. I was lucky to find the Navy.
I guess you are who you are. He was a street person. He should have stayed one.
He made a very reasonable request to add a simple safety measure to a system he was in part responsible for, and he was ignored by the very people who taught him to take that system seriously.
How would you expect anyone to react?
Keep in mind the people that he reported the issue to are at least 3 steps removed from the people that change the design. There are the military guys that use the equipment (including his commanding officer), there are the military guys that spec the equipment, there are civilians that work directly for the military that oversee its design, and then there are civilians at a military contractor that actually design it.
I was the last step in that change for a few years - a civilian for a contractor that designed weapons. I would have loved the opportunity to talk to the 'users' to get feedback. It was seemingly impossible due. This was either due to unintentional bureaucracy, or purposeful separation of people for security measures. I'll never know. But it's entirely possible that his commanding officer was completely sympathetic and thought the design was fucked up, but had no idea where to go to get it changed.
Portrayed by the author as taciturn and evangelical, Lt Com. Karlsven, a farm boy who joined the Navy, went on to become a teacher and pastor working with children. The rear admiral, identity unknown to the readers, commanded four months prior to the Cuban missile blockade, the height of the cold war, and a time when the nation's military credibly believed nuclear war was imminent. Kirby's beautifully written accounting of his own internal struggles with identity, faith and authority is a delight to read for its prose. But, still arrogant as he thought he only once was, the author finds fault with everything except himself. Karlsven deserves better than Kirby's depiction ( http://www.newspapers.com/newspage/47643008/ )
That's the best part of the article to me. He had the ethics to ask for a discharge. He said he was close to detonating the heads.
Rationally speaking, if he had detonated a head and thus blown the warehouse (and possibly a part of New Mexico?), he might had weakened the US nuclear inventory and caused the domination of the USSR.
This was the early sixties. The US outclassed the USSR in nuclear arms by literally an order of magnitude. The US had tens of thousands, with thousands of those immediately ready to be delivered, while the USSR had thousands, with hundreds immediately ready.
For example, at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the US had about 170 ICBMs, 100 submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and 450 shorter-range ballistic missiles based close enough to reach the Soviet Union. The USSR had 20-40 ICBMs and no SLBMs, and of course the whole deal with the Crisis was their attempt to base short-range missiles close enough to reach the US, so they just had those few. The USSR had 160 long-range nuclear bombers, while the US had well over 1,000. This doesn't even include the British and French forces, both of which were fairly substantial. (The British V bomber force outnumbered the Soviet strategic bombers all by themselves, and was in position to strike quickly.)
One guy blowing up one weapon in one stockpile wouldn't have altered this significantly.
The name 'Wire of Death' is an English rendition of one of its popular Dutch names; Dodendraad which can be translated as either "Death wire" or "Wire of the dead". As the war continued and more and more victims fell to the electric fence it became known as simply De Draad meaning "The Wire". To the German authorities it was officially known as the Grenzhochspannungshindernis ("High Voltage Frontier Barrier")
or throwing a [look a like of] high security key (strategic command communication in another country with big nukes) used punch card (which supposedly was just burned following strict procedure in the presence of 3 witnesses - birth of a king is witnessed less strictly :) into a toilet bowl of the commander - by his reaction he would prefer real bomb or even crocodile there than the card.
