Big difference between pretend, real heroes
Being a hero has never been easier. Military hero, I mean. Even schmucks like me, as poor a soldier as the U.S. Army ever produced, can be a hero these days.
I’m being facetious, of course. I’m not a hero. I can pose as one, though, thanks to the Danbury Mint, which is selling, for $149 payable in four monthly installments, gold-plated, diamond-studded rings engraved with logos from the four armed services (sorry, Coast Guard).
The rings are designed to impress the impressionable and turn second-raters or even cowards into regular Audie Murphys.
“Every glorious detail of The Armed Forces Ring is a tribute to what America stands for,” or at least that’s what a mailer I got the other day from the mint in Norwalk, Conn., said.
“Show your family and friends what a real hero looks like,” the advertisement proclaimed. That “real hero” would be me, whose greatest contribution to the defense of the nation came the day I mustered out of the Army Reserves after six years of malingering and bellyaching about what my service friends and I called “the big green machine.”
(The period, 1970-76, was before camouflage, when Army fatigues were — you guessed it — green. Dark green, no less.)
Don’t judge the folks at the mint too harshly, however. They are out to make a buck. In the U.S. of A., you’re allowed to make a buck, you know.
It didn’t use to be this way. In the days before military service was voluntary, when the burdens of service were more widely shared, we were less gullible and a whole lot more dubious about the armed services, and in this instance, I mean the brass, the bemedalled high-hats with stars on their sleeves.
This healthy skepticism took various forms. Once upon a time we could laugh at the military. Remember the film “No Time For Sergeants?” It starred Andy Griffith playing a wily backwoods recruit.
Griffith’s character befuddled the brass, turning latrine duty on its head. (Sorry for the pun.) The Air Force was a laughing stock in the film. “No Time For Sergeants” hit the screens in 1958.
No film took on the brass the way “Dr. Strangelove” did. One of its stars, George C. Scott, played a general conferring with the president of the United States played by Peter Sellers.
It had just it been learned that a nuclear-armed American plane was headed toward a target in the Soviet Union.
It was a mistake, the general said. But a good mistake. A vain, egotistical swordsman a bit unhinged by the pressure of command, the general — Gen. “Buck” Turgidson — tried to convince the president that a retaliatory attack by the Soviets would kill millions of Americans. But, hey, other millions would survive.
Dr. Strangelove himself, a refuge from Nazi Germany advising the U.S., appears in the War Room talking up survival rates.
Gen Turgidson interrupted. “Doctor, you mentioned the ratio of ten women to each man. Now, wouldn’t that necessitate the abandonment of the so-called monogamous sexual relationship, I mean, as far as men were concerned?”
“Dr. Strangelove” was a comedy, a dark comedy, to be sure. “Seven Days In May” was drama. It portrayed an attempt by the brass to seize control of the government.
Neither movie made the generals and the admirals look good. It’s hard to imagine either being made today. “Dr. Strangelove” and “Seven Days In May” were both released in the early 1960s.
This was 15 or so years after the end of World War II. John Kennedy was in the White House, as deeply skeptical about the military as anyone. He had a right to be. He was a war veteran. On active duty in the South Pacific, junior naval officer Kennedy was occasionally appalled by the men in charge.
President Kennedy didn’t feel compelled to offer a salute to the waiting military brass as he stepped off Air Force One.
Neither did his predecessor, a former General of the Army named Eisenhower. Greeted on the tarmac during a visit to western Pennsylvania in 1958 by a retired Army Reserve general, R.K. Mellon, dressed up with medals a-popping, Ike deadpanned, “I should have worn my uniform, too.”
He was joking. Both Eisenhower and Kennedy, in vastly different ways, were real heroes of World War II.
Later presidents got the salute business from Ronald Reagan, who was also the first president to wear an American flag lapel pin. Reagan spent the war making training films in Hollywood.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not disparaging active duty personnel. A big salute to them.
Still, for a country that refused for the longest time to have a “standing army,” we’ve certainly changed.
A strong military is a marvelous policy tool for any president or Congress to have. But those in charge should be wary of the notion that every world problem can be solved by sending in the troops. The rest of us should be skeptical, too.
The army I served in got respect, but the respect was more earned than assumed. Today’s Army, we are told, is a model of efficiency, and the respect factor has gone up a hundredfold. The brass can do no wrong.
All in all, I prefer the army I knew. At the very least, we realized there were real heroes and pretend ones.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books: Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation and Our People. He can be reached at grandsalutebook@gmail.com.