Monthly Archives: November 2009

To The Veterans And Those Potential Veterans Who Serve

Military

There are a lot of debates one can have about the military. One can ask, as the founding fathers might, whether it be necessary to have a standing army at all. One can ask, as a non-interventionist might, whether it is worth spending American lives on non-essential tasks. One can ask whether our military is used wisely, used justly, and whether its soldiers are acting in the furtherance of societal good or a president’s whim. These questions have been asked and debated here, and rightly so. But not today.

I have the most profound respect for someone who says “here is what I believe and who I am — I will serve my countrymen and pledge to back that up with my life if it is necessary.” It’s one of those traits that I’d like to hope I possess, but one in civilian life, in the peaceful little enclave I raise my family, can never be truly sure. But those who choose the life of a soldier don’t need to question themselves. They’ve already signed up to be the tip of the spear. They’ve sworn an oath and joined an organization and command structure to carry out a mission. Some are never called on to perform the task they train for, but they’ve still earned my respect by offering to shoulder that burden. Others, however, are given that calling, and we call them Veterans. Today is the day to thank them for living up to the convictions they’ve pledged themselves to.

On this particular day, however, I think of one veteran in particular. Thanks, well wishes, and a great deal of concern go out to Major Jeff Warbiany, marine aviator, veteran of the first Gulf War and in theater for a good portion of the second, currently on float on a boat somewhere in the South Pacific. Jeff is my brother, and while one might think that his choice to serve shows him to be the hoo-rah counterpoint to every way that I’m a radical libertarian, he matches me nearly stride for stride in political belief. He understands what he’s doing, and even when he might disagree with the political calculations that have him deployed and away from his wife and son, he knows that he has a job to do and will do it to the utmost of his abilities for his brothers in arms and for those of us here at home. I’d much rather he be home safe right now, and that the two of us were discussing the evils of the Federal Reserve over a beer and a cigar, but since that’s not possible, all I can say is thank you and come home soon, bro.

Brad Warbiany
https://thelibertypapers.org/

The Soldier Pays the Biggest Part of the Bill: an Excerpt from a Speech by Maj Gen Smedley Butler, USMC

General

Excerpt from War is a Racket by Major General Smedley Butler USMC

[The] soldier pays the biggest part of the bill.

If you don’t believe this, visit the American cemeteries on the battlefields abroad. Or visit any of the veteran’s hospitals in the United States. On a tour of the country, in the midst of which I am at the time of this writing, I have visited eighteen government hospitals for veterans. In them are a total of about 50,000 destroyed men — men who were the pick of the nation eighteen years ago. The very able chief surgeon at the government hospital; at Milwaukee, where there are 3,800 of the living dead, told me that mortality among veterans is three times as great as among those who stayed at home.

Boys with a normal viewpoint were taken out of the fields and offices and factories and classrooms and put into the ranks. There they were remolded; they were made over; they were made to “about face”; to regard murder as the order of the day. They were put shoulder to shoulder and, through mass psychology, they were entirely changed. We used them for a couple of years and trained them to think nothing at all of killing or of being killed.

Then, suddenly, we discharged them and told them to make another “about face” ! This time they had to do their own readjustment, sans [without] mass psychology, sans officers’ aid and advice and sans nation-wide propaganda. We didn’t need them any more. So we scattered them about without any “three-minute” or “Liberty Loan” speeches or parades. Many, too many, of these fine young boys are eventually destroyed, mentally, because they could not make that final “about face” alone.

In the government hospital in Marion, Indiana, 1,800 of these boys are in pens! Five hundred of them in a barracks with steel bars and wires all around outside the buildings and on the porches. These already have been mentally destroyed. These boys don’t even look like human beings. Oh, the looks on their faces! Physically, they are in good shape; mentally, they are gone.

There are thousands and thousands of these cases, and more and more are coming in all the time. The tremendous excitement of the war, the sudden cutting off of that excitement — the young boys couldn’t stand it.

That’s a part of the bill. So much for the dead — they have paid their part of the war profits. So much for the mentally and physically wounded — they are paying now their share of the war profits. But the others paid, too — they paid with heartbreaks when they tore themselves away from their firesides and their families to don the uniform of Uncle Sam — on which a profit had been made. They paid another part in the training camps where they were regimented and drilled while others took their jobs and their places in the lives of their communities. The paid for it in the trenches where they shot and were shot; where they were hungry for days at a time; where they slept in the mud and the cold and in the rain — with the moans and shrieks of the dying for a horrible lullaby.
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tarran
I am an anarcho-capitalist living just west of Boston Massachussetts. I am married, have two children, and am trying to start my own computer consulting company.
https://thelibertypapers.org/author/tarran/

Thoughts On Veterans Day

Draft, History, Military

veterans

As we mark Veterans Day here in the United States, it is worth remembering that, for the rest of the Western world, today marks the end of what may very well be the most pointless war in human history

The war in which millions of educated and working class men sacrificed their lives to fight over the remnants of a Europe that was still ruled by Hohenzollern’s, Hapsburg’s and Romanov’s —Middle Age Europe’s inbred contribution to insanity.

And what were they fighting over ? The same stupid battles that Europeans were fighting 100 years previously when Napoleon raged across the Russian frontier. Only this time, they were doing it with tanks, planes, and mustard gas.

It was massacre writ large and insanity on display for four long years — and it all started when some guy got shot in Sarajevo.

And yet, somehow, the boys of America ended up in the middle of this mess that the Royalists and Europeans has created. Rationally, there was no reason we should’ve been there and yet we were led by a man convinced that he could remake the world in America’s democratic image.

Sound familiar ?

That didn’t work out so well back then, as people unlucky enough to live in Europe in the 1930s and 40s can attest. Not to mention the men who the United States sent back to Europe in 1941.

So as we remember Veterans today, and thank them for their service, perhaps it’s time to think about how we can stop creating so many gardens of stone in so many corners of the world in the name of misplaced idealism.

Doug Mataconis
http://www.belowthebeltway.com

Quote Of The Day

Humor, Quote of the Day

A [previously unpublished] letter to the editor in the UK Daily Telegraph:

SIR – I find it intensely humiliating to be asked by airport security staff if I have packed my own bag. This forces one to admit, usually within earshot of others, that I no longer have a manservant to do the chore for me. Gentlemen should be able to answer such questions with a disdainful: “Of course not! Do I look like that sort of person?”

Arthur W. J. G. Ord-Hume, Guildford, Surrey

I’m sure that will enjoin my colleagues in hearty guffaws when I relate it at the American Airlines Admiral’s Club on my next trip.

Hat Tip: Gulliver, The Economist

Brad Warbiany
https://thelibertypapers.org/
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