Boys And Girls Together - Big Mistake

The military exists to kill people in large numbers.

Its press agents prefer to say, “No, it exists to prevent such mass killings.” It does so, they say, by being ready and willing to kill in large numbers.

And so, this being the land of the free and the home of the press agent, instead of naming it the War Department, we prettify reality by calling it the Defense Department, while referring to death as “body count.”

Mushmouth talk of this sort produces slogans like “Peace Is Our Business” for B-52 crews whose actual business is to kill multitudes by dropping nuclear bombs at official command.

Historically, our military’s killing work has been inflicted exclusively on men. Men who hated it were forced to do it anyhow.

Such men must always constitute a great majority, since (1) most men instinctively shrink from killing people, and (2) most men fear the prospect of being killed or maimed, which are high-probability risks of the job. Commanders sensibly pack their armies with males young enough to believe themselves immortal.

Until recently, few women have shown much zest for this ghastly toil. Now, however, they clamor for official license to kill and be killed, just like all those wretched men, most of whom, if given their druthers, would rather do neither.

What we have here is a cockamamie perversion of the otherwise sensible principles of the feminist movement. What was to be hoped for from feminism was a maturing influence on the essentially boyish, game-playing nature of American life.

Feminists may bridle at the idea that there is a more mature quality in the female nature than in the male. Why should women be denied the same boyish, game-playing lives enjoyed by men? There is a moment in the movie “Patton” in which the war-loving general, speaking battlefield language, tells his men they are going to grease their tank treads with the guts of enemy soldiers. Using another man’s guts for lubricating machinery hardly seems like the sort of thing anyone, man or woman, would demand the “right” to do.

What about using the intestines of enemy women soldiers for the job? Is that more loathsome than using the inner organs of men? In a grotesque perversion of logic, women are saying their guts have the same right that men’s have to hard usage by enemy tank crews.

A great deal of the sexual hysteria now racking the military comes from deep and sullen male resistance to women claiming a “right” to kill and be killed for the country. The Kelly Flinn case, no matter how the Air Force rationalizes it, was about a boyish, game-playing system determined to keep women from flying a glamorous killing machine.

This led with fine, ironic and inexorable justice to the case of Air Force Gen. Joseph Ralston, a sexual sinner like Kelly Flinn and probably millions of other Americans, if truth be told.

The general had an adulterous relationship 13 years ago while separated from his wife. “Fair’s fair” is the cry in Washington, so Ralston, who was about to become chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, may have his career shut down.

Tales of sexual abuse of military women are commonplace. So are reports of consensual sex among military women and men. There was the famous gulf war “love boat,” which produced a large crew of pregnant sailors.

And what else was to be expected? The military is not a Boy Scout Camporee. It is teaching young people to kill other young people, a work that does not prosper when men are expected to behave like gentlemen and women like ladies.

Needing youth’s muscle and gullibility, the military must deal with a huge number of men and women at the age of raging hormones. Licentious, even abusive behavior is predictable. Officers who rise through such an environment might naturally acquire a cavalier view of the marriage vow.

All this is complicated by the American culture’s childish view of sex, which requires us to be shocked by it even as we rejoice in the prurience of TV soap operas, supermarket tabloids and gossip about love children of the stars.

Maybe full sexual integration of the military is a noble idea whose time has not come. A few days ago was the 53rd anniversary of D-Day. If we were in a shooting war now, we could be in real trouble.

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