Document created: 27 August 04
Air University Review, November-December
1970
Colonel Robert F. Hemphill, USAF (Ret)
Members of the gray-haired legion of the retired occasionally find time for rumination of the type that too often is an intrusive luxury for the busy commander or staff officer. Briefing deadlines, suspense dates, and visiting firemen are natural foes of quiet contemplation.
Depending upon circumstances, the retiree may discover himself to be a resident defense expert, gratuitously assumed by his neighbors to be broadly informed in the ways of arms and a source of reliable opinion on anything related to a military service. He must chuckle, reminiscent and misty-eyed, at World War II Spam jokes and nod sagely at topical growls about the military-industrial combine.
The retiree speaks from a unique platform, being peculiarly of and yet not fully within the service. He can encourage objective evaluation of the defense establishment, which increasingly is being called to account, during this season of disenchantment with a war which fits no earlier pattern and of nagging worry over perils at the doorstep. It is desirable that he be able to interpret lucidly and logically the defense function as he sees it, particularly its meaning in terms of people, the essential common denominator. What did it mean to him? Why did he elect to spend a substantial number of his productive, mature years in uniform? How does he feel about it now? What about the services today?
This calls for perspective, and the retiree needs to get his philosophical house in order if he is to make prologue of his past.
Like the career doctor, architect, salesman, or farmer, the career serviceman pursues his vocation for a number of reasons. Usually he likes it and gets satisfaction from performing responsibly and well. He sees it, perhaps unsurely at first, as a means of honoring the citizen’s fundamental obligation to his nation and of doing something useful with his life. This, his visceral reaction tells him, is the way it ought to be. Not inconsequentially, the career pays him less than he would prefer but enough for him to provide the necessities for himself and his family.
The individual on his way to becoming a military man does not always proceed via the nearest direct route from the schoolroom to the orderly room, clear-eyed and unafraid, sure of his goal. Indeed, some wander—others are shunted—into military life. Those who came along in the late 1930s and early 1940s found vocational preferences pre-empted by a nation preparing for the possibility of war, and they were not unfailingly pleased with their fortunes. But when the bombs exploded that Sunday morning in Hawaii, there was motivation enough for all. It was war! We had been attacked, and we would, by God, clean a few ploughs—which we did.
The World War II veteran who chose to remain in uniform did so because he found in service life a precious, ineffable purpose which outweighed and tempered the dislocations, discomforts, and dangers. There was a sense of continuing accomplishment, a strong feeling of kinship between the individual and his nation, a kind of proprietary, interdependent reliance that is produced by few other human endeavors.
It did not occur to him to question that intuitive sense of belonging and mattering. It was enough, even as the more tangible rewards of military life reinforced the quiet conviction that the career decision already taken had been the right one. He would have been slow to repudiate Stephen Decatur’s “our country, right or wrong” rhetoric.
Threaded throughout the seasoning years of service was the pride of being a part of the nation’s defenses. Beyond serious question, defense continued to be necessary because the nation was eminently worth protecting and preserving. It was still young in years and bright with promise, and its acknowledged imperfections were correctable. The hope persisted that the nation, functioning through its lawful governmental processes and applying its diplomatic skills complemented by sure and potent strength of arms, might be able to bring about just and enduring conditions of peace, at least in regions of immediate concern.
Such sanguinity did not go untested. There were wars and their rumors, police actions, and shows of force and flag which kept the private military household, if not the entire defense establishment, in tension. There were few truly peaceful periods during which the professional—even if his service had urged it—was free to tug at his mental moorings and wonder just who he was and where he was heading, or, for that matter, whether either he or his service was in constructive motion. If he wasn’t the regular crew chief assigned to a specific defense task, he was off somewhere learning how to become one.
At service schools, where he polished his military know-how and marveled at the integrity with which immutable operational principles prove their immutability, the subject usually was wars and how to win them. That made sense. Why else would a nation keep a uniformed defense force trained in the application of violence? Who wants to come in second in a war?
Similarly, his study at civilian institutions pursued academic goals related to the defense mission, which also made good management sense.
But where, in all this, was the military professional supposed to learn to identify and to deal with the tides of change now reshaping the society which produced both him and the defense establishment? For that matter, were armed forces philosophers, whose concepts influence the evolution of the services, any more prescient than their fellows on the campuses, in industry, and elsewhere in government when it came to forecasting disruptive shifts within the nation’s social structure? Whether they should have foreseen trouble both in the jungles of Southeast Asia and “right here in River City” is important now only as it sharpens their future perception.
The serviceman and the military machine he was forever tinkering with and testing were tucked away behind the chain link fence, and he was told to keep ready. There didn’t seem to be time or need for anything else.
