Why aren’t the rich and the famous in uniform?

Yogi Berra did it. So did Dr. Seuss, Humphrey Bogart, and John F. Kennedy. They all served in the armed forces. Today it’s much less common for the rich or famous to serve, but that wasn't always the case. During W.W. II, Jimmy Stewart and Clark Bable both volunteered. In the 50's, Elvis Presley was drafted and spent two years in the army. And after September 11, Pat Tillman left the NFL to become an army ranger. In their new book, “AWOL: The Unexcused Absence of America’s Upper Classes from Military Service — and How It Hurts Our Country,” Kathy Roth-Douquet and Frank Schaeffer, would like to see more class integration of the military.

Both have a personal stake in their arguments: Roth-Douquet is a military wife and Schaffer’s son is a marine. While both would like younger Americans to sign up for national civilian service, they offer different solutions to military service. Schaffer proposes a lottery draft and Roth-Douquet suggests the military “convince” more people to sign up. The authors were invited on “Today” to discuss their book on Memorial Day. Read an excerpt:

Introduction

Frank and Kathy
We never served in the military. And we certainly claim no personal credit for the fact our respective son and husband volunteered — if it had been up to us initially they probably wouldn’t have. We were raised in a culture, a privileged culture, that misunderstands and underestimates the meaning of military service. In our own lives, as we came to understand and appreciate the military, it was striking to us how enormous our previous ignorance was, and how entirely comfortable we were with that ignorance. And we noticed that we were not alone. People like us — educated, urban, in careers where you make good money, and interested in the good life, good food, travel — entire extended communities of people like us know nothing about the military.

We are trying to make the case that this ignorance is not okay, that serving in the military should not be just about personal preference. This is particularly important now when even the leaders of the major institutions in the United States seem not to believe this, when they ask so much of the military, and yet have not asked anyone to serve. It is as if our leaders have become shy about talking about the common duties of citizenship, shy of even using a word like duty.

Frank
I guess that this book is Kathy’s and my attempt to figure out what happened to us.  It is also a declaration of love for a husband and a son and a statement of respect for the choice they made.  The Marines borrowed my boy and returned him a man, and in the process made me a little bit better person. My son grew up during five years of service and two combat tours.  So did I.

I was extremely fortunate to meet Kathy. Here was a “sister” who was also relatively new to the military family. Here was a splendidly educated and articulate career woman, dedicated mother and military wife, who shared my belief that the growing gap between many civilians and the military is a bad thing. The idea of teaming up to write something together seemed very natural when I learned that Kathy was writing pieces for USA Today on the same subject I had been addressing in some of my books and Washington Post articles: life within the contemporary military family.  

Maybe this book is also — for me, at least — a penance, an “I’m sorry” to the good people who have been protecting me all along. I guess my attitude has been something like that of the hobbits in Tolkien’s Middle Earth, as described in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. When the hobbits occasionally met the so-called rangers, they were suspicious of them more often than not. The hobbits had no idea what lay beyond their cozy world or any inkling of the price the rangers were paying as they kept vigil. The protectors held a dark universe of terror at bay while the blissfully ignorant and protected slept.

Kathy
I met Frank Schaeffer when he came to a book signing in my town. Like many people in the military, I’m a fan of Frank’s work, especially Keeping Faith (written with his Marine son John), and Faith Of Our Sons: A Father’s Wartime Diary.  He was the only person I knew describing what I experienced, the “disconnect” between my old life and the military world.  Frank and I ended up talking for several hours, in between him signing books and me chasing my children around in the bookstore. We compared notes about our “drafting” into the military, about our own previous misconceptions, and those of our friends. We also talked about how much we’ve benefited, felt honored even, by our experiences. Later in email exchanges we started to talk about the need for a book to help address and maybe even bridge the gap between the military family and the rest of our country.         

During my kid’s spring break in 2005, I was in Washington, D.C., to do research for this book.  People asked me how I was, and I struggled to convey the answer. The kids were missing their dad since he deployed to the war in Iraq. My son hadn’t been sleeping through the night, which means I had gotten up as much as five times a night for nearly two months, and at age forty that gets a bit old.  It’s hard to keep the routine going, hard to put a sit-down dinner in front of a three- and seven-year-old, hard to read a story and sing a song at the end of a long day by yourself.  The older one sometimes tests for discipline. