As I know from my own experience, if one is in search of fairness and equity, there are certain places you just don’t go looking. Some of those places are in the Armed Forces. Case in point: I was a Lieutenant IN THE NAVY when the Defense Intelligence Agency thought it would be a good idea to make me the officer-in-charge of a 27-man contingent deploying to Bosnia in 1996 to conduct intelligence operations ON THE GROUND following that nation’s bloody conflict. I and the Americans in my charge, were integrated into a British Army unit that had significant experience in these type of operations, mostly because THEY WERE IN THE ARMY! To marginal, if not disappointing, degrees of success, I tried my best to convince them that this Naval Intelligence Officer was not a liability to their safety. In other words, I wasn’t fooling anybody.. I was a Navy guy (not a SEAL, not a Marine, just a Naval Intel Officer) literally plunked into an Army ground intelligence unit, the old-fashioned WW-II way.
On one particularly gray and rainy day as I was trudging (and yes, it WAS trudging!) through a thick, muddy soup-of-a-farmer’s-field. A portion of the field which ran along the bank of the River Vrbas was speckled with every form of anti-personnel mine; they were the reason why the farm owner had flagged us down as we driving past. Among the unexploded ordnance (UXO), there were the pressure-plate kind that once stepped on produced that unmistakable “click” which, contrary to popular belief is not actually heard when once steps on the mine, but instead is the sound of St. Peter closing the gate behind you. There was the stake-mounted kind that looked like a pineapple on top of a wooden poled staked into the ground. At the top of the “pineapple” was a small pin attached to a ring, attached to a string. The string, or “tripwire,” was strung across a likely path, usually in low brush and tied to a tree at the other end so that when walking, an unsuspecting soul might trip on the string, attached to the ring, and pull the pin on the mine, and kill or maim every person in a one-hundred foot radius. There were dozens of these things deployed in no particular pattern in drunken former-Yugoslavian warring faction fashion and among them I walked alone, having volunteered to return to our vehicle to retrieve a camera to photograph the evidence. Walking back from the Land Rover through the field, I was very aware, hyper aware, that I was to walk directly in the footprints of the soldier who had walked before me. Then only problem was, by this this time all the footprints had all filled with muddy water that rendered the imprints invisible beneath the mud broth that seeped in to cover them.
For the next several minutes of walking, shuffling really, I had to consider that each step could very well could be my last. I remember looking down at the name tapes on my battle-dress uniform top. One of name tapes, over my left breast pocket, read “U.S. NAVY.” I looked at the British Army Major, a real soldier and pro, and said, “You know, I went through a lot of trouble joining the Navy to get out doing crap just like this!” He replied in that typically understated British fashion, “Right Frank. Well, if you’re looking for fairness and equity, you joined the wrong profession.”
Something clicked and is was not the Hollywood sound-effect of an anti-personnel mine pressure plate. It was my mind. My British Commander and mentor, as he would often over the next several months, calmly but painfully reminded me that what I thought, or how I felt, about matters didn’t matter. This was serious business. People could die. I could die. The focus was on a mission and on the safety and success of the unit and it’s long-term goals. There was no expectation that others should deviate from the formation of the unit to consider individual feelings or emotional considerations at whimsy. Of course a person in need was to be tended to, if such feelings were a full-time distraction, then a soldier would be removed from the battlefield, for the sake of others and all in the unit.
This seems neither fair, nor equitable. Not to the individual. But then, despite endless accounts of individual bravery and dedication in military history, none of them have been about the individual. These accounts of “individual” bravery and dedication have alway been about the unit, the focus of which is always on the mission, not on bending to the considerations of individuals within the unit when those considerations are only about the individual separate and distinct from the unit as a whole.
It’s not about the homosexual that wants to serve, understand? It’s not incumbent upon the crew of a guided missile destroyer or submarine or Marine Expeditionary Battalion to get their sensibilities in order to accommodate 1% of the population. The administrative burdens alone on a commander to make way for an admitted homosexual in his unit and the very real pressures that introduces when we get down to the uncomfortable business of talking tight living quarters and shower facilities, to name just a couple. The issues are numerous and burdensome and far transcend a forced move toward non-universal concepts and theories of social evolution.
We are at war. If this is the number one issue of the day (and according to today’s news graphs, it is, together with the WikiCreeps shenanigans of Julian Ass Hang, it is), then we may have very serious problems with the priorities our civilian leadership is forcing upon the military forces responsible for the security of the very nation they lead.
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