This seems now to have been shortsighted because defense and those who
constitute it cannot exist apart from the nation served, whatever its current
complexes. Only at the peril of alienation do military men forget this
relationship, and in time of divisive stress, as at present, the erosion of
traditional public support of the armed forces emphasizes its vulnerability.1
The American military man of today may wonder whether the defense establishment of which he is a part has become so engrossed in the problem of fighting a strange and distant war that it has failed to apprehend the substantial changes in the community environment at home.
Unless he suffers it by choice or default, the man in uniform is not shut off from the sound and sight of events in that community, no matter where he may be. Service life may, if he lets it or if he is ineptly led, soften and dull his awareness, detaching him from the real world outside the perimeter fence and persuading him that he need not concern himself with mundane problems because his is a higher calling—even though he came from and ultimately will return to that world outside the fence.
He does not live in remote comfort within a steel cocoon, endlessly whetting his saber and updating his war plans, and yet undeniably he is committed, as his nonmilitary peers are not, to calculated, rehearsed response to incursive threats and actions. He is a man “set under authority,” as was Luke’s Roman centurion,2 a human resource at the ready who can be momentarily and terminally employed in the national interest without moratorium, strike, or haggling over the scope of his employment. He does not blindly assume this role with its inherent limitation of his personal freedom but accepts it because of its promise of a broader freedom.
It is becoming evident that the career military man, a product of his time and place, cannot ignore the forces of change at work in the society upon which he depends. His mission is defense of his country from all enemies, foreign and domestic. He is committed not to the preservation of the status quo but to the safeguarding of those lawful forms and structures within which reasoned and reasonable change can occur. He may—perhaps must—seek involvement in the changes which roil about him today because of a growing conviction that it has to be done, that somehow he must be “responsive . . . to legitimate demands for change.”3 For him, whatever the roots of his philosophy, it may no longer be enough to hold sympathetically aloof, pursuing military competence within his closely defined assignment in the belief that there only lies his duty.
The career man is concerned about his stance on the major social, political, and moral issues confronting his nation. He, too, is a citizen and has inherited the responsibilities as well as the blessings. Sitting before his TV in Georgia, Germany, or Japan, he sees men treading the moon, living with new hearts, besieging campuses, and polluting the atmosphere. He reads of the flouted decorum of previously inviolable institutions, of the hopelessness of ghetto dwellers trapped in the poverty cycle, and he stirs hopefully at news of Strategic Arms Limitation Talks and the nuclear nonproliferation treaty. He wonders what these kaleidoscopically dissolving and shifting scenes mean to him and to the defense function. He wants to react but checks his impulse until he can ascertain that reaction will not impair his performance of duty—that still comes first.
But he should not be misunderstood if he asks whether “duty” has not gained a new dimension. In the face of sobering domestic challenges, is there not something additional that he should be doing? His uniform may complicate his reaction, but it cannot muffle his inclination to stand up and be counted among those who are ready to help.
It would seem, then, that the career serviceman thus disposed should be pointed toward avenues to explore in his desire to assist in the reduction of the nation’s distressing internal problems. He needs to be told his service’s position on such issues as urban decay, the increase in crime, subsistence-level existence, discrimination, inflation, the drug culture and the young, and the pollution of resources. He can decide then where his expanded duty lies, realizing that by his own earlier career choice he is not quite a free agent.
In the optimum case his service will disclose more than positions and policies. It will offer operational programs in which he can, to the limit of his interest and to the extent consistent with his traditional mission responsibility, invest himself.4 It will provide for him a new career dimension which recognizes afresh that the American serviceman lays it on the line, anywhere, in the defense of his nation.
Like other men, the career serviceman passes this way but once, and he wants to believe that his passage matters. He, too, wants to catch a vision and help it come a little closer—in perspective.
Tokyo, Japan
Notes
1. Chaplain (Lieutenant Colonel) William G. Devanny, “The Ecumenical Movement and the Military,” Military Review, March 1967, pp. 28-34.
2. Luke 7:8 (Revised Standard Version).
3. Lieutenant General John W. Carpenter III, USAF, remarks at USAF Chaplains conference, 15 October 1969, extracted in Air Force Policy Letter for Commanders, Office of the Secretary of the Air Force, Washington, D.C., 1 November 1969.
4. Dr. John L. McLucas, “Domestic Action—A New Challenge for the Air Force, “Air Force and Space Digest, February 1970, pp. 54-57.
Colonel Robert F. Hemphill, USAF (Ret), (LL.B., Denver University; M.Ed., American University) lives in Tokyo, Japan, where he is engaged in research and writing. Commissioned from flying school in 1942, he was a flight instructor during World War II. Later he held several staff and judge advocate assignments and was graduated from Air Command and Staff College. Colonel Hemphill was U.S. Attaché to Japan, 1964-67, and senior Air Force representative to Army Command and General Staff College, 1967-68. He is a contributor to U.S. magazines and newspapers.
Disclaimer
The conclusions and opinions expressed in this
document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression,
academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official
position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air
Force or the Air University.
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