Saving the generals
Getlein, Frank
high Andes who told a visitor that he did not know what heaven was like but that he was certain that it was a city, was giving voice to an age-old yearning. It is a yearning shared by those who have...
...It is not the whole city...
...The frosting on the cake was Civilet- ti's attack of memory lapses, apparently one of the health hazards of the office, shared by John Mitchell, Richard Klein- dienst, and (you could look it up) Harry Daugherty in the really good old days...
...And we must realize that every city, like Jerusalem of song and story, is an idea as well as a place...
...To do this we must, of course, abandon our old geographical concepts of where a city is...
...the registration resister, on the other hand, is just trying to save his ass and to hell with him...
...Our European allies are different...
...That is one trenchant reason for what happened in Vietnam and one, unfortunately, that, to my knowledge, has yet to be stumbled upon by the people who wrote the Pentagon Papers, by the punditry at large, or even by the anti-war movement...
...This particular insanity of the generals so affected Gloria Emerson that, some years later, she had to be restrained from hiring a plane and a bullhorn to fly over Ellsworth Bunker's summer place in New England crying out that a Free Fire Zone had been declared, you have five minutes, run, Bunker, run...
...He could presum- ably subpoena the attorney-general him- self, assuming Civiletti still has the job, and question him closely about those statements...
...And they do...
...Judge Civiletti won' t give you no bail, It's hard times in the Carterville jail...
...During the Babylonian captivity we are told that "the craftsmen and the engravers departed out of Jerusalem...
...The core city is no longer doing all the things which makes the city a city...
...And trade builds on peace...
...ELL, IT WAS funny, any way you look at it...
...Hear me, boy...
...For Germans, both East and West, similarly mystical gratifications are derived from involun- tary military service: they are preparing themselves for the return of Barbarossa, Old Fritz, the Iron Chancellor, the Crazy Corporal, perhaps all the above, from their graves beneath the Rhine...
...We don't get it often, we've got it, lets use it...
...All that is one powerful reason we got into Vietnam heavily in the first place and why we handled it so sloppily, from a purely military viewpoint...
...Le ciel est-il bleu ou gris...
...If they're not used to conscription, as American gener- als are not, they go bananas, can't think up things to do fast enough with their wonderful new toy before the dread civil- ian Congress takes it away from them...
...They are honorable men, most of them...
...Delightful as all this has been and doubtless will continue to be as the cam- paign and the various investigations swing into high gear together, it all dis- tracts attention from the real reason why the Carter conscription is a profound mis- take, why conscription in this country when there is not a war on, by which I mean a real, legally declared, fully ac- knowledged war, with price controls, ra- tioning as needed, at least a pro forma attempt to limit war profits, all that and more, is a cataclysmic blunder...
...But people find that which transcends their solitary limitations not only in the holy, but in truth, in justice, and in beauty...
...What I see in all this is that the things which built the city were good things, things which were humanizing, no matter how materialistic their aspect...
...The recruits are there as needed, can be called in as desired by classes, No strain...
...On the face of it, the registration resister, when finally tracked down by Javert-Civiletti, can reasonably plead that he reasonably assumed that everything would be hunky-dory if he agreed at last to register just as the Justice Department,as it is strangely called, was ready to sock it to him...
...or, as they said in more elegant times, since God has given us the conscription, let us enjoy it...
...Experts say that for the foreseeable future the cities may have to resign themselves to their limited role and hope that somehow the larger society will assume more of the burden of caring for the poor and the old isolated within their boundaries...
...The Russians, with a tiny handful of exceptions, wouldn't want it any other way...
...We don't...
...so help me, I'm not making this up--a program for training cockroaches to go on the alert at the smell of nearby enemy, thus allowing the American conscripts to jump up and save Vietnam from the Vietnamese...
...It makes them feel, well, Russian...
...They've always had conscription...
...Because they do, the generals in all those countries take conscription for granted...
...so cities were places of learning, of order and government, and places where artists and writers gathered...
...The proposition here advanced is that we owe it to our generals not to let them disgrace themselves again because of the deceptive ease offered by conscription...
...and that what radiates from the center must be returned in some way to renew the core...
...But, most fundamentally, they were places of exchange, a systematizing of a discovery lost in the mists of the history of humankind: that we can benefit from and enhance our lives by satisfying each other's needs, by exchanging goods and services...
...Strategic hamlets, good grief: straight out of the military history of the American West, with its system of forts and without any relevance at all to the way things were in 'Nam...
...Like all of us, they can be tempted and con- scription is a double temptation for the American military man: you've got it, you ought to use it, and, since you've got it, you don't need to think in conven- tional or unconventional strategic terms, just throw some more meat into the meatgrinder.We must not lead them into that particular temptation for the second time...
...that, like Rome of old it exists where its far-flung citizens are...
...I mean, the law has been fulfilled, why be vindictive...
...Do you recall a single strategic plan for winning that war...
...But when God spoke through men, cities became holy places...
...There wasn't any...
...If today the middle class has fled the cities, the rich live there in luxurious ghettoes behind guards and bars, and the poor live in decayed shells or on the streets, the fault is not in what makes the city...
...Ease makes sloppy art...
...According to John Herbers writing re- cently in the New York Times, the "cities are performing a more limited role...
