Desert Sailors

The Army is now training sailors to perform combat operations, and sailors are right now fighting side by side with soldiers in Iraq. The theory is that this is a method of coordinating combat operations between the US forces so that the military will be better able to work cohesively. It would also be a way to bring less duplication of resources between the different services. Plus, this sort of cross-training gives our combat troops more versatility. Well, that's what the government is saying about this, but you know what?

That's a load of crap.

Obviously it makes absolutely no sense to pluck men and women who have been trained to fight on water and throw them in the middle of the desert. What good are they going to really do, except the ability to provide a heartbeat and stop a bullet that comes their way? The sailors who are doing this aren't doing it absolutely cold, they're given two weeks training at Fort Bragg - as opposed to nine weeks for regular Army - but I've got to say, if my life depended on it I'd sure like more than fourteen days to learn how to preserve it. I believe that the sailors who are doing this are also - and please give them a lot of credit for this - volunteers.

What's happening is that the Army is not able to recruit enough people to join and risk their lives. They also aren't able to find enough reservists or national guardsmen or retired military to fill the ranks. So who does that leave? That leaves anybody who has their name on an enlistment contract, and when your name is on that contract they can do anything with you that they want.

I used to be in the Navy myself so my heart goes out to these poor sailors. I can imagine what my reaction would have been when I was informed of my new duty station in the sand dunes. Sure, I trained for one day on an M-16. But that was so I could put a pretty ribbon on my chest. It sure wasn't so that I could use it against terrorists who wanted to kill me as much as they could manage.

When I was a linguist, I trained right alongside Air Force, Army, and Marine troops. Most of my time in the military was, in fact, spent on Air Force bases. There was talk back then about combining the intelligence sections of these services into one and being something sort of separate. The joke was that we would be the Security Service (SS) and could all wear black uniforms with SS on our collars. That was some black humor there (and it never happened, either, by the way - that I know of). Okay, so that was a sensible argument about combining resources because we were all doing almost exactly the same thing.

But this? No. A sailor should fight on the water. Soldiers fight on land. And marines fight wherever they need to. That's the way it should be.

Steve Sommers is the author of REXROI, and Evil Super-Villains need Love, Too ... and other important wisdom. (Both books can be viewed by simply clicking on the titles)