General Quarters

In today’s Dallas Morning News, Robert Kaplan had a column on how the armed forces are overwhelmingly Republican voters, and why this is so.

It’s a fairly blunt look at some reasons as he observed during 2 embeds with our troops.

The problem for the Democrats today is that they are, in the current form, wholly incompatible with the armed forces.

Excerpts:

I spent part of the summer of 2004 in West Africa with a platoon of U.S. Marines. I would guess that, with few exceptions, they voted for President Bush. Some feared that the Democratic challenger, Sen. John Kerry, would end the war in Iraq before they had a chance “to get in on the fight.”

Election night found me in a restaurant-bar in central Alaska frequented by members of an Army
infantry brigade about to be deployed to Iraq. As the results from Florida and Ohio came in – and
for days afterward – the mood was of relief sometimes bordering on euphoria. They, too, would
get to fight. What the Ivy League professoriate is to the Democratic Party, the fighting units of
the U.S. military are to the Republicans.

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Truly, Vietnam has been discussed ad nauseam, especially in the 2004 presidential campaign. But
the aspect of Vietnam that helps reveal why the grunts are so alienated from the political elite –
and particularly from the Democratic Party – has rarely been discussed at all.
While left-wing elites continue to refer to the Vietnam War as wrong and dishonorable, it happens
to be the war where the antique code of honor had its birth for the present generation of
American soldiery. It’s also the war of which the forebears of those now fighting in front-line
units in Iraq harbor the keenest memories. As one Mexican-American Marine sergeant explained to me, fighting in Iraq was the only way he could prove to his uncle, a Vietnam veteran, that he was
worthy of his legacy.

When I asked another Marine in Iraq why he hated Mr. Kerry so much, he snapped, “Because he
wasn’t proud of his service in Vietnam – he threw away his medals at a demonstration that only
rich kids went to.” (Actually, Mr. Kerry only pretended to throw them away, but this Marine did
not know that.)

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Mr. Bush’s response to 9-11 released the spirit of this new warrior guild – and that spirit is giving
rise to a particular community. Michael Vlahos of Johns Hopkins University writes in a monograph,
Culture’s Mask: War and Change After Iraq, that today’s post-9-11 military – with four years of
ground combat deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq behind it, not to mention Special Operations
deployments in dozens of other countries on a regular basis – constitutes a class of crusty,
colonial-like veterans ready to rule as well as fight.

“I like Bush because he’s dumb and stubborn like us,” one Marine corporal in Iraq told me only half
in jest. “He’ll fight to the finish here, no matter how bad it looks now.” In other words, pace
Harvard’s Harvey Mansfield, in his forthcoming Manliness: A Modest Defense, Mr. Bush is a man
who, like the grunts, comprehends that duty takes precedence over perfect virtue.
Grunts – men, too, in Mr. Mansfield’s definition – hate being portrayed as victims just as much as
they hate being portrayed as war criminals: whether victims of not enough up-armored vehicles or
of an ill-begotten war. Marines, in particular, have always taken pride in making due with inferior
equipment. That’s because they see themselves as warriors, which is exactly how Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld sees them. If Democrats see our armed forces likewise, they haven’t
satisfactorily communicated it to the troops.

***********************

Because the Democrats see the Old South only in terms of its racist legacy, they are blind to the
Confederate spirit of warrior honor that still percolates through the military. The late historian
and Wesleyan University professor William Manchester was not blind to it, though. In Goodbye,
Darkness, his memoir of his fighting days as a Marine in the Pacific, he pays tribute to Southerners
battling the Japanese on Pacific atolls, charging “fearlessly with the shrill rebel yell of their great-
grandfathers.”

This Confederate warrior spirit, in turn, is linked indelibly to Christian evangelicalism, a movement
defined by its emphasis on the Hebrew Bible. A stirring example is the romantic figure of Lt. Gen.
Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson of the Army of Northern Virginia: the reincarnation of the biblical
warrior Joshua, according to historian Douglas S. Freeman in his classic Lee’s Lieutenants: A Study
in Command. Mr. Freeman depicts Jackson as someone who lived by the serenity of the New
Testament and fought by the smoldering thunder of the Old. The same is true of some of
America’s elite ground-fighting units today, whose Christian prayer services before combat place
an emphasis on readings from the Old Testament.

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