Comments - June 14, 2024
I ended up being very opposed to war. I have other stories to tell, but I'll save them for later. My all-time favorite comment on the willingness to serve, and the idea of the duty of a citizen to serve, was expressed in a Democratic rebuttal to President George W. Bush's State of the Union speech in 2007. Here is the relevant excerpt.
"...Like so many other Americans, today and throughout our history, we serve and have served, not for political reasons, but because we love our country. On the political issues - those matters of war and peace, and in some cases of life and death - we trusted the judgment of our national leaders. We hoped that they would be right, that they would measure with accuracy the value of our lives against the enormity of the national interest that might call upon us to go into harm's way...We owed them our loyalty, as Americans, and we gave it. But they owed us sound judgment, clear thinking, concern for our welfare, a guarantee that the threat to our country was equal to the price we might be called upon to pay in defending it...."
Sometimes I think about General Washington and the winter at Valley Forge. I've read various stories about the privation, the hunger, the lack of sanitary facilities, and how they coped and stayed there instead of going home to their families. I ask myself if I would have stayed. My answer is always yes, I would have stayed. Easy for me to say. I could have stayed in college, but I quit in the middle of my 3rd semester, autumn of '67. Was immediately reclassified from 2S student deferment, to 1A, or whatever it was, eligible for the draft. I enlisted for four years, hoping to go to language school, to learn Russian or Chinese. At the end of Basic, when it was time to learn what our next training assignment would be, a non-com had a big smile for me. He said "I have good news and bad news. The good news is that you got your request to go to language school. The bad news is that you're not going to learn Russian or Chinese, you're going to learn Vietnamese. I smiled and thanked him and went on my way. By the end of Basic Training I had learned that the Army will do with you whatever they see fit to do. So I was not surprised or disappointed. I was willing to try to do my best, come what may.
Jim Webb expressed what I think: "...they owed us sound judgment, clear thinking, concern for our welfare, a guarantee that the threat to our country was equal to the price we might be called upon to pay in defending it...."
Here is the address for a text version of (now former) Senator Webb's Democratic Rebuttal to the President's 2007 State of the Union speech.
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/308971
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