Soldier In Shadow (John Gomez/Shutterstock)

Then there’s the old line on a military officer’s performance review which read, “His men would follow him anywhere, but only out of morbid curiosity.” The mind immediately goes back to 1984 (I think), when our base was scheduled for a major IG inspection, which caused a certain lieutenant to lose what little of his mind was left.  

A prior enlisted troop, our 2nd Lieutenant mistook his shiny new commission for a promotion to Deity First Class.  Our unit’s morale was already on par with our leadership’s general competence, which made the Marx Brother’s look like Seal Team 6. Dedicated to making a bad situation worse, Lt. Calamity called in a group of us junior enlisted folks on a rare day off, and instructed us to spray paint the grass around his building a brighter shade of green (presumably to impress the incoming inspectors). 

The colossal and unrepentant asininity of this one lieutenant was but a small symptom of an organization’s leadership gone cock-eyed. Predictably enough the Inspector General team assigned substandard ratings on our Management Effectiveness Inspection and, equally  predictable, everyone in our organization caught hell except management.

My three-year stint in that unit provided practical lessons on something I knew intuitively to be true; that as French novelist Honore de Balzac observed, “Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.” 

It was a painful lesson for someone almost organically unsuited to the sclerotic and vapid regimentation of government work. Fiercely resistant to following orders that fail to advance — and sometimes work against — the goals they are supposed to support, I nevertheless told myself that it was worth enduring for a larger cause, i.e., defending the nation. 

And as difficult as it could be, the vicissitudes of life in a bureaucratic and politicized puzzle palace were nothing compared with life in a forward deployed Area of Responsibility (AOR). There were troops who endured infinitely much harsher conditions than I, but as a fellow military retiree explained years ago on my third trip to the MidEast, “When they say go, you have to go. But you don’t have to come back.”  

The point for me, and for those with whom I lived and worked, was to keep our families, friends, and countrymen safe so they could enjoy the freedoms and that we and so many prior generations of GI’s insured with their very lives.  If that alert in Korea, or that attack warning in the MidEast went sideways and we didn’t come home?  “Them’s the breaks,” as they say, because someone has to keep the barbarians at bay and that’s where we come in. 

At least that was the idea. We pay the price over there so you have the latitude to make the best of your freedom here at home and pass along a culture of liberty and virtue to future generations. It wasn’t easy, but we held up our end of the bargain.

The one thing we didn’t count on was that while we were in one hellhole after another defending our country from foreign threats, the utopians in the faculty lounge were doing their insidious work here at home. It appears that Lenin had it exactly right when he said, “Give me just one generation of youth, and I’ll transform the whole world.” 

Our countrymen didn’t hand over just one generation.  As Allan Bloom and others have noted, we’ve handed over several generations who have been taught to loathe their country and to reject their culture and history, of which they know precious little. 

As far back as 1951, novelist Mary McCarthy wrote of Vassar College:

A wistful respect for the unorthodox is ingrained in the Vassar mentality.  …The effect of this training is to make the Vassar student, by the time she has reached her junior year, look back on her freshman self with pity and amazement. When you talk to her about her life in college, you will find a series of before and after snapshots: “When I came to Vassar, I thought like Mother and Daddy. I was conservative in my politics.” With few exceptions the trend is from conservative to liberal, from the orthodox to the heterodox.

Meanwhile, as I wrote several years ago: 

The indoctrinator’s work has continued unabated ever since, as, to quote Prof. Bloom, “..the universities gave way under the pressure of mass movements, and did so in large measure because they thought those movements possessed a moral truth superior to any the university could provide.” Reason yielded to passion, science yielded to commitment, history yielded to emotionalism, and a national heritage yielded to self-victimization and erroneous accusations of “privilege.”

My late uncle was part of the American forces who liberated concentration camps near the conclusion of World War II. What would he think of the obnoxious and ignorant little fartlings on our university campuses who now call for the extermination of Jews around the world? 

Actually, forget the kids for just a moment and consider what sort of “institution of higher learning” breeds university presidents who, when they aren’t plagiarizing other’s words, are incapable of summoning their own verbiage to quickly and plainly denounce the intellectual and moral rot that breeds such abject and mindless hate on campus? 

What good has been accomplished when thousands of American lives were lost in Afghanistan fighting a neanderthal class of misogynistic barbarians only to have it all squandered and surrendered by a doddering weak-kneed president with the foreign policy acumen of celery? 

What was the point of the War on Terror and the urgent work of foiling future attempts by the ambassadors of the religion of peace from yet again slaughtering thousands of innocents in American cities and government centers if we were going to elect an administration who would throw open our borders and roll out the red carpet to an estimated 8 million unvetted people from over 190 countries, many of them unaccompanied military aged men?  

We’ve gone from a boorish president who nevertheless kept our adversaries in check to a president whose decrepitude and timidity have emboldened every crack pot dictator and weird beard radical on the planet?

Joe Biden inherited a stable MidEast where the Abraham Accords and a combination of deterrence and sanctions had relegated Iran to a relatively quiet insignificance. His response has been to light the region on fire by resuming the Obama policy of lifting sanctions and shoveling billions of dollars to Iran, thereby funding Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iran’s own military ambitions so that America  now finds itself funding both the aggressor (Iran and it’s proxies) and the aggressed (Israel). The stupid audacity of it all is staggering. If we manage to avoid World War III it will be despite Joe Biden’s best efforts to start it. 

Who thought it was a good idea for America to go from energy independence to decimating our energy sector while going hat in hand, begging for energy from countries who hate us? Who decided it was a grand idea to impoverish the country by eliminating fossil fuels in an effort to reduce life-sustaining CO2 which makes up exactly .04 percent of earth’s atmosphere? 

And who pray tell reached the stunning conclusion that Dr. King had it backwards when he spoke of a day when his children and all children would be judged by the strength of their character and not by the color of their skin? 

Looking at a nation where criminals and terrorists are noble but citizens are a problem; where millions of illegal and unvetted immigrants rush the border but politicians produce a “border security” bill that literally legalizes nearly 2 million illegal entries annually; where schools and activity centers for disadvantaged children are now used to house and feed people who entered the country illegally; where the Biden administration diverts funding away from medical care for veterans but directs it to medical care for illegal immigrants, veterans are entitled to ask what exactly was the point of their sacrifice? 

We’ve gone way beyond goofy lieutenants who want their grass painted green. We’ve squandered generations of American blood and sacrifice, and for what? President Biden’s official minders bid you to ignore the obvious signs of decrepitude and rapid mental decline, insisting that you disregard that which you can see with your own eyes. If they will lie to you about something so obvious, what else are they lying about? You’ve been had, but not because you weren’t warned.

Another presidential election looms, and this veteran wonders if enough people have finally realized the breakneck speed of our descent. Our FBI and even our local authorities across the country are saying that it’s not a question of if we will be attacked, but when. Will we have the sense to send the progressive project packing? I sincerely and fervently hope so. But I doubt it.  

It didn’t have to be this way.