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: An early chance to save himself Date: Fri, 13 Nov 92 15:11:15 EST Message-ID: \SE A;NATION;PRUDEN ON POLITICS \HD An early chance to save himself \BY Wesley Pruden \CR THE WASHINGTON TIMES Bill Clinton gets an early choice, maybe two, to define himself, and either one of them would dramatically change the military establishment he once sneered at as beneath a young man of his education and status. He wants to put homosexual soldiers in the military services, and soon after he takes office in January he'll have to decide whether he wants to put women in combat regiments, too. Chelsea could conceivably get a chance to redeem the Clinton family honor. Brisk decision-making is not the stuff of the Clinton legend, and if we can use Governor Clinton to measure the prospects of President Clinton, several commissions, blue-ribbon panels and task forces will study the two issues for months and maybe years before he decides. Nevertheless, most senior military officers, and nearly all line officers, are aghast at both prospects. They're convinced that the presence of homosexual men in the ranks will destroy "discipline, good order and morale." Since everybody said blacks would destroy the Army when President Truman ordered integration in 1947 and that didn't happen, some people argue that this proves that everything will be OK when the Army mixes up men who chase skirts and men who chase skivvies. This does not impress Gen. Colin Powell, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a man of uncommon common sense. "It is difficult in a military setting where there is no privacy, where you don't get a choice of association, where you don't get choice of where you live, to introduce a group of individuals who are proud, brave, loyal, good Americans but who favor a homosexual lifestyle," he told Congress earlier this year. "I think it would be prejudicial to good order and discipline to try to integrate that in the current military structure." Gen. Gordon Sullivan, the Army chief of staff, states the obvious for those who tend to be oblivious of the obvious. To ask men who hustle women (this is still the way soldiers talk) and men who hustle men to share latrines, barracks and showers would create "very difficult management problems." This does not come as a hot news flash to any man or woman who has ever lived the barracks life, which Mr. Clinton so obviously has not. He has no instinct in such matters, and if the man who once boasted to his draft board that he was "too educated" to wear the uniform insists on treating this as merely delivering on a politically correct campaign promise, we will all regret it. Mr. Clinton matured in a place far from his Southern roots, in a culture that not only had no appreciation of military realities but scorned them. His education was all book learning. The communal life in the dorms at Georgetown and the group houses of Oxford and Yale Law School did nothing to educate him in what Army life is all about. Only a tone-deaf politician could have used the occasion of Veterans Day, when the nation stops to honor the men and women who paid their dues in the nation's wars, often with blood and occasionally with their lives, to renew a vulgar political promise made in the heat of the campaign to a noisy and unpleasant constituency of uncertain size. If he destroys military morale with this executive order, he might as well go the whole hog (as they say down home) and order women made vulnerable to combat. What we'll have left, after these decisions wreak their ruin, is a military service bereft of men who take a fierce pride in being men in all the ways that men are men, the kind of men who have written deeds in blood across the world. This would suit some of Mr. Clinton's constituencies just fine, convinced as they are that the source of evil in the world is American power, and the sooner America's military is rendered impotent, the better. This is only a view from the goofy fringe, and anybody smart enough to get himself elected governor of Arkansas knows it. This is a gopher hole that a president-elect need not step in, even if he has to put up with a pout from his wife and her left-wing friends. 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