Monday, February 27, 2012

The Honor of Serving

When a friend asked me “What’s your book about?” my short answer was “betrayal, death, deceit, longing, redemption— how all impacted a Missouri farm boy serving his country in Panamá during the mid-1950s.”

But that’s not what I was thinking about when I started writing.  As I came to realize what the book was really about, I was shaken.

Lying somewhere beneath the story is a message. It’s about how we citizen soldiers in Korea and later in Vietnam—often reluctant draftees—were the grunts who did some heavy lifting for our armed services in these conflicts and the enveloping Cold War with the Soviets.  Most of us were too young to fight in World War II.  But we came to know plenty about the war from our fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, and neighbors.  In those days, the fit, the old, and the young bonded together in a joint effort to fight for freedom and democracy to defeat our enemies.  We accepted the responsibility to pay for this task through high taxes and war bond purchases. Even kids saved their money and bought bonds.  In the end we and our allies were successful, and we felt good about it.

Although I never thought of myself as a real soldier, I was proud to serve in one of the successors to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the intelligence and clandestine organization led by General “Wild Bill” Donovan, which was disbanded after WWII.  As college kids we had high opinions of ourselves and were quick to make fun of regular soldiers. But we were also willing to carry out our assignments and accomplish the mission with the same deadly competence of our predecessors.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that I’m an advocate of universal national service for all young people.  Whether military service or social, medical, and other humanitarian service in the US or in other countries, it doesn’t matter.  What matters is that young people learn to give of themselves for a greater cause. And for their service they should earn a modern-day GI Bill for education that can be paid for by fewer warplanes, ships, and other equipment that is now obsolete.

My national service was a post graduate degree of sorts.  In two years I met, worked with, and came to appreciate people I’d never known before in places and assignments that were foreign to me.  I grew up.  My GI Bill helped to pay for a Harvard Law School degree and made it possible for me to earn an income, the taxes from which have more than paid for my education.  It was win-win for all concerned.