Reservists Adopt a Healthier View of Military Crap Shoot

Last week’s call-up of military reserves by President Bush struck some painful chords here. It reminded me of a period from mid-1950 through 1951 when President Harry Truman did the same thing. And I was sitting on the catbird seat.

At that time, there were two types of miliary reservists: active and inactive (they go by different names today). The active reservists were the weekend warriors, the men and women who drilled once a month, went to a two-week summer camp and continued to be an integral part of the military. For this they were paid, and the time could also be accumulated to provide for a higher rank and a substantial pension after 20 years.

The inactive reserve was made up of people like me who developed certain skills during World War II that were deemed vital enough that we weren’t permitted out of the reserves. There was nothing voluntary about our reserve status. We were in because they wouldn’t let us out.

I wanted out. I had spent four years on active duty in World War II and had amassed almost 2,000 flying hours when the war ended. I was saturated with both the military and flying, and I wanted to be a civilian again as soon as possible. The peacetime military held no charm for me.

So in the five years between the end of World War II and the beginning of the Korean War, I was surely the most inactive reservist in military history. There were times I didn’t even read my mail from the military. When I went back to college at war’s end, I was married and had one child. When Korea came along, I had three children, a mortgage on a house and my first decent-paying job. I was beginning to sell writing to magazines and taking part in another war--especially one as fuzzy as the Korean conflict--was rock bottom on the list of things I wanted to do.

Most of my World War II buddies felt the same way--but not all of them took the same route. There were two groups in particular who were attracted to the active reserve. First, those who were still enamored of flying and wanted the chance to play with military aircraft free of charge. And, second, those who wanted to build up rank and hang out with the reserves until they could collect retirement pay.

There seemed little risk in the active reserve route then. After all, we’d just brought two superpowers to their knees and won the second war to end wars. Surely there would be a long enough grace period for these veterans to reach retirement age.

The reasoning was OK, and if I hadn’t been so turned off by the military, I might have considered it, too. But my first day of the peacetime Navy gave me all the inkling I needed. The day after the Japanese surrendered, officers were ordered to begin wearing ties at all times on the crummy island where I was then stationed. And shortly thereafter, my return home was almost delayed because I had lost two pieces of flight gear that the Navy routinely burned when it was turned in.

So when Truman began calling up the reserves to go to Korea, the bleats from my peers who chose to remain in the active reserves were loud and anguished. And that’s when I began to develop the hard-nosed attitude I have today about weekend warriors.

Whatever reason prompts a person to join the reserves--patriotism, money, retirement, the chance to sharpen skills or play war without danger, a need to get away from the old lady or the old man--there is also a risk implicit in that decision: the risk that they may be called to active duty for a multitude of reasons. That’s why I don’t feel particularly sorry for them if that happens. It’s a crap shoot, and you win some and lose some.

But I felt pretty sorry for myself during the Korean War because the Truman call-up reached into many thousands of inactive reservists. We had a pretty good network going among ourselves and we knew when inactive reservists with our skills began getting called up.

It was a miserable year for me. I dreaded going home to look at the mail, and I was paranoid about telegrams. A lot of my inactive reservist buddies went to Korea, and some of them were killed. But this time the dice rolled right for me. I was never called.

After Korea the risk of being sent into combat as a reservist went down considerably, even though we spent almost 10 years bogged down militarily in Vietnam. The Establishment reason was that we needed the reserves as a backup force at home for trouble spots that might develop elsewhere. In my opinion, the real reason was that Lyndon Johnson--with steadily declining support at home for our involvement in Vietnam--couldn’t risk sending the reserves overseas because they were mostly made up of the sons of middle and upper-class Americans whom Johnson didn’t care to antagonize.

Our current vice president of the United States was one of those people. For all his protestations, the reserves provided a haven for a lot of young men with clout to avoid combat. I’m not judging this. I think I would have used any device that came to hand to avoid going to Vietnam. I just wish J. Danforth Quayle could have been honest about it.

Joining the reserves--along with graduate studies in college, putting braces on teeth and phonied-up physical infirmities--provided safe houses for those who had the necessary resources to avoid Vietnam. The ultimate hypocrites were eligible draftees (and their parents) who used such means and then castigated those who fled to Canada. That’s why I get a little queasiness in the pit of my stomach when I hear all this unctuous talk about the reserves of that period representing the ultimate in patriotism. The young men without clout who were drafted and sent to fight that miserable war were the real heroes.

It’s certainly understandable, however, that the failure to activate the reserves en masse for combat duty in Vietnam may have had more than a passing influence in persuading some of the current reservists to join up. If so, it must have come as a bit of a shock when George Bush reached into the reserves very quickly in the current Middle East crisis.

The quotes that I’ve been reading from Orange County reservists in the newspaper make it appear that we have a very different crew here. They are hardly ecstatic but most have accepted their military responsibilities matter-of-factly even though it will mean a considerable dislocation for many of them in their civilian lives. Without debating the merit of what Bush is doing in the Persian Gulf, this attitude on the part of reservists is healthy and the way it should be.

We’ve come a long way in establishing the identity of the reserves since those frenetic months in Korea and those tragic years in Vietnam. Maybe we’ve hit on the right formula now. But let’s all hope that the reserves who have been called up will all be back at their civilian jobs in a few months. Or sooner.