OK, it's time for a little personal history.
More than a little.
Whatever.
It's late, bear with me.
Jesi - Conservatress - upon whom be all glory for her obvious awesomeness - left me a comment on a preceding article about the reinstitution of the draft, thanks to the GIVE Act.
I was all set to tell her this story, in that forum, and then I realized just how long a story it was.
So, here we are.
Jesi, this story - this blog - came about thanks to your comment; I leave it entirely in your capable hands to decide whether it was worth all the grunting and straining.
Let's rewind time.
The Way-Back Machine, if you will.
Go on back to the year 1997.
At that time, I was a noisy, roughhousing, frequently drunken and certainly no more admirable than necessary (except when officers were present) young PFC in the 3rd Battalion, 504th PIR, 82nd Airborne Division.
I was an infantryman.
Now, I am not by any means an exceptional guy; there's always that one dude who gets to be supernumerary every time they mount guard duty because he looks like a recruiting poster, and I wasn't either that high-speed OR that low-drag. But I could pull my own weight; I could do a road march in field gear and come back for more afterwards; I was younger, tougher, and cooler than I am now, by a stretch.
I had learned to be lethal with a pretty huge variety of small arms, and anti-tank weapons; I knew small-unit tactics; I could identify tanks by nation of origin by listening to the engine note or seeing a profile; I could make a HMMWV about do a jig.
I knew everything in the whole world, man.
And I got picked as one of the lucky folks that were going to get to play with real-life Russians.
See, some genius with more stars than brains in the Clinton - era Joint Chiefs had decided that China needed deterring, so that they didn't swarm over the border and obliterate all the little splinter republics left when the Soviet Union fell down on its drunken butt.
So, they invented the idea of a "security detachment," a kind of roving multinational ground forces unit made up of troops drawn from Russia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Georgia, and a couple other 'stans whose names I can't recall.
Now, the idea was, this unit, taken from the troops of a bunch of different countries, would bond together, train together, and become brothers in arms - and then take that unified spirit home to their national forces, who would then be able to use their skills as cadre, while acting as kind of a National Guard against Chinese border incursions.
On paper, this sounds like a great idea; in practice, they cobbled together a battalion; the "Central Asian Battalion."
A battalion goes up at full capacity maybe around 500 guys; I hate to point this out, but the Chinese Red Army has a million men under arms; 500 dudes in desert camo isn't even a speed bump.
But what the hell, it was the Clinton years; things didn't have to make sense.
Now, bear in mind that my impressions of this are being slightly filtered; I am now older - and certainly more geopolitically informed - than I was when I was 21; but that said, my impressions of CENTRASBAT'97 are those of a 21-year-old PFC, so take 'em with a grain of salt.
A freakin' BOULDER.
But still.
I grew up in the 80's. The Russian Menace was everything, until it suddenly went away and we found ourselves looking around, all confused, looking for the big bad guy on the block, and finding nobody left.
So, when we got told we were going to get to play with some real-live commies firsthand, and all, we didn't know what to really expect.
Whatever it was, it wasn't what we got.
The platoon of guys - supposedly former SPETSNAZ from what we were able to phrasebook our way through - that came to train on American equipment and such here, were wimps. I don't mean in mind; I mean in body. Mentally, they were tough; their discipline was harsh enough that it made us a little leery of working with them; but they tried to go on one of our morning runs, and didn't hang the first mile before they were dropping like flies.
THIS is the Red Menace?
What the hell happened to these guys?
Now, there's a boatload of history - a boatload of STORIES - I could tell, just about the experience of making the longest airborne mission in history (we got a spiffy certificate, and everything;) about the jump, which was the first time I'd ever gotten to stand outside an airplane thousands of feet up and look around (the C-17 Globemaster III. It has a DIVING BOARD outside the jump door. You can literally walk right out and look around. Damn that was fun.)
I could tell about earning my Russian jump wings.
About landing in a freshly-harvested cornfield, and watching a hand-shakingly terrified farmer ride up on horseback with an AK-47 to try to find out why his farm was being invaded by Americans.
I could tell about wandering aimlessly - and unsupervised - around Tashkent.
I could tell about getting my camera confiscated by some sort of very, very apologetic State Security type goons who were honestly really nice and DID NOT want us photographing the big, concrete, blocky... whatever it was.
I bought a "Moscow" postcard.
We got drunk, on really good Russian vodka, in really bad Russian tents, with really REALLY drunken Russian officers, who were very nice and wanted more booze before "the Americans come in and make everything work properly."
We were served really terrible food, by really astonishingly beautiful women with horror-movie teeth.
We watched - aghast, and then frantically suppressing laughter - as the proud multinational forces passed in review, and managed to daisy-chain rear-end their armored vehicles together, on live television, because the first one in line stopped too early before making a turn.
We marched around with them; listened to speeches from guys wearing more fruit salad than uniform; did PT with them; got, in a lot of cases, dysentery from the horrifying Russian chow halls, traded ALL KINDS of crap with them - I got a hand-operated chain saw that has a belt case, for an 82nd Airborne patch - and we learned something about them.
They were really trying.
Man, their countries were fucked up, their lives were fucked up, and they knew it, but these poor bastards were really trying their asses off.
Because they wanted to be us.
And they just didn't get that the fact that we'd all CHOSEN to be there, was what did it.
They had just as much money thrown their way as we do; the dedicated, hardcore support of the world's other great superpower at the time, just like we did; they had the resources, the tools, the time, the opportunity.
But they got drafted.
And three-quarters of those poor guys just wanted to be farmers.
They didn't want to be the watchmen on the walls, the lone gunman defending their town; they wanted to be the farmer who is miraculously saved from the bandidos when the cavalry rides over the horizon.
They didn't want to be there.
And we thought being there was the coolest shit in the world.
The difference, the real, ultimate difference that makes our military the class of the world, bar none, is that 100% of the men and women in it want to be there. They're not there because they had noplace else to go; they're there because they believe in it.
They believe in the honor of our nation.
They believe in the righteousness of the cause of freedom.
And the Russians didn't have that.
Missing that single spark, that one difference, made all the difference there could have been.
I never - growing up - really understood the horror that is the feeling of pity.
But I sure learned what it meant, out there in that field, talking to those guys, when I realized that they not only didn't understand why we wanted to be there, but didn't understand why they couldn't be like us, and never would.
They were forced to be there.
The draft kills the soul of your military.
The Russians had every advantage we had, except one: we have freedom.
And I would have taken us over them a billion to one, no matter how outnumbered we were.
Because there is no cure for a dead soul.
I thank - every day - the God in whom my belief resides, that I was blessed to live where I live, in the time when I live there. Because the same idiots who tried communism in Russia, and killed the once-great soul of that nation, are trying it here.
The draft is one tool of that; because if you can take the soul out of your military, why, then they will be easily led to atrocity; soulless men don't care if they do wrong.
I am not, by nature, a particularly gifted or eloquent man.
But I implore, of all of you, that whatever your motives, whatever your political affiliations, whatever your virtues or vices, that you do not let this happen here.
Our nation is a beacon of hope; it is a light of what can be, to those for whom there is no other hope.
They may march, and rant, and wave flags, but I promise you. They wish they were like us. They WISH they had to complain about which HDTV to buy, or what "brand" of food to eat; they WISH their lives were so free of worry about simple survival from day to day that they could take TIME to watch mindless fluff on TV about gossipy teenagers, and take it seriously.
And a big part of the reason we have those things, and they don't, is freedom.
One of the first tasks for someone wishing to take over a free country is to subvert the military.
And all you need to do it...
...Is a draft.
Don't let them do it.
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