...Why indeed...
...That was the theory at Verdun, as far as anyone can discern a theory there, and it was the basic Ameri- can practice of the Vietnam war...
...More sinister was the Free Fire Zone, a plan to kill everybody for miles around and then to wonder why the natives didn't proffer their hearts and minds...
...American generals, on the record, go off their rockers when handed conscription for the same reason a six-year-old goes off his when handed the key to the confectionary store, an arms merchant off his when given a cost-plus contract...
...And then, here was the nation's high- est law enforcement officer, Civiletti again, coming on the tube on Thursday night, all networks, to explain that in re Billy Carter, "No, I don' b'leeve we'll prosecute...
...Here was the nation's ighest law enforcement officer, Civiletti, coming on the tube on Tuesday night, all networks and who knows how many rock 'n' roll stations, addressing all reluctant registrants for the Carter con- scription...
...Of several minds: Frank Getlein I l~[ml SAVING THE GENERALS HOW CONSCRIPTION INDUCES INSANITY But why boundaries...
...Great religions have their holy cities-- Rome, Mecca, Benares-on-the-Ganges, and the epitome of all, Jerusalem, Jerusalem the Golden, David's holy city--the metaphor for cities to come...
...Difficulties make good art, in war no less than in theatrical production or danc- ing...
...And others have their others...
...ABIGAIL McCARTHY r Ill Judge Civiletti will put you in jail, It's hard, it's hard...
...Only then can the city be an organic whole...
...You see, dere, when a fella fails to register after we been beggin' him for two years and then, when he hears we are thinkin' ofprosecutin' he finally does register, why, we don' normally prose- cute...
...The non-registrant picking up a cool two hundred grand with pros- pects of a half mil is clearly in the tradi- tion that made this country great and should be encouraged...
...They must take in all those who draw their sustenance from its trade and exchange...
...It's the big chance...
...Quel temps fait-il Paris...
...Because we don't, when we conscript men in peacetime, American generals go off their rockers...
...From them came trade...
...Conscription gives generals an easy life...
...Meanwhile, we must assume, Jimmy 12 September 1980:487 Carter retired to the Rose Garden to meditate on a favorite theme of his in 1976, "Why non-registrants with high connections are treated differently from non-registrants with no connections at all...
...When God was a distant God, people found him on mountain tops and in lonely forest shrines...
...Why bother with strategy when you can just order up another so many thousands of corpses: eventually there'lt,be so many the enemy won't be able to get through...
...My own favorite was the "Cong sniffer...
...For the French, conscription evokes the Corsi- can Upstart and la gloire, which they haven't had much of since: military serv- ice is a small price to pay...
...These discoveries were discoveries of what it is to be human...
...The Russians and Chinese are different...
...We all have our dreams...
...Re- duced to a narrow economic base, they are the keepers of the poor and the old...
...Hand in hand with that ancient discovery must have gone another--the joy in work which is called craftsmanship, and the joy of sharing that work with others...
...You, boy," he said to my ear, which, I readily admit, colored his speech with the tones of the people he hangs around with, works for, and de- fends at all costs, "'You, boy, you get yo' ass down to the Post Office and register, right now, or I'm goin' th'ow yo' ass in jail and you'll never get out...
...The great civilizing city-states were built on, and grew from, trade--Florence, Ravenna, Padua, Siena, Genoa...
...some of them are even competent...
...FRANK GETLEIN Commonweal: 488...
...The boundaries of any city should take in those who have moved to its fringes and suburbs--the businesses as well as the people...
...If we reject the obvious explanation as unworthy of philosophical inquiry, we are left with the explanation that our free-enterprise society naturally favors the entrepreneur and Billy Carter was certainly being enterprising in his Libyan connection...
...Trade binds us...
...They are, as Mayor Koch noted, the as- similators of the least-skilled and most oppressed of the new immigrants from abroad...
...Cities were the places where people wor- shipped together and to which they jour- neyed together in pilgrimages...
...The Chinese', on the other hand, get the warm pleasant feeling that they're building socialism when the army takes them away for a spell...
...That reason is, very simply, that con- scription in such non-war circumstances drives American generals right out of their heads, as is easily demonstrated from the last time we had peacetime con- scription, namely in the years leading up to and throughout the Indochina Wars...
...In Russia's case, it's part of the czarist heritage, like the pictures in the Hermit- age, the ballet, the bureaucracy, and the all-around enslavement of the citizenry by the government...
...That's exactly what happened in Vietnam...
...It is a yearning shared by those who have only heard tales of the city and by those who are exiled from it...
...I don't know about judges, especially those appointed by the presi- dent with the advice of the attorney-' general, but I can't imagine a jury outside the Pentagon that wouldn't turn the kid loose...
...From a command point of view, peacetime conscription produces the lazy man's war...
...What there was, instead, was a series of what can only be called public relations gimmicks-except that most PR pro's wouldn't dream of using the transparently flimflam devices as a "strategy" that existed entirely in press releases...
...The main point is that there was no strategy at all and the reason there wasn't was that the generals were relieved from the necessity of having one: all they had to do was to call up another ten thousand, another twenty, another fifty, and just keep getting them killed and wounded...
Vol. 107 • September 1980 • No. 16
