Memorial Day is an emotionally complex holiday, mixing sadness
at the loss and suffering of so many Americans, appreciation for
the selfless and patriotic sacrifices made through the generations,
and pride and gratitude that we have a country worth the devotion
that has been lavished on it by so many.
The day can be a melancholy business at the Thornberry
household because my wife’s father, a member of the West Point
class of 1934, did not survive World War II. I have my own
honorable discharge. But my job in the U.S. Navy during the early
days of the Vietnam war was to help keep the Viet Cong out of the
Mediterranean and the North Atlantic. Hardly onerous duty compared
to what so many of my age-mates had to endure, many of whom paid
the ultimate price.
More seriously, my shipmates on the destroyer USS
Conyngham and I were taking time out of our lives to help
keep the commie hordes to the east from overrunning Western Europe.
We were there because the political leaders of a by-then recovered
Europe had made the choice not to re-arm themselves in any serious
way because Uncle Sam had shown a willingness to defend the
independence Europeans no longer cared much about.
Considering what the countries of Old Europe have made of
themselves, perhaps we should have let the commie hordes have them.
The French would have driven the commissars nuts. And the KGB would
have had the Islamists shot. But I digress.
Now while honoring the individuals who’ve died defending
America, we must worry about entire American military services
being imperiled by left-wing social engineering run amuck. Some of
the offenses are simply aesthetic, such as the Navy’s intention of
naming a cargo ship after union activist Cesar Chavez. (Can the USS
Saul Alinsky be far behind?) Others are more
serious.
For decades the military services have dealt, with varying
levels of success and failure (and a lot of disingenuous PR), with
the chaos and lowering of physical standards brought about by the
thoroughly post-everything and counter-intuitive notion that women
as well as men should be and can be warriors. We’ve yet to learn
how open homosexuals will fit into the intimate, 24-7 military
life. And somehow American combat units manage to perform well even
while being obliged to play Mother-May-I with gaggles of JAG
officers who second-guess their every move.
The latest frontier in the sexual correctness over mission
obsession is Navy Secretary Ray Mabus’s intention of assigning
women sailors to super-crowded submarines. Submarine crew members
live and work so much in each other’s back pockets that they must
pass psychological exams to determine if they can deal with the
closeness. Left ideologues wishing to assign women to submarine
duty may as well go the little distance left and assign men and
women sailors to the same bunks.
While the country is still celebrating the success of Navy
SEALs in sending Osama bin Laden to hell where he belongs, we learn
that Mabus, a former naval officer himself but now little more than
a courtier, is considering endangering this elite of the elites
branch by obliging them to accept women members.
Can he really mean it? Or is he just keeping the left
happy by teasing them with this absurdity? I’ve seen Mabus’
picture. He doesn’t look like a fool. And he’s from Mississippi
where there are many sensible people.
“It’s my notion that women should have the same
opportunities as men in the Navy,” Mabus told the Navy
Times. He added that the only reason he has a teensy
hesitation in opening up SEAL training for women is, “some of the
physical things you’ve got to go through to be a SEAL.”
Ya think? Anyone who wishes to water down the
physical side of SEALs’ training and missions to a level where Demi
Moore actually could be a SEAL is in the total grip of leftist
ideology. And anyone in a position of power to make this part of
the NOW wish list national policy is as big a threat to America’s
security as a foreign enemy.
Civilian control of the military is absolutely necessary
in a democratic republic. But this sort of nonsense should remind
Americans that it’s vitally important which civilians we put in
control. Both political parties in America have saddled our
military with too many political and social work deployments (see
Haiti), and have treated the services as clay to mold in the shape
of their own political and cultural phantasms.
With the right folks in charge we could honor our troops
by recognizing that their only mission is to discourage our enemies
from attacking us, and, failing that, to close with and destroy our
enemies. There’s no room in this stark and absolutely necessary
assignment for social engineering. None. Sorry, Demi. Sober up,
Ray.
