THE ARMY IN DECLINE?

The relentlessly anti-American British press continues their jihad against our military with this article in the Independent about the recruiting difficulties encountered in recent months by the U.S. Army. While the numbers appear to be accurate, and the problem is real, the way in which this newspaper goes about reporting the story (the people they interview, the quotes they use) gives the impression our military is on the verge of collapse. Take this part, for example...

...recruits such as Jeremiah Adler, an idealistic 18-year-old from Portland, Oregon, who joined the Army believing he could help change its culture. Within days of arriving for his basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia, he realised he had made a mistake and said the Army simply wanted to turn him into a "ruthless, cold-blooded killer".

Mr Adler begged to be sent home and even pretended to be gay to be discharged. Eventually, he and another recruit fled in the night and rang the hotline, which advised him to turn himself in to avoid court-martial. He will now be given an "other than honourable discharge".

From southern Germany where he is on holiday before starting college in the autumn, Mr Adler told The Independent: "It was obviously a horrible experience but now I'm glad I went through it. I was expecting to meet a whole lot of different types of people; some had noble reasons. I also met a lot of people who [wanted] to kill Arabs." In one letter home to his family, Mr Adler wrote that when he arrived he was horrified by the things he heard other recruits talking about, things that in civilian life would result in someone being treated as an outcast. In another letter he said he could hear other recruits crying at night. "You can hear people trying to make sure no one hears them cry under their covers," he wrote.

As a U.S. Army veteran of peacetime service in the late 1980s, I do not doubt Mr. Adler's honesty when he describes his aborted participation in the Army. Anyone who has been in Army Basic Training can tell similar stories about trainees crying in the barracks at night, or coming unglued prior to some aspect of the course (I vividly recall a trainee standing in line in front of me as we prepared to receive our M-16A1 rifles who was shaking uncontrollably. He refused to take his weapon, the entire platoon was treated to grass drills while he stood on the reviewing stand and, eventually, after several more such instances, he was discharged). One also encounters young men who say stupid things, even barbaric things. As a young, college-educated man of 24, I learned all sorts of words and phrases I had never heard before, much of it describing sexual practices (real or imagined).

The bottom line is that Mr. Adler's experience of culture-shock upon entering Army Basic Training is no different than when I entered the course in 1986, and the fact that there is a war on is irrelevant. The evidence of recruits crying under their covers is not indicative of an Army on the verge of breakdown. When we start seeing riots on Army posts, massive use of illegal drugs by soldiers, officers being gunned down in broad daylight by soldiers robbing the payroll (all stories described to me by veteran officers at my unit, the HQ of the 59th Ordnance Brigade, as having happened in the 1970s), then I will begin to believe that the Army is deteriorating. So far, that is not the case.