From George Washington to Bill Clinton, when the president has issued an order, American soldiers have not hesitated to obey. They salute, move out and frequently die in the course of its execution, even if the command seems unsound. Korea was a sorry war, Vietnam a worse one (its scars won’t disappear until the generation that bled there dies out), while Somalia still makes no sense at all. Yet our warriors went to these miserable places and fought as if U.S. security were on the line and they were defending Bunker Hill or Gettysburg’s Cemetery Ridge. There has not been one incident where our warriors refused to follow the orders of their commander in chief. Sure, the warriors will bitch about the mission, grouse about the leadership right up to the guy that’s sitting in the Oval Office, and damn everything and everybody ““up there’’ who put them in the meat grinder. Wouldn’t you? But when their leaders shout ““Move out,’’ our fighters do it.
Most regular and reserve warriors I’ve talked to don’t respect or like Bill Clinton as a man or a leader. I suspect there isn’t anything Clinton can do to win them over. But I have no doubt they’ll follow his orders – as they did in Haiti and Kuwait – and guard him with their lives. Hell, he’d be safer at Fort Bragg, N.C., or Camp LeJeune, N.C., than sitting in the bullet-splattered White House. Clinton came into office with two strikes against him. One: he dodged the draft during the Vietnam War along with 16 million others who went to college, Canada or took cover in the Reserves. That’s part of his ““character’’ problem, which makes warriors see him as a slippery politician who violates their code of ““not lying, cheating, stealing nor tolerating anyone who does.’’ Two: he failed to understand the deeply ingrained soldier ethic against gays serving openly in the ranks or women serving in combat positions.
Our president desperately needs advisers who understand the military mind, people who have walked the walk and can talk the talk, not Generation X know-it-alls with their open disdain for soldiers and the profession of arms. Clinton has tried to win hearts and minds by visiting more bases and soldiers than soldiers’-best-friend Ronald Reagan ever did, but it’s a campaign he’ll never win unless he makes real changes. A shot in the right direction would be to adjust his P.C. quota by putting more vets in the White House and his cabinet, and follow FDR’s example of not saluting. To soldiers, the salute is a sacred sign of shared and mutual respect.
Helms’s mean-spirited, inflammatory outburst sent the wrong message to the kind of crazies who tossed grenades into the foxholes of their combat leaders in Vietnam, or the nuts like the one who recently turned the White House walls into a shooting gallery. Such comments raise questions about Helms’s ability to be part of foreign-policymaking during unsteady times. He is all but saying it’s OK to kill the president – and this country has seen enough leaders gunned down by fruitcakes and fanatics. He’s also sending the wrong message to an unsettled post-Soviet world that looks to America for leadership: our president is not safe or respected in his own country. Holding Helms accountable sends the right message: that there is no double standard here, and that our president is going to remain in office for the balance of his constitutionally designated term, secured in that position by the dedicated men and women of the American armed forces.
