Stories That Should Be Remembered

I read a post on an online friend's blog yesterday.

He quoted from a college professor railing against military veterans in her class, accusing them of wanting to get a degree so as to earn more money killing, raping and looting, using the tools their "masters" had given them in the military.

This is a link to the article: soldiers in her classroom. Referring to them, she said:

"The American military and mercenary soldiers who 'sacrificed' their lives did not do so for the teacher’s freedom to teach the truth about the so-called war on terror, or any of US history for that matter. They sacrificed their lives, limbs and sanity for money, some education and the thrills of the violence for which they are socially bred. Sacrificing for the 'bling and booty' in Iraq or Afghanistan, The Philippines, Grenada, Central America, Mexico, Somalia, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, or any of the other numerous wars and invasions spanning US history as an entity and beginning with their foundational practice of killing the Indians and stealing their land."

You might notice that she didn't mention The Revolutionary War, WW I or WW II. They don't fit as neatly in to her thesis.

I think soldiers, sailors, and marines are not as arrogant, or as stupid as the good Doctor makes them out to be. I certainly don't think most of them "are parroting their master’s slogans" as she accuses them of doing. Kids, for good or bad, going to war (be it back when I was one of them and could avoid doing it because I had a "4-D" deferment and avoided it, or when one of my high school friends, who had no way out, went in, and died as a result, back in one of the wars the Doctor mentioned, Vietnam), or today, for the most part don't go in, or come out, brainwashed as the Doctor implies, without any analysis, as killers. She, in my mind is arrogant and mindless to assume that having gotten out of the military, their only purpose is to get a piece of paper that allows them to make more money doing what she, without any evidence accuses them of having done, more mindless killing.

I am not defending a soldier who commits an atrocity, as I would not defend the kid in Utah who mowed down some people in a mall last week. I am defending our other soldiers, sailors and marines. While I don't like what old people like me like to use them for sometimes, attacking them because they served is plain wrong.

One of my brothers was a Marine from '72 to '76, during the Vietnam era.

He went in for the most part because of a stupid old man and his own youthful machismo. He and a friend were out in some woods that were part of a state forest. It was winter and it was cold, they slipped a lock on a cabin and went in. A Department of Natural Resources Ranger came by and arrested them. The stupid old man, a judge, told them they could spend some time in a youth facility, or they could join the military that spring when they graduated high school. Stupid kids that they were, they did the stupid old judge one better. They weren't going to be wimpy soldiers or sailors, they'd be Marines.

My brother was lucky, as he tested through the roof on the entrance exams. They put him in, I think it is called, the "Air Wing." He worked on the avionic systems of A6 and A5 Marine jets that flew off Navy aircraft carriers near the Philippines and Japan.

He left after four years, at the time, the youngest peace time Sergeant in the history of the Marine Corps. He went to school and built upon what his "masters" had taught him. Not the killing part, the avionics part.

When my Mom died, we were sitting in her house going through stuff to be distributed. One of the things sitting in one of the boxes was my brother's commendation for having jumped into a burning jet to "save" the pilot.

I only knew about it because he and I got drunk together one night in the late Seventies. He told me about it, saying it was the worst thing he had ever done because the pilot died the next day as the result of his stupid reaction. Had he let him die in the cockpit, the pilot would have passed sooner and less painfully. My conclusion about his action was a bit different. I don't know if his "masters" made him a hero or if he brought the character trait with him to the job.

In my mother's living room, holding the leather folder holding its fine-paper commendation, I asked my two nieces, his daughters, if they knew that their father was a hero. Looks can't kill. Violent head shakings didn't deter me because unless I told them, they would never know.

I told them something of the story without the parts about charred flesh.

My brother is a hotshot with an aerospace company. As near as I can tell, if no one else in the world can figure out what's wrong with an airplanes' distance measuring equipment, he fixes it. His daughters have half of their genes from him. He might have never settled down, excelled and married his kid's mom, built a good and honorable life with his wife and spent way too much money educating their kids, unless "his masters" gave him the tools to be what he always was.

The good Doctor does my brother and hundreds of thousands of other veterans wrong by her vicious screed. More, she does her students wrong by not teaching them to think critically, rather, encouraging them to criticize and hate without reason.

I hope my brother doesn't find his way to this post. Heros aren't comfortable with attention.