While waiting on a traffic light, my eye was caught by a bumper sticker slapped on the back of an aging Ford Focus. "My Grandson is a Marine," it read. I glanced into the car's interior. In the front seat was an elderly black couple.
A few days later, I read in the Politico that the Navy Reserve had just accepted George Prescott Bush, nephew of the president, as an intelligence officer. His decision to serve made headlines (as did Senator John McCain's son's decision to join the Marines) because people of their status usually have better things to do — like attend Yale.
The chattering class is fond of pointing out that the US military draws disproportionately from middle- and working-class families. But suggest that they help right the imbalance by encouraging their own offspring to serve, and they are aghast. "I want you to know we support you," one upscale mother recently told a military recruiter, "but military service isn't for our kind of people."
Fighting the nation's wars, it seems, is a job for somebody else's kid — the gardener's son, say, or the grocer's daughter. To make sure it stays that way, well-heeled parents have declared a fatwa against military recruiters, attempting to keep them from contacting their teens or setting foot on their beautifully-manicured campuses. A website called "Leave My Child Alone!" advises parents on how to prevent recruiters from calling their kids, lest they persuade them to interrupt mom and dad's plans for them: top colleges, cool jobs, and scads of money.
The result is a dangerous disconnect between those who serve in America's all-volunteer military and the elites who expect to command it, argue Kathy Roth-Douquet and Frank Schaeffer, authors of AWOL: The Unexcused Absence of America's Upper Classes from Military Service — and How It Hurts Our Country.
The authors are themselves part of elite America who unexpectedly (and unwillingly) joined the military tribe when relatives dragged them into it. Princeton graduate and Democratic activist Roth-Douquet served in Bill Clinton's White House before marrying Marine officer Greg Douquet. Schaeffer, whose son John joined the Marines in 1999, is a New York novelist and son of the late Christian philosopher Francis Schaeffer. Douquet and Schaeffer admit that, until the military marched into their lives, what they knew about America's armed forces could have fit onto a dog tag.
"As we came to understand and appreciate the military, it was striking to us how enormous our previous ignorance had been, and how entirely comfortable we had been with that ignorance," the authors write. "We are trying to make the case here that this ignorance is not okay."
That cluelessness would have been inconceivable just a generation ago. Ironically, the draft came about because too many sons of privilege volunteered for military service, putting in peril too many of America's presumed future leaders; conscription was intended to more fairly spread out the risk among the middle and working classes.
Today, it's the children of teachers, farmers and factory workers who take most of the risks. Our professional class may have grown up in the era of "ask what you can do for your country," but when it comes to their kids joining up, "ask not" is now the order of the day. Few officers and recruits come from upscale zip codes; as for those with the power to declare war, only 25% of our Congressmen are veterans compared to 70% in 1969. Astonishingly, just 1% of these leaders have a child in uniform, and the last presidential sons to serve were FDR's boys in World War II.
Our elites seem content to keep it that way, despite the fact that many of those murdered on September 11 — the day America declared war on radical Islam — were their own friends and relatives. The New York Times, which endorsed the invasion of Afghanistan as a "just war," shied away from asking anyone to actually don a uniform and fight it. Nor did other newspapers or networks — perhaps because editors and anchors were afraid their own offspring might take them seriously.
Ironically, these are the very kids who, after earning Ivy League degrees, expect to become the civilian leaders who order soldiers into combat, cover wars, and — while making their Wall Street fortunes — enjoy the protection of those blue-collar kids patrolling the skies above them. Most have never met anyone who served, which means their knowledge of all things military is limited to what they see on the (mostly elite-run) news and in Oliver Stone flicks. This may be why, according to one poll, those who serve view the military culture as generous and creative, and their own service as a privilege, while civilian elites regard soldiers as mindless killers, victims of unscrupulous recruiters, Schaeffer and Roth-Douquet say.
Not only are elite youth ignorant about military realities, they also miss out on the benefits of a few years in uniform, such as leadership experience, along with the confidence, discipline, and maturity it brings. Moreover, military service throws together men and women of all races, regions, religions, and classes. The US military is "the only place in America where African Americans routinely boss whites around," the authors point out. You want diversity? Join the Marines. Don't like the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy, or the ban on women in combat? Become an officer, and change the military from within.
But elite enclaves don't even want students to be asked to consider serving their country — which is why Harvard and other top schools recently sued to keep military recruiters off their quadrangles. "It is hard to see how this NIMBY-ism (not in my backyard; or worse — let somebody-poor-brown-black- or-rural-white-do-all-the-heavy-lifting) can be dressed up as ‘progressive,'" Schaeffer and Roth-Douquet note. Meanwhile, Harvard welcomes recruiters from "such bastions of moral probity as Enron and the tobacco industry."
Elite ignorance about the military is dangerous; it can lead to misunderstandings about what our military — expected to do everything from fighting wars to stopping genocide to rescuing hurricane victims — is capable of. When few of our leaders have either military experience or a close relative in uniform, we will end up with a military overused and underled, asked "to do the impossible by very misinformed civilian leaders who will not be around to pick up the pieces," Schaeffer and Kathy Roth-Douquet warn.
As for war correspondents — journalists Mike Wallace and the late Peter Jennings famously said that, if they learned about a planned ambush of American soldiers, they would refuse to inform US commanders in the interest of filming the slaughter for the evening broadcast. Would they be less obsessed with "neutrality" if their own offspring were among the intended targets?
This issue is personal for me: My own husband spent many years as a commissioned officer in the Army, and I have two healthy, draft-age sons. If one or both of my kids end up in uniform — if, God forbid, they end up in a war — I want both his civilian bosses and those who cover the battles to have wisdom and experience. I want them to be as concerned about my son as I will be, because they've been there themselves, or because their own sons and daughters are in harm's way.
Schaeffer and Roth-Douquet remind us that, sixty-odd years ago, as World War II raged, ordinary American and English families took comfort in knowing that their leaders understood their fears for their soldier sons — because the sons of FDR and Winston Churchill were also serving dangerous duty. The fact that all classes were sharing the sacrifice under-girded the sense that we were all in this struggle together, and upheld long-term support for a war against the original axis of evil.
We ought to spend some time meditating, not only on those who sacrificed much on behalf of their country, but also upon those making those sacrifices today — and those who are not willing to even consider making them.
"When those who benefit most from living in a country contribute the least to its defense and those who benefit less are asked to pay the ultimate price," the authors of AWOL note, "something happens to the soul of that country."
Which is why upper crust parents should get over the idea that military service is "not for our kind of people," encourage their kids to leave their elitist ghettos — and start paying their dues.
Anne Morse is a senior writer at BreakPoint.
