Path: bloom-picayune.mit.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!americast.com!americast.com!americast-post Newsgroups: americast.twt.news From: americast-post@AmeriCast.Com Organization: American Cybercasting Approved: americast-post@AmeriCast.com Subject: Saving our heroes from the boomers Date: Sun, 22 Nov 92 17:26:45 EST Message-ID: \SE A;NATION;PRUDEN ON POLITICS \HD Saving our heroes from the boomers \BY Wesley Pruden \CR THE WASHINGTON TIMES With friends like his, Bill Clinton won't need enemies. If his transition team is really interested in the welfare of the president-elect, the first man they'll find is an old vaudeville stage hand experienced in the application of the dreaded hook. Mr. Clinton, full of bounce and energy, nevertheless has demonstated so far that he is first of all a child of his generation, with an ignorance of the traditions and realities that are important to those who preceded the noisy boomers. His latest embarrassment is the attempt, fortunately failed, to rename the airport in Little Rock to honor his wife, Hillary, discarding the name of a World War I hero, whose family name was honored in Arkansas when the families of many of the Clinton friends in Little Rock were still slopping hogs in the sticks. Coming out of the Vietnam experience, many of the boomers have little regard for the military - indeed, Mr. Clinton himself is on record as "loathing" it. He may or may not still harbor these feelings - he has never renounced his callow pronunciamento - but so far the only institution in American life that he has picked on is the military. This may be an accident. If so, he should move quickly to make amends, but more important, he should employ someone to tell him when he is stepping on the toes of the people he must have on his side if his administration is to succeed. To Mr. Clinton and his boomer generation, few of whom ever wore the uniform, his promise to put homosexual soldiers in the bunks with straights was just another policy decision. They do not understand this as, first, a policy decision affecting the morale and effectiveness of the military forces, and then as an issue of privacy. That's because they don't really understand why a soldier has to be so tough and hostile in the first place. Many of them have never thought about the ultimate mission of any nation's military establishment, which is to kill - not to understand or sympathize, but to kill the nation's enemies. Mr. Clinton's friends naturally imagine that if the goal of a combat infantry company is kinder and gentler, it's OK to load it up with gays and debutantes. This will guarantee disaster in wartime, but at least we'll all feel good about ourselves. The privacy issue doesn't count because the boomers who are prescribing upheaval have no intention of being a part of the military, anyway. That makes discarding the name of an authentic flying hero, and slapping the name of Hillary Clinton on the airport at Little Rock, wholly logical. The fact that George Geyer Adams, for whom the field has been named for 60 years, was a hero of the 154th Fighter Squadron, one of the most decorated National Guard squadrons in the nation's history, cuts no ice with boomers, for whom the history of the world began when they popped out of their mamas' wombs yesterday morning. Lt. Adams' 154th Observation Squadron, as it was called over the Argonne forest and above Flanders field, was decorated in both World War II and in Korea far out of proportion to its numbers. I confess a bias here: I stood in my first military formation as a green recruit in the Arkansas Air National Guard, and I am afflicted with the Southerner's reverance for useful tradition. Once, at dinner at the British governor's house on Guadalcanal 25 years after the fact, I remarked that it was a friendly gesture that the name of Lt. Ernest Henderson, a U.S. Navy flier killed in the Battle of Midway, had been retained as the name of the airport on the 'Canal long after the Marines who named it, in a flush of gratitude and patriotism, had departed. The governor looked at me as if I had made a pass at his wife. "Why on earth would we have changed the name of Henderson Field?" But the airport commissioners in Little Rock, all cronies of the Clintons, thought that relegating a war hero to the trash bin of history, and replacing it with the name of the lawyer for the bureaucracy, was a good thing to do. What's next? This article is copyright 1992 The Washington Times. Redistribution to other sites is not permitted except by arrangement with American Cybercasting Corporation. For more information, send-email to usa@AmeriCast.COM