Gearing up for war

...He dismisses pacifism, even when pacifists accept alternative service, because pacifists can pursue their beliefs only in countries which are free and in which their fellow citizens are willing to fight for their rights...

...The examples above are only part of a swarm, but they are representative...

...But it was also a remake of an old chestnut: the service takes a slob fense contracts, energy, urban programs, to name just a few...

...What does the Times propose as an answer...

...Later in the year the Times publishes the argument of Yale professor Donald Kagan, to whom it seems obvious that " i n a world of independent and sovereign states that come into conflict and threaten one another's vital interests - - sometimes even existence itself -citizens who choose to remain in a particular country are morally obliged to serve in its armed forces when the need arises...

...He was a Marine...

...13 January 1984:7 Now all of these things have been floating around in one form or another for years...

...That allegiance is to God, and to any other human being because of God's incarnation...

...JOE DOLLS HAVE RETURNED THINK we are gearing up for another war...

...An institution that can ill-afford the strain, Congress is not unfamiliar with handling such rivalries...

...their constellation is...

...the unemployment levels within Texas, does not always allow unanimity within state delegations,much less within the regions...

...And they fall into roughly two categories, with the Times editorial overlapping...

...Region may be one of any number of ways to dissect an issue, but it can also open old wounds...

...It was wonderful watching Tip O'Neill first deplore and then, with an eye to the polls, support the action...

...But there is more of it now, this distance from Vietnam, and it is happening in a particularly dangerous time...

...But there are mixed signals coming from the people these days, and something in the air which can't be picked up clearly yet by opinion polls, though opinion polls have already caught one major gust of it -- the overwhelming approval of Reagan's invasion of Grenada...

...But there are other signs, and they worry me more...

...Nonetheless, regional coalitions continue to be formed in an increasing number of issue areas -- education, housing, deI Of several minds: John Garvey GEARING UP FOR WAR G.I...

...If Congress had any courage (hoping for that might be like looking for a backbone in a clam) it could put a stop to our further involvement there...

...more or less for reasons of personal convenience, aw~ided military service...

...Don't we make education compulsory, they ask...

...At one level it was a kind of Rocky with sex, a sentimental story of achievement...

...For the majority of conscientious objectors, resisters, and draftees, however, personal [.,,r 4: t'.r r f sacrifice for the sake of something which seemed more important was demanded, and given...

...killing has nothing to do with it...

...A curious argument: you are free to be a pacifist because we let you be one...

...In Esquire Christopher Buckley, another non-server, also expresses some regret at having missed a necessary rite of passage, and Bob Greene has written a similar piece...

...therefore you shouldn't be a pacifist...

...One man, who avoided service during the Vietnam war, half approves of his sons' hawkishness and wonders in print whether he might not have missed something...

...Killing is a greater evil than being killed, and it is done in the name of the state when it is done in war...

...Joe dolls have returned to department stores...

...But this questioning is not only not going on (even the bishops' peace pastoral speaks of pacifism as a kind of personal spiritual hobby, a nice witness which states can't take seriously...

...JEREMIAH BARUCH (Jeremiah Baruch is the pseudonym of a Washington writer with a position in government...

...The editorialist quoted philosopher Jacob Needleman on the moral vacuum in our culture, a vacuum which has led young people to reach out for new religious ideals...

...In March the New York Times published a typically silly editorial -- the usual Times process is to take an important moral or political question, mush it up, and offer an entirely predictable liberal answer...

...We do have an obligation to society -- but this does not necessarily imply any duty towards the state...

...Of course there were people who used conscientious objector status as a way to avoid a potentiall) dangerous situation...

...It is equally short-sighted to equate the whim of the state with the needs of sociely...

...There is nothing new about sentimental military movies, deceptive ads for the armed services, war toys, or arguments in favor of military and other involuntary state service...

...I keep thinking of the memorial to those who were killed in Vietnam, which may be the only war memorial in history that comes close to telling the truth...

...There is some hope in the growing uneasiness over Lebanon, but that uneasiness is taking place while a macabre MiJzak plays faintly in the background...

...The first category sees in military life an important personal and communal experience which teaches values, important ones, and in the absence of those values we are somehow less...

...The regional groups are causing more political decisions to be posed in a manner that accentuates conflict in an institution whose success is measured by the extent to which it contains and diminishes conflict...

...More than one writer has pointed out that a heresy is not an outright lie so much as it is a distortion of a truth, and although ! disagree with the people who now wish they had served in Vietnam and with those who believe in an obligation to serve the state, they are close to something true...

...To offer the state the unlimited right to demand that we kill and be killed is, quite literally, idolatry...

...It would come even closer to telling the whole truth if, along with the many thousands of American dead, there were the long list of equally dead Vietnamese...

...I say that we are gearing up for another war, and I have never wanted to be proven wrong more than in saying this...

...That may be just the sort of time a country needs to move from one war into another...

...This does not mean that Christians may never cooperate with the state, but that their cooperation is necessarily limited by a truth which matters more than the state which remains, however constituted, however just, a man-made thing...

...they have the same relationship to the truth...

...G.I...

...it impresses me that those who now wish they had served in Vietnam...

...The problem is that this same regret could work for any war, or for either side in any war...

...They are people who...

...But it is dangerously sentimental and short-sighted to conclude that one should therefore have participated in the war, without looking at the war itself, it remains a rather selfcentered regret: I missed a great experience which made some of my contemporaries more interesting than i am...

...one thing which those who went into the military, those who resisted to the point of going to prison, and those who were willing to do alternative service have in common is that all of them saw something greater than personal convenience at stake...

...The times are right, simple people are in charge, and there is a generation of young men for whom Vietnam is as remote as the Spanish-American war...

...Of course there are all the political signs: Lebanon is the scariest, a problem without a solution which the U.S...

...A look into the heart of that moral vacuum...

...The argument of Donald Kagan implies that there can be no higher allegiance than that demanded by the "legitimate state...

...That distance in time, coupled with what looks almost like nostalgia for military values, could make us ripe for another war if international circumstances and a hawkish administration moved us in that direction...

...The second category assumes that society and the state are one and the same, that duty to one is the same as duty to the other, because the "state is society's representative...

...In the same way beer is about hunting, mountain climbing, and friendship, never about getting juiced...

...obtusely insists on solving...

...No one of them is significant...

...Military life is about learning skills, preparing for your future, and travel...

...This doesn't apply to all countries, not (for example) to wicked ones, but only to "legitimate" states, and a legitimate state is "one that permits the open advocacy of different opinions, the possibility of changing the laws by peaceful means and, most important, emigration without penalty...

...or at least wonder whether maybe they shouldn't have done so, are not (in any of the accounts i have seen) either resisters or conscientious objectors...

...To assume that we can do no better shows a suicidal lack of imagination...

...the state as a source of war and not merely a bystander isn't really considered) - - we even have a renewed nostalgia for the sound of the mortar shell...

...It isn't my favorite thing, but in any case they miss the point...

...there are those within the service who have tried to avoid dangerous duty as well, and some who enter the service because it is the course of least resistance or for more perverse reasons: one of my classmates told me that his ambition was to be able to put a knife into someone and feel nothing...

...First the editors reduce the question to the belief that youth are simply looking for a cause larger than themselves, and suggest universal government s e r v i c e . . , preferably mandatory, but (since that is prohibitively expensive) at least voluntary...

...The ads must be designed by the same people who turn out beer ads...

...they wouldn't let you be one in Russia...

...This arrangement is becoming even more lethal than it was in the past, and must at least be questioned...

...A serious study of religious values or the depths of mystical traditions...

...Hawkishness over Grenada isn't what worries me as much as a series of other, more subtle signs...

...and whips him into shape, turning him from a selfish boor into a decent fellow...

...Moreover, the variability within states, e.g...

...To have a duty to society, an obligation to the people who have come before us and have cared for us and those who will come after us, means to have a duty to the state...

...Although it may gall them to be compared in any way...

...if there were a genuine American desire that we avoid a deeper involvement in Lebanon even Republicans might do their best (as Go!dwater has) to persuade the administration against the course it seems bent on taking...

...There is in the young, he says, a "raw hunger for transcendence...

...Conservatives frequently charge that this sort of argument implies that death is the greatest evil...

...For the Christian, however, there must be...

...Florida often finds itself having more in common with the Northeast than with its immediate neighbors, and the needs of New England's high-tech growth do not always coincide with the survival instincts of the older Great Lakes industries (not to mention the strain placed on the Northeast-Midwest coalition by the acid rain controversy...

...Journalism is playing its part...

...Not long ago An Officer and a Gentleman was a big hit...

...JOHN GARVEY Commonweal: 8...

...An Officer and a Gentleman led to a couple of TV imitations, which join a series of enlistment commercials...

...The Times waves aside the objection that its preferred version could look like involuntary servitude...

...The people to whom the ads are directed and to whom the movies most appeal are too young to have any real memory of Vietnam...

...It is easy to see how someone who spent a major portion of his adult life avoiding something which seemed to many of his contemporaries a duty could, with the passage of time, come to believe that an important part of adult experience had passed him by...

...A good beginning, with a quote from a good man...