MIDDLE-AGED SOLDIERS NEVER DIE
Stegenga, James A.
THE LAST WORD Middle-aged soldiers never die.... fames A. Stegenga ¦M 11 the schemes suggested so far Agm for reviving the draft envisage m mm calling up nineteen-year-olds to meet the military's...
...At the same time, the fifty-year-old recruit is apt to be less deferential toward authorities his own age who propose unnecessary, unwise, impractical, or improper foreign policy adventuring...
...Instead of calling up several hundred thousand immature nineteen-year-olds who will have to be mothered and socialized to accept the rigors of training, the privations of military life, and the duties associated with their assigned soldierly jobs, the military could induct emotionally mature fifty-year-olds who have spent their adult lives working in organizations, patiently coping, understanding and accepting legitimate restrictions, suffering idiots, and shouldering responsibilities...
...Not really...
...They would be more capable than your basic incompetent nineteen-year-olds, too...
...Your typical fifty-year-old has also passed that time in his life when he was burning with zeal and ambition to trisect the angle, end poverty, or invent the 100-miles-to-the-gallon carburetor...
...They would be more experienced at working smoothly with other people, typing memos, solving problems under pressure, staying healthy, improvising, running machines, doing their own laundry, entertaining themselves, fixing stuck windows, following orders, staying awake at night, and all the other chores of soldiering...
...By the same token, we ought to be uncomfortable that our soldiers are so much younger than our population...
...But if it is really necessary to resume conscription—a big "if," but let it go—I think a case can be made for drafting fifty-year-olds instead...
...The fifty-year-old recruits would doubtless be more self-disciplined and self-controlled...
...America's men now push these responsibilities off onto America's boys...
...More so than his nineteen-year-old son or niece, the fifty-vear-old soldier is likely to ask the old civilians in Washington, "You're sending me where to do what...
...Fifty or 100 years ago, perhaps, the cannon fodder still had to be young bucks with strong backs so they could lug 100 pounds of gear on foot all over the European landscape...
...They would have a better feel for the ins and outs of manipulating organizations and getting things done...
...More would know how to read training manuals, blueprints, maps, and the colonel's mind...
...We are understandably and appropriately uncomfortable when we notice that our military forces are blacker and poorer than the civilians back home...
...But now the soldier and his junk are mostly hauled, and brawny youths don't have that much of an edge...
...Ask yourself with whom you would rather go into combat—the gawky kid down the street who recently barely graduated from high school, or your grown-up corner grocer who used to be a truck mechanic...
...he is reconciled to putting in time, and thus might not resent the intrusion of Uncle Sam so much as the youngster with dreams and a whole Life Plan that will be disastrously upset by a two-year interruption...
...Where is it written that the young should do the sacrificing, killing, and dying for the old...
...It's time our men— and adult women, too—stepped forward to shoulder the burdens of our nation's defense...
...Most fifty-year-olds are past their child-rearing years (or almost past them, anyway, even in this era of supporting "children" until they finish graduate school at age thirty-two...
...And everyone knows that the toughest guys in any military unit aren't the kids but the grown-up sergeants and colonels—"grizzled," they're called...
...But, you ask, don't people have to be young and strong to survive basic training, walk and run all day long, do thirty push-ups whenever the mean sergeant demands them, and handle those heavy weapons and obstinate vehicles...
...Perhaps military service would even be less of a disruption in the fifty-year-old's life than it is for the nineteen-year-old...
...More of them would know technical trades...
...Grown-up soldiers would just be a lot easier to handle...
...fames A. Stegenga ¦M 11 the schemes suggested so far Agm for reviving the draft envisage m mm calling up nineteen-year-olds to meet the military's manpower needs...
...Anyway, many of my fifty-year-old friends are in better shape than some of the lazy nineteen-year-olds I see...
...exuberant and only partially civilized teen-agers on their tight leashes...
...You gotta be kidding...
...The military could then do without whole brigades of baby-sitting sergeants, counselors, stockade managers, and MPs patrolling brothel areas...
...The military would be spared most of the time and effort now expended keeping James A. Stegenga, eight years away from his proposed draft age, is a professor of international relations and military affairs at Purdue University...
Vol. 44 • January 1980 • No. 1
