What was it I said a few days ago about needing a new U.S. v. Seeger, for military COs who object to *this* war?
Now, according to the Rocky Mountain News:
"Soldiers from a Fort Carson combat unit say they have been issued an ultimatum - re-enlist for three more years or be transferred to other units expected to deploy to Iraq."
This is how Rumsfeld's "new doctrine" of "smaller, more cohesive units" will be constructed. By guys who are terrified of going right back to the hellhole they just left.
Two sentences that stand out to me most, from this article:
"A recruiter told [the anonymous sources of the article] that the Army would keep them 'for as long as it needed them.'"
But instead: "We have whole platoons refusing to sign."
By the end of the U.S. war against Vietnam, substantial numbers of GIs were shooting into the ground, distributing antiwar newsletters, fleeing their units. A small but significant number were going after their officers, many of whom were callow ROTC'ers -- the 1970s equivalent of Paul Bremer and his Heritage Foundation kids giving advice after Falluja. (I was going to say ".... of Rumsfeld," but then I realized: we did have Rumsfeld running *that* war too.) But that state of affairs, that level of rebellion, developed after a number of years. Is it the Internet speeding it up this time? The sheer gall of this administration?
It's just possible that the Pentagon has just miscalculated; that the Gen-X and Gen-Y mix of rebellion and party spirit, which they'd learned to feed and hoped they could control, will now blow up in their face.
(Thanks to Duncan Black for pointing out the article.)
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