The Reactionary Utopian

Loose Cannons with Nukes

August 30, 2007

[Originally published by the Universal Press Syndicate, May 27, 1997.]

This Kelly Flinn business is making my head spin. It also sends chills down my spine. Possibly it’s the cause of these fainting spells I’ve been having. I can’t take much more.

Today's column is "Loose Cannons with Nukes" -- Read Joe's columns the day he writes them.

First of all, I’ve always had reservations about the sexual integration of the armed forces. People can get over racial and religious differences, but sexual differences are different from other differences.

For one thing, they are more durable than other differences. And more desirable. Some would even say they are more necessary.

They are also harder to screen out of close personal contacts like the rough intimacy of military life. We no longer have restroom doors saying “White” and “Colored.” It wouldn’t make much sense for them to say “Catholic,” “Methodist,” and “Presbyterian,” either. But “Men” and “Women” are here to stay. I hope.

If having women in the military were a great idea from a military point of view, it would probably have occurred to Julius Caesar or Napoleon, or Rommel or Patton, before it occurred to Patsy Schroeder.

Just one man’s opinion, you understand. But if we need women in our defense forces, we must not need much defense.

First feminists argued that women have the “right” to serve in the armed forces on the same terms as men. Now they complain that women’s rights are being violated by the normal (that is, rough) treatment of recruits in boot camp. And they demand that these women who are supposed to be protecting the rest of us be protected from their male comrades and officers in the service.

If you can’t take the heat ... The proverb is, as Hamlet says, “something musty.” The idea of basic training is not to nurture your most exquisite individual qualities. It’s to get rid of them. It’s to coarsen you to the point where you will be capable of killing on command. We seem to be losing the elusive distinction between boot camp and sensitivity training. A society may need a certain number of men who can do bloody things without qualms, but not because it’s their “right” to do them.

[Breaker quote for Loose Cannons with Nukes: Boot camp and sensitivity training]

[Breaker quote for Loose Cannons with Nukes: Boot camp and sensitivity training]

But this being 1997, it looks as if we’re headed for an all-victim defense force. Miss Flinn herself feels victimized by her treatment: “I’ve lost my innocence, and I’ve lost my ability to trust people in general and anyone and anything,” says the woman who took another woman’s husband and lied about it under oath — acts she calls “mistakes.”

As for losing her innocence, it recalls the retort of the cynical Thomas Cromwell in A Man for All Seasons: “You lost that some time ago. Have you only just noticed?”

Miss Flinn’s lost innocence has already brought her a flood of book and movie offers, and no doubt a chance to pose in Playboy. Who knows? She could be the first to do both an interview and a centerfold in the same issue.

Whatever course she chooses, at least she won’t be carrying a nuclear payload anymore. I hope we can all agree that nuclear weapons and loose cannons don’t mix. If you think disgruntled postal workers are trouble, wait ’til you see a disgruntled B-52 pilot.

Our huge armed forces far exceed any rational defense needs; at this point, we should speak not of “defense” but of our “foreign legions.” All governments call their military forces “defenses”; no country has a “Department of Aggression”; yet for some reason, wars just keep on happening. Maybe it’s because big nation-states feel as victimized as Miss Flinn does. No doubt their feelings are easily hurt.

If you’re an outright pacifist, I suppose you should rejoice at what has happened to the U.S. armed services lately. Old soldiers are quitting in disgust, and younger men of soldierly temperament — who put honor, courage, and duty above their “rights” — find the private militias more congenial.

But if you’re going to have armed forces at all, it makes no sense to staff them on the basis of the criteria appropriate to liberal civilian institutions. To amend Nelson Algren’s famous advice: Never eat at a place called Mom’s, never play poker with a guy named Doc, and never take survival tips from liberals.

Joseph Sobran

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