Excerpted from Atrios' comments, Feb 25 2003, 02:59 pm in this post
...Why should we support those who volunteered to murder?

David Ehrenstein

I wanted to tell you about my feeling about what David said, so settle in it's gonna be a long one.

David is brilliant writer, and not someone whom I would ever argue with in a battle of words or wits, because I'd surely lose. I am not at all talented as a great logician, thinker or writer. I'm just a guy with a blog and some wild experiences in my life.

Surely one of those is my time spent in the Navy. I remember that all I ever wanted to be was a Naval Aviator, I grew up watching the big P-3's fly in and out of Moffitt Field, in what's now the heart of Silicon Valley. Their final approach course was right over our house and they were so low, I could see the pilot's helmets. I folded papers for my morning San Jose Mercury paper route and watched A-4's coming into Moffitt or Alameda occasionally as the sun was rising, and I remember wondering if they had just flown back from a carrier off the coast, and imagining what the pilot flying the plane was doing at that exact moment in time (as I learned later, through experience, his inner Aviator was happy as hell to be getting out of that tiny cockpit soon).

So why am I going into all this? On the day I was commissioned in the wardroom of our Naval Science unit at college, I was wearing a set of Tropical Whites (the ones without that stupid choking collar) that my friends popped my new Ensign shoulder boards onto, the CO shook my hand and I joined a long, long line of officers in the US Navy.

I could hardly bring myself to take that damn uniform off. I got on a plane later that day and flew home to a small town in the south via O'Hare, and went to the USO lounge in my sparking, new Officer-suit. I just could not get over myself, looking back on it, I was such an Ensign. I boarded the connecting flight, which was about two and a half hours long and as I settled in the seat, I began thinking about what might be expected of me as a Naval Officer and in the future as a Naval Aviator (I already had my orders to Pensacola, so now I just had to get through flight school...hell, I knew that would be a piece of cake). I clearly remember thinking that at some point in my life ahead, I might be told that my mission would be one that involved the unpleasant realities of war. Even though we were at peace, the future was just as cloudy for me as for anyone else, so who was to know what it might hold. War could be as inevitable as peace was. To me the realities of war meant that someone, myself included, could get seriously hurt or even killed, sometimes randomly, sometimes with a purpose. War could be sensible (in the meaning of a mission to accomplish) or it could be senseless, the death me or of a comrade at random when least expected. It could mean the death of innocents, or the death of someone who was trying their best to ensure that you had seen your last sunrise at the last sunrise. I thought about all those things. It was a bit disconcerting, because all of a sudden, my spankin' new white uniform with the Ensign boards now made all those options real, for the first time, in a way that I never, ever thought of before. There was no turning back, no walking away, no leaving it all behind. I could not say "Oops", and I never wanted to.

I was a volunteer. I was part of the first wave of the "all-volunteer military", which was the catch phrase of the '70s military. I was not a volunteer to murder, I was a volunteer to serve my country. To give back something for the years I had spent growing up in a country that gave me an opportunity to do something I had always dreamed of. No person I ever met in the Navy (which has pretty much always been all-volunteer) signed up to commit murder, if by murder you are counting armed conflict dictated by National Policy, right or wrong. They would be horrified to even think that they were going to deliberately, or maliciously inflict harm on people who had done nothing to them.

I oppose the war-makers in this administration who are seeking their own political ends through an ill-conceived invasion of a sovereign state. I see no good outcome of a conflict in Iraq and I believe that such a conflict and invasion will forever stain the honor of our military because it was used as an aggressive political tool by a cynical, dishonest group of men and women who used it for their own purposes. I do not believe that the individual soldiers, sailors, airmen or Marines who are put in Harm's Way by these men and women are murderers or the moral equivalent of murderers, or will be dishonored or are dishonorable for their part in the conflict, whatever it may be. They are being asked to perform a mission by people who should know that this is a fool's errand, and should not be undertaken lightly.

It's instructive to note, that the oath that officers and enlisted men take is subtly different. While both pledge to support and defend the constitution, only enlisted men are obliged to "obey the orders of the officers appointed over them". Officers are not, which is sort of like the "free will" arguments in religious dogma. How some Officers will choose to exercise it remains to be seen. I think that it's already happened to some extent within the Pentagon, but was shut down quickly by the pro-invasion civilians in the DoD. I think that there will be more dissent from within the senior ranks, and maybe one or more quiet "retirements/resignations/reassignments" as things get closer a head in the Iraqi Theatre.

Those are my thoughts. I do not know if they gave pause to DavidE and the rhetoric of murder or not. All I can do is present my point, that we do not volunteer to commit murder, but to serve our country, and to think such a thing dishonors us all.