Response to Sept 26th's blog
The debate of whether the army should an all volunteer or drafted is a debate the has sparked many years ago yet still has relevance to this day. It is an undeniable fact that the American army has shrunk due to the amount of people in the military. This begins our debate of whether it should be an all volunteer army or not.
If the army were to continue to be an all volunteer the army would continue to dwindle in numbers. However, compared to a draft army usually everyone that is in the military wants to be there and has put themselves in that situation because they want to be there. With the all volunteer army, we can continue to use the benefits to this day and continue to fix all of the economical problems and fulfill all the broken promises to America's greatest heroes. There are certainly some flaws in the military but if service were to become mandatory a lot of things would have to change to accommodate this incredible change. Benefits would have to change because the government could guarantee these benefits to everyone because that is so unrealistic. If we are struggling now to fulfill the men and women who serve how would we be able to support everyone who is fresh out of high school with free college, a place to live, proper income, and much more. There would need a lot to take place to also make sure the military would not turn into a mass welfare provider where people are based off their needs not their work effort. This is a question that continues to challenge America and will be an ongoing debate forever. It is up to the American people to really have the final say in what happens because the government is by the people, for the people.
If the army were to continue to be an all volunteer the army would continue to dwindle in numbers. However, compared to a draft army usually everyone that is in the military wants to be there and has put themselves in that situation because they want to be there. With the all volunteer army, we can continue to use the benefits to this day and continue to fix all of the economical problems and fulfill all the broken promises to America's greatest heroes. There are certainly some flaws in the military but if service were to become mandatory a lot of things would have to change to accommodate this incredible change. Benefits would have to change because the government could guarantee these benefits to everyone because that is so unrealistic. If we are struggling now to fulfill the men and women who serve how would we be able to support everyone who is fresh out of high school with free college, a place to live, proper income, and much more. There would need a lot to take place to also make sure the military would not turn into a mass welfare provider where people are based off their needs not their work effort. This is a question that continues to challenge America and will be an ongoing debate forever. It is up to the American people to really have the final say in what happens because the government is by the people, for the people.
""Another recruit stumbles into the first person. "I?" screams Sergeant Carey, stomping a foot and raising an accusing finger. "You got on the wrong bus, 'cause there ain't no me, my's, or I's here. The only eyes are in your head.""-page 61. This quote stood out to me, because I believe it is the best example of the standards the Marine Corp holds its recruits to. When someone joins the Marines, they are expected to drop all of their individuality, and become solely a member of the Marines. This contrasts greatly with the Army's ad campaign of the early '70s, "Today's Army wants to Join You," which stressed the changes the Army made to allow for more individuality, something the Marine Corp was never about. After reading this chapter, I see why many members of the Marine Corp were condescending towards the Army's ad campaign. This chapter also reminded me of the Army Strong ads we watched in class, where the Army appeared to be challenging potential recruits to step up to the plate and challenge themselves to make the 'team'. This chapter also demonstrates to me why the military should remain all-volunteer, as it takes a lot just to make the Marines, let alone participating in combat. With the weeks spent training in harsh conditions, if someone doesn't want to be there, then not only are they wasting their time, but the military's time too.
ReplyDeleteAfter reading the chapter of Making the Corps and the two other readings, I got a sense that, specifically in the Marines and I know from personal readings about the Navy, specifically the SEALs, soldiers in the military come to believe in their own invincibility; and therefore, when faced with trauma, they find it hard to seek help. There, I believe, is the tendency for a soldier to lie not only to their doctors, but to themselves, about issues and trauma’s they face, for fear of being looked down upon or considered unworthy. “Some will hide minor injuries out of worry that they will be recycled out” (67, Ricks). There is this idea, in the Marines and especially SpecOps groups, that you are the best of the best, so therefore, there is no way you can be plagued by some mental disorder or trauma, and that if you are, you can take care of it yourself. However, that kind of goes against what the Marines are taught during basic training. Unlike the Army, the Marines try to destroy individuality, to instill a sense of community, to become one big giant killing team, and the same is true for SpecOp groups. However, I would argue that the killing of the individual is to make the transition from civilian to soldier go more smoothly, but once you are in, you regain some individuality back. For example, Sergeant Carey, described as the “perfect Marine”, publicly disagreed with superiors, which could be boiled down to personality. However, it still holds, though debatable, that the destroying of most of the individual is the cause for the destruction of the soldier.
ReplyDelete“One can read many pages of a historic or strategic account of a particular military campaign, or listen to many successive installments in a newscast narrative of events in contemporary war, without acknowledging that the purpose of the event described is to alter (to burn, to blast, to shell, cut) human tissue.”
ReplyDeleteWithin the Kinder piece from At War we are faced with the fact that there is a glaring misrepresentation among the civilian society of the human body in warfare. Kinder makes the point that most media of the military does not acknowledge the grisly reality of war for the men on the ground, such as the prospect of illness, becoming crippled, or death. The references made within the pieces by Kinder and Linker of terrifying war violence that might affect you for the rest of your life are only glossed over by the public through news reports and papers, but are never shown to there full extent. Kinder then goes on to say that we see the failure to communicate these horrors clearly when we observe the language used when discussing warfare, an example being the reference of the death of soldiers being referred to as “losses.” This lack of acknowledgment between the connection of physical and mental suffering of the individual and war itself as well as having the effect of seemingly removing the humanity of this making something foreign that we are desensitized to. Additionally history itself has shied away from discussing the human aspects of war, making seem as though it were more important to understand strategy than the suffering of people. Therefore all of this creates a societal misunderstanding as to the devastation that war has upon the people within it; the lack of understanding allows us to not care or be truly informed on the issue of war and its effect of the people.
For Wednesday’s readings, the piece that stood out to me in particular is “Making the Corps” by Ricks. From reading this chapter I feel we got more of an inside look when it comes to the Marine’s mindsets and outlook on life in the military. A few quotes I found interesting were “Of all the services, he joined the Marines because he likes to excel, whether at crime or soldiering”. “I always wanted to be the best” and “Ain’t nothing the Marine Corps could put in front of me that could scare me more than my neighborhood” (70). I feel just by these quotes, we get a basic representation of how people see the Marine Corps and how they present themselves compared to the other military branches. Even going back to the concept of the military ads we analyzed in class, it was clear that the Marines sold themselves on the ideas of toughness and masculinity while the other branches had more of a personal and career benefit approach. Winston, the recruit possessed the qualities that the Marine Corps seemed to be searching for within soldiers. An interesting point to me in this reading occurred before the actual chapter started. On page 52, 1st Sergeant Charles Tucker states, “The broken family kids are one of the bigger problems here”. I found this interesting because based on the statistics on the draft and recruitment, it is clear that a large number of these new soldiers were coming from those “broken families”. Though some of them might have possessed similar qualities as Winston solely based on the environment they were coming from, the Marines represented themselves as very discipline and respected individuals, which would not put up with the stubbornness these recruits were accustomed to back home. The small details such as the soldiers march routines and the proper way to hold a lunch tray that were described in this reading really got my attention because it shows what the Corps is trying to mold these recruits into. The whole concept is to create a highly disciplined, fearless, uniformed, and almost robotic type soldier that will simply follow orders, while those in command expected those same everyday values to translate on the battle field.
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