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Since the late 1860s, our national custom is to book a day of the year, Memorial Dayto honor the soldiers whose lives were sacrificed on behalf of our country. Yet the rest of the year, as a country, we largely ignore the painful daily sacrifice of the living soldiers.
And with the introduction of the all-volunteer army more than 40 years ago, it was becoming easier to do since military service became a "voluntary" choice, often motivated by the most predatory aspects of late-stage vulture capitalism, which feasted the profits generated by the collapse. wages that happened by chance at about the same time.
It was President Richard Nixon, who had pursued the Vietnam War, who was elected to end the conflict, who signed the post after a commission he set up to study the issue the recommended.
There is no doubt that Nixon was a victim of failure in trying to enforce the universal military conscription to wage an unpopular war. If you removed this coercive aspect of the war abroad, US policymakers would have more freedom in the negotiations, no matter what country they were in, as long as they wanted.
If you could remove that obligatory civic obligation, you could move that obligation to the lower layers of society and present it as a "golden opportunity" wrapped in camouflage.
After all, it is the universal nature of the project in Vietnam that has asked everyone to be attentive.
Vietnam's resistance to the war goes beyond the borders because everyone's son could be expelled, with the exception of Donald Trump's types. As Daniel S. Levy Remember, even Paine, Webber, Jackson & Curtis, a Wall Street brokerage firm, joined the resistance and spread an announcement proclaiming that the end of the war in Vietnam would be "the most optimistic thing that can happen to the market. stock. "
In places like Columbia University and Harvard, even elite children endanger something that opposes the war.
Since the introduction of the fully voluntary army, what is being developed is a kind of socio-economic project that consists of recruiting recruits in places that have been most victims of the free trade of neoliberal capitalism that has so marked our country.
We now have the army that matches our 21st century, a feudal society that more and more resembles the socio-economic structure of Westeros in the Game of thrones.
"Today, more than 300 million Americans claim rights, freedoms and security and none of them is forced to protect and defend," wrote Dennis Laich. and Lawrence Wilkerson in the newspaper. American Conservative. "Apparently, only 1% of the population feels this obligation. The 1% bleeds and dies for the remaining 99%. "
And as the authors point out, the 1% who chooses to serve does not come from Ivy Leagues, Wall Street families, corporate boardrooms, Congress or wealthy America; it comes from less well-off areas; West Virginia, Maine, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama and elsewhere. "
In addition to shifting the responsibility of defending the country from the wealthier families, the change to become a volunteer meant that the average length of a military career had to be longer and that after September 11 we had pushed our national guard to play a fighting role abroad. not seen since the second world war.
Scroll to October 2017, when four US soldiers were killed in action in Niger and even US senators admitted that they were not aware of the fact that we had soldiers in this country.
Senator Bob Casey admitted on CNN, he was not aware of the deployment. "I think there is a lot of work that both sides and both branches of government have to do," he said. "Not only to stay more informed, but also to know why we are here and what has happened to get to the bottom of things."
In 2004, I had evidence of this kind of misconduct on the part of our elected officials when I covered a National Guard pancake breakfast at their armory in Westfield, New Jersey, to: WNYC.
The entire town rallied to the National Guard Armory to return, serve and eat pancakes, with the goal of raising funds for the families of members of the National Guard traveling to Iraq. At this point, 65% of the total National Army Guard was mobilized into the largest deployment since the Second World War.
At $ 6 per plate, the pancake breakfast was $ 17,000. And all this was necessary for the lights to stay on and the home mortgage of some weekend warriors to become full-time combat soldiers.
Glenn Reith, the General of the New Jersey National Guard, told me that at the time for a family of five in the Guard. activation meant real economic hardship. "The biggest challenge may be that if you are on active duty, you have a federal facility where all your needs and care are taken care of, "he said. "Our families are present in all communities and because of that, they do not have the same structure to support them day-to-day."
At that time, New Jersey had lost 32 people in combat.
The wife of a long-standing national guard, ready to be deployed, told me that her household was already subsidizing a war effort she thought was wrong and poorly planned. She did not want me to use her name.
"I know that my husband needed a lot of things and that he had to buy them himself, that is, binoculars that were told to them that" they should have and he called me and asked me to search them on the Internet, "she said. "It was $ 700 twins that he owed purchase himself. He called me another day and told me that I needed to visit a website on the Internet. I recovered it and it was a site for riflescopes for machine guns. I said, "You make fun of me." I said it's something you need and we need to buy it. It's an article between $ 1,000 and $ 2,000, it's a lot of pancakes. "
But for this brave woman and mother, the economy was the least of things.
"Every day, I have to deal with children crying that they do not want to go to school. I am entitled: a student who comes home tells me that I can not think of a school, I can not think. . . . Why does daddy have to come back? "
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