AWOL: The Unexcused Absence of America’s Upper Classes from Military Service and How it Hurts America Tom Smith

That’s the provocative title of an important new book by Kathy Roth-Douquet, my friend and former student, though that is far from the most impressive item on her resume.  She was also a principal assistant Deputy in the Department of Defense in the Clinton Administration.  That’s how she met her husband, who was the pilot of Marine One, the President’s helicopter.  He went on to command a Marine helicopter squadron and serve two tours in Iraq.  Kathy is also an alum of my wife’s college, Bryn Mawr.  If you’re married to a Mawrter-to-the-core, you will know what I’m talking about.

Kathy and her co-author Frank Schaeffer have an important and powerful point.  Frank graduated from a British boarding school and is a novelist and film maker, which sounds more Bohemia than Camp Pendleton, except that his son enlisted in the Corps right out of prep school.  Time was, the sons of America’s most monied, most educated classes served in the armed services and were proud to do so.  The whole leadership cadre of the sixties and seventies were junior officers in WWII.  But now?  Princeton and Harvard don’t even allow ROTC on campus, do they?  It took a ruling from the Supreme Court to compel elite law schools to even allow military recruiters on campus.  Words fail me in trying to express how deeply wrong this is, and we should be grateful to Kathy and Frank for addressing this difficult isssue head on.  What’s not difficult is the realization that there would not be elite institutions, educated families or the rest of it, without the men and women who defend us.  And who make sacrifices the rest of us do well to try to comprehend.

As a policy maker, lawyer, and wife of a Marine Corps CO, Kathy is uniquely qualified to write this book.  I hope it can be the beginning of a conversation this country really needs to have.

Kathy is going to be doing at least one event in San Diego, (June 16 at MCASM) and I think she would be open to doing more, so if you have suggestions, please let me know.

Here’s an excerpt from a review:

Before Roth-Douquet fell in love and married a Marine, the closest she’d come to the military was getting arrested at a protest at an Army Depot. Schaeffer’s youngest son enlisted in the Marines. Both men served in combat, and along the way their loved ones learned that being part of the military is an experience increasingly foreign to the most wealthy and educated American families.

“Not so long ago,” they write, “the sons of presidents, bankers and oilmen regularly served. … Now, however, not one grandchild from those powerful dynasties [the Roosevelts, the Kennedys, the Sulzbergers, the Bushes] serves.”

In 1956, 400 out of 750 in Princeton’s graduating class went into the military. In 2004, it was 10 out of 1,100. And Princeton led the Ivy League. Only 5 percent of today’s Congress are veterans, and only seven have a child serving in the military.

The gap between those who serve and those who don’t has its roots, of course, in Vietnam and the draft. When those two issues were gone, opposition to the military on elite college campuses morphed into opposition to the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy the military held toward gays.

But this is a fig leaf for deeper prejudices. At Harvard, where ROTC was banned from campus, the Roman Catholic Church – also not big on homosexuality – has two chaplains, a kitchen, meeting rooms and a place on the list of campus activities. No one suggests banning the church from campus. . . .

In contrast to Vietnam, Americans of all classes profess great trust and pride in their military, even as they’ve soured on the current war. But that doesn’t mean that they’d serve. I know. I, too, became a member of the military family when my son became an officer in the Navy. When he applied to the ROTC, a friend said to me earnestly, “Can’t you stop him?”

At a dinner party last year with some of America’s wealthiest families, the talk turned to whether the United States would ever have to protect Israel militarily. One woman, whose family are huge supporters of Israel, said adamantly, “Not my son.” Well, it would be mine, I said, stopping conversation.

With the draft gone, we will never have the participation rates in the military that we had in the past. But the decisions, implicit and explicit, of those in the upper classes to protect their sons and daughters from even the choice of military service is inexcusable.

And the consequences are real. As the “AWOL” authors point out, the unarmored Humvees that patrolled the streets of Baghdad and caused so much death and injury to the troops would likely have been replaced quickly with armored cars designed to patrol insurgent territory if “the daughters of, say, President Bush and Bill Clinton had been patrolling the streets of Baghdad with, say, the son of the CEO of the New York Times.”

Those with the most need to come back to the American military.

Correction:  Princeton does have ROTC, a comment informs me.  Well, good for them.  And so does my alma mater, Cornell, and has for a long time, and located prominently on campus as well.  I seem to recall reading something to the effect that Princeton ROTC was banished to off campus, but that may be wrong as well.