Salon | Letters to the editor

_______________THE ARMY OF THE RIGHT BY JONATHAN BRODER (01/06/98)

A couple of things in this article struck me as funny little blind spots on the part of Thomas E. Ricks.
He talks of how Marine recruiters were not permitted to wear their uniforms to recruit in a public school. "Moreover, this happened after a controversy in Cambridge in which the right of public high school teachers to be openly gay had been reaffirmed. The recruiters said there's something wrong when you can be openly gay but can't be openly Marine." Having spent four years of my life in Cambridge, I can hazard a guess as to the reasons behind the school's discomfiture with the Marines: the military's policy on gay soldiers. Perhaps the Cambridge public schools would be more accepting of Marines if they were more accepting of gays.
Interestingly, the same factor comes into play in Ricks' comments on the lack of ROTC programs at elite universities. I don't know about Yale, but at Harvard the main obstacle to the return of ROTC is, once again, the refusal of the military to accept that homosexuals can effectively serve their country. Nevertheless, Harvard students do participate in ROTC through an arrangement with the program at MIT. My own observations encompass only a small sample of ROTC students, I'm sure, but if the goal is to make the military of the future more politically balanced, ROTC is not the answer. It suffers from the same problem of self-selection that Ricks suggests plagues the military as a whole. Campus leftists are not joining ROTC en masse.

-- Maia Gemmill
New York
Thomas E. Ricks does an excellent job of explaining why members of today's military might identify with Republican hawks and feel hostile toward President Clinton, women and the millions of Americans who choose every year to stay out of the armed forces. His suggestion that a far right-leaning military might look -- and act -- with increasing contempt on the society it protects is one of the most frightening things I've heard in a long time.
But I am amazed by Ricks' assertion that members of our military would cast themselves as upholders of a more virtuous American ideal. Now, I have to admit that I know only three former military officers who fall into my age group (30-40). But they're all West Point graduates, all salespeople for a major U.S. supplier of health-care equipment -- and every single one of them sleeps around on his wife, steals from hospitals so he can keep refilling their inventory and is outspokenly racist. If that's the American ideal, I want no part of it.
The fact is that America's military people are just as guilty of weakness of character as anybody else in this society -- Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich included.
--J. Kingston Pierce
Seattle
SALON | Jan. 9, 1998

R E C E N T L Y+| DECONSTRUCTING THE KENNEDYS BY CAMILLE PAGLIA

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_______________THE ARMY OF THE RIGHT BY JONATHAN BRODER (01/06/98)
	A couple of things in this article struck me as funny little blind spots on the part of Thomas E. Ricks. He talks of how Marine recruiters were not permitted to wear their uniforms to recruit in a public school. "Moreover, this happened after a controversy in Cambridge in which the right of public high school teachers to be openly gay had been reaffirmed. The recruiters said there's something wrong when you can be openly gay but can't be openly Marine." Having spent four years of my life in Cambridge, I can hazard a guess as to the reasons behind the school's discomfiture with the Marines: the military's policy on gay soldiers. Perhaps the Cambridge public schools would be more accepting of Marines if they were more accepting of gays. Interestingly, the same factor comes into play in Ricks' comments on the lack of ROTC programs at elite universities. I don't know about Yale, but at Harvard the main obstacle to the return of ROTC is, once again, the refusal of the military to accept that homosexuals can effectively serve their country. Nevertheless, Harvard students do participate in ROTC through an arrangement with the program at MIT. My own observations encompass only a small sample of ROTC students, I'm sure, but if the goal is to make the military of the future more politically balanced, ROTC is not the answer. It suffers from the same problem of self-selection that Ricks suggests plagues the military as a whole. Campus leftists are not joining ROTC en masse. -- Maia Gemmill New York Thomas E. Ricks does an excellent job of explaining why members of today's military might identify with Republican hawks and feel hostile toward President Clinton, women and the millions of Americans who choose every year to stay out of the armed forces. His suggestion that a far right-leaning military might look -- and act -- with increasing contempt on the society it protects is one of the most frightening things I've heard in a long time. But I am amazed by Ricks' assertion that members of our military would cast themselves as upholders of a more virtuous American ideal. Now, I have to admit that I know only three former military officers who fall into my age group (30-40). But they're all West Point graduates, all salespeople for a major U.S. supplier of health-care equipment -- and every single one of them sleeps around on his wife, steals from hospitals so he can keep refilling their inventory and is outspokenly racist. If that's the American ideal, I want no part of it. The fact is that America's military people are just as guilty of weakness of character as anybody else in this society -- Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich included. --J. Kingston Pierce Seattle SALON \| Jan. 9, 1998