Word: militaryâ
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They joined the military??into college, or out of the ghetto, or because of its seemingly studly glamour. "I saw a Marine when I was in high school," Sergeant Robert Sarra recalls in a new documentary. "And I was like, that's it! They're mean, they're tough, they got cool uniforms, and chicks dig 'em." That image barely survived through Sarra's basic training--brainwashing, he and other young men now call it. As for combat, he found it less like a Top Gun video game, shooting MiGs out of the sky, and more like Grand Theft Auto...
...into which American troops and money would be poured with no result different from Viet Nam. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, chastened by Viet Nam, in which our troops performed with admirable success but were declared to have been defeated, and by the steady decline of respect for the military???and the decline of military budgets?resisted a major commitment. I sensed, and understood, a doubt on the part of the military in the political will of the civilians at the top to follow through to the end on such a commitment...
...official apartheid, the Jewish and Arab communities seldom mix. The majority of Arabs live in 107 villages (most in Galilee) in which there are no Jews ?and until 1966, these communities were under military rule. There are relatively few Arabs in top government jobs or in the military???partly for security reasons and partly to spare them a crisis of conscience during war. Although they comprise 13% of Israel's population, Arabs hold only six of the Knesset's 120 seats and constitute only 3% of the students at Israel's universities...
Though Shoup maintains that many U.S. officers saw the Viet Nam war as a chance to field-test new weapons and season a generation of career soldiers, the experience seems more an example of military???and political?misjudgment than of calculated aggressiveness. The military, which oversold Lyndon Johnson on the efficiency of air power against North Viet Nam, can be faulted; so can the State Department, which insisted that Ho Chi Minh, despite his Soviet training and his country's history of resistance to Chinese influence, was little more than Peking's puppet. But the final decisions lay with...
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