The all-volunteer military has enabled America to fight two wars while many of its citizens do not know of a single fatality or even of anyone who has fought overseas. This is a military conscripted by culture and class – induced, not coerced, indoctrinated in all the proper cliches about serving one’s country, honored and romanticized by those of us who would not, for a moment, think of doing the same. You get the picture.

Oh, I do. And what is wrong with it, he asks rhetorically?

A couple of things. First, this distant Army enables us to fight wars about which the general public is largely indifferent. Had there been a draft, the war in Iraq might never have been fought – or would have produced the civil protests of the Vietnam War era. The Iraq debacle was made possible by a professional military and by going into debt. George W. Bush didn’t need your body or, in the short run, your money. Southerners would fight, and foreigners would buy the bonds. For understandable reasons, no great songs have come out of the war in Iraq.

You know what my most searing memory of war is? I was in 9th grade and my English teacher came to school all broken up one day, because she had seen The Deer Hunter the night before, which had recently come out. The movie had hit too close to home, she said, and she was all torn up over it. Her anguish and pain was palpable. At one point, the poor woman, who I recall being in her early 30s, seemed like she might crawl into a fetus position right in front of the class. If memory serves, I think she had to leave the room at least once to compose herself.

Today, the traumas of war are borne as much by the children of American soldiers, as this recent heart-wrenching NYT story makes clear. But their pain and sacrifice is theirs alone, while most of American society remains unconcerned and untouched by the two wars fought in its name.

A similar disconnect explains why there is no real public conversation about the war in Afghanistan. (You ever hear it discussed at the water cooler or at your local watering hole?) What’s going on here? As David Wood recently noted:

The U.S. Army now begins its 10^th continuous year in combat, the first time in its history the United States has excused the vast majority of its citizens from service and engaged in a major, decade-long conflict instead with an Army manned entirely by professional warriors.

I’m not the first person to recognize what it would take for Americans to sit up and take notice of the wars being waged in their names. In 2007, here’s how Andy Roony ended his weekly commentary:

Now comes the part of this I never thought I’d hear myself say: Whenever we, as a nation, decide to fight a war – in Iraq or anywhere else – it should be fought by average Americans who are drafted.

One year ago, as President Obama was set to announce that he was sending additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan, Bill Moyers said:

Let’s share the sacrifice. Spread the suffering. Let’s bring back the draft. Yes, bring back the draft — for as long as it takes our politicians and pundits to “fix” Afghanistan to their satisfaction.

Bring back the draft, and then watch them dive for cover on Capitol Hill, in the watering holes and think tanks of the Beltway, and in the quiet little offices where editorial writers spin clever phrases justifying other people’s sacrifice. Let’s insist our governing class show the courage to make this long and dirty war our war, or the guts to end it.

Now one could argue that liberals who suddenly pine for a national draft are doing so for ulterior motives. But it seems obvious to me that the emotional and intellectual detachment of most Americans from two wars results from not having a personal stake in them. Maybe that’s reason alone to revive the draft.

On the other hand, as Fred Kaplan noted six years ago in Slate:

The prospect of compulsory military service raises fundamental questions—and agonizing dilemmas—for a free and democratic society.

Still, ten years and counting in Afghanistan, I’m surprised that the issue doesn’t come up more. It strikes me as weird that America is engaged in two wars but that most Americans don’t feel, much less think about, being at war.

the worst that can be said about the CRU emails is that the scientists sometimes come across as rude or dismissive, and say things in the emails that really aren’t very nice. However, the personal email messages between senior academics in any field are frequently not very nice. We tend to be very blunt about what appears to us as ignorance, and intolerant of anything that wastes our time, or distracts us from our work.

In other words, this is the way we are.

Evidently, William Connolley can’t fathom the way “trigger-happy Yanks” talk while engaged in war, as revealed by the recent controversial WikiLeaks video.

Here’s some context Connolley might want to consider, provided by a “Yank” currently deployed in Iraq, courtesy of Andrew Sullivan:

There is no script for how one is supposed to react to systematically killing another person.  Many laugh, many make macabre jokes during and after the fact and, in general, line troops revel in the death and destruction of their enemy.  It’s how they deal with the enormity of what they’re doing.  And if you or any of your readers assume for even a moment that things like that mean that they or the other hundreds of thousands of Soldiers who embrace dark humor and excess to cope with what they’re doing are somehow depraved, then you need to be re-introduced to the reality.

I’m here to let you know that the dialogue that took place in that cockpit was neither uncommon or, to me, even all that appalling.  It was quite restrained, compared to what usually comes out of the mouths of Soldiers here when radio etiquette is not an issue.

Then, after tallying up the devastation, Payne concludes:

In IR [International Relations], much of the research on ecology and security has focused on the possibility that “environmental scarcities” contribute to the outbreak of violent conflict. It would appear as if additional research should focus on the environmental harm of war itself — and the difficulty of making critical green choices in a war context.

Um, when it comes to wreaking havoc and carnage on your enemy, what exactly are the “green choices” that might leave a country’s landscape slightly less in tatters?

I was a good guy when I was drafted, a good guy from a good family. I wonder a lot, how did that good guy turn into something else?

This muli-faceted story of a high school teacher’s crusade to protect impressionable students is quite poignant.