No Rights for You, Idiot Boy

Blackfive noted this story after I saw it on Intel Dump. Mr. Carter has all the whys and wherefores in terms of constitutional law. Blackfive has the right attitude. Personally, I'm always amazed at the fools who fail to grasp just how many of your rights you sign away when you join up. (Short answer: all of them, in some degree.) For some reason, dumb poorly-educated 17 year old me figured the deal out. An amazing number of people in the military never do grasp the fact. When you sign that contract and go on active duty, DOD owns your ass. All those nice guarantees of treatment that are contained in the Bill of Rights go right out the window. You chose to subject yourself to the jurisdiction of the UCMJ. All the rules you think apply, don't. I don't have a whole lot of sympathy. You get told to STFU and quit blogging? STFU most riki-fucking-tik, troop. You're done. Bitch about it all you want, but don't push the issue because you'll lose. It won't be pretty.

Similarly, Mr. Carter's post contains a link to some guy that has applied for CO status. I'm always highly skeptical of people that discover some deeply held objection to war on the eve of deployment. What the hell did you think you joined, the Job Corps where you get to wear funny clothes? Did it not occur to you that the military's entire reason for existence is the application of force? Or, in the vernacular, to kill people and break stuff? Somehow, this escaped your attention? There was a brief window in time where you could plausibly claim that you didn't understand what the military was really about. That window started in 1975 and ended with the invasion of Grenada. After Grenada, Panama, Gulf War I, Somalia, Haiti, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and the return to Iraq, the idea you weren't going to be deployed isn't one you could plausibly claim to hold. It gets even better because this yotz decided after his first deployment and on the eve of his second that he had issues.

Were his expectations so completely unrealistic that his entire world view was shattered by his first deployment? What do you think happens in a combat zone? It's all sweetness and light? No, you dipshit, people die there. Are you so completely ignorant of human history that this escaped your notice? Wow, war is awful. Film at 11! Oh, wait, this is not news. How awful isn't something that can adequately be conveyed, but you should have had some expectation that it was going to suck. I mean, you do have a brain, right? Then when you showed up, you couldn't pretend that all your choices were pure and right. You didn't get to play Lone Ranger and only deal with the parts of war that weren't morally ambiguous. You got the whole fucking package, and some of the parts aren't real comfortable to face. It seems to me that maybe the time to think about this was before you signed up, not after. Oh, but his experience in the war changed him because it was so horrible. Yeah, well, join the fucking club. Been there, done that, got the scars. Whine to someone who gives a shit.

Really, what most CO applications come down to in my opinion is naked cowardice. You don't want to go face the unpleasant reality of war. You don't want to have see the horrible things that result. You don't want to risk your precious pink skin for the cause. I don't have a problem with cowardice. I have a problem with trying to dress cowardice up in fancy clothes and calling it a moral choice. You don't want to go? Do what one guy in my platoon did before we deployed to the Gulf: shoot yourself in the leg with a .38 pistol. He was a weaselly little dirtbag, but he was a lot more honest than most CO applications.