Considering Joining the US Military? Don’t

I’m the child of a World War 2 veteran, raised on stories of banzai charges, and flamethrower attacks on machine gun bunkers in the Philippines. I’m married to a vet, who comes from a long line of veterans stretching back to the Revolutionary War. She works in a professional capacity with other veterans, and when our kids came of age, I encouraged them to join the military. For a slew of reasons, namely, lack of interest on their part, they didn’t, and I regretted their choice almost as much as I regretted my own failure decades ago to serve my country.

But not anymore.

If you are young man or woman who is considering joining the US military, do yourself a favor: don’t do it. You have better choices, and if you truly consider yourself a patriot who loves your country as I do, then we need to spark a change in what Eisenhower called the “military industrial complex,” the alliance between corporations, government and the Pentagon. And since Congress doesn’t have the will to cut the budget we must vote with our feet.

We have to starve the beast by refusing to join it.

For most of our nation’s history, those who governed the nation also fought for it. Presidents from George Washington to George Bush knew war. But since January 1992 no sitting president has served in the military (no offense to my readers in the National Guard, but W drove a desk in the Texas NG). These men think they understand what war is and what our military capabilities are, but they have no expertise in it and therefore are not worthy to order it into battle.

Yet that hasn’t stopped them, and we live with the consequences of their actions. Broken men and women in VA hospitals and clinic, memories of friends killed in foreign wars. Jingoistic patriotism, with “military discounts” for overpriced Chinese-sourced crap sold by corporations run by men whose closest military experience is completing a Call of Duty mission.

Join the military and you won’t be serving with their kids. No, while you’re eating MREs in some distant sandpit on the other side of the planet, theirs will be Instagramming their meals from Asian-fusion restaurants in West Hollywood.

Abroad our image of a powerful nation is replaced by barefoot goat-herders chasing the world’s most powerful military out of Kabul. In less than two generations our leaders have turned us from the world’s most feared and respected nation to the most laughed at and despised, the media equivalent of a roided up body-builder with a pinky sized dick. Some of our allies pity us, while others are sending out feelers to our foes in Moscow and Beijing.

Don’t be a part of this mess that is not of your making. Don’t waste your time on a country that you love which literally doesn’t give a shit if you die in some place it can’t pronounce. It doesn’t deserve your fealty let alone your life.

If we vote with our feet, things will change. When the sons of hedge fund managers serve alongside the sons of sharecroppers, and the men and women in power know the sound of a ricochet, and the feeling of what Winston Churchill described as the “Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result,” are the ones in charge of our country, then you’ll know the time has come for your sacrifice.

But that time is not now, nor is it anywhere on the horizon. Don’t feed the beast.