Quote:
Originally Posted by Tannhauser
If one of your children said they wanted to join the Armed Forces and fight for His/Her Country, would you be proud and supportive, or try to disuade them?[/b]
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Currently I would strongly advise them against it but considering they would hypthetically over 18 the choice would ultimately belong to them. Folks joining now are often deployed very rapidly to Iraq and finding that their short deployments get stretched into 12 and then 15 months. Its a war I opposed form the begining and I still think is ill-concieved and badly managed. The proponents of this war have consistantly put their idology over the facts on the ground in my view which has made a conflict I considered ill-considered in the first place more and more dangerous for those on the ground doing the actual lifting. The rates of people being seriously wounded or permanantly disabled are high and the military has had a lousy track record of properly supplying the soldiers in the first place and has been doing a horrible job of taking care of the wounded and disabled that are returning in the second. Veterans returing with serious disabilities have been finding their claims questioned or tossed out summarily by the military - so no I would advise against joining the armed forces now, particularly the Army or the Marines.
There are plenty of ways to serve your country without being potentially maimed in a war I consistantly believed our president was a big fat idiot for getting us into in the first place. Join Americorps and rebuild New Orleans or teach in a North Philly public school, become a smoke jumper fighting wildfires in the West. And besides all of that even if the kid was ideologically opposed to everything the old man said, if he went as a "security contractor" he would make 4 or 5 times the money and could not have his contract / deployment extended wtihout his permission because of somebody else's lack of planning for what the can of worms they stupidly opened would have all-too predicatably been.
If say Gore had won the "selection" in the Supreme Court and we were only focused on actually rebuilding Afganistan with a broad range of internaional support, I might be inclined to be much, much less emphatic to this hypothetical kid and much, much more willing to let him make his own choices but I would still have reservations. Simply put I feel like particularly for ground troops that the military has a kind of crappy record for taking care of their own in particular in terms of exposure to toxic substances - Agent Orange, Gulf War Syndrome, etc. I am by nature distrustful of large institutions that are used to strictly top-down command structures and to put it bluntly that the decision makers are often a little too comfortable with letting the low man on the totem pole get the get the sharp end of the stick.
Beyond all that Grandma (my mother) is a practicing Quaker and there would be pressure from her to find some other way to express the urge to serve his country that would be out of my hands. It would be much more OK for example from Grandma's perspective to risk one's life working for a NGO in Darfur then to serve in a relatively safe, non-lethal branch of the military.
07-14-2007, 02:54 PM
Uhmm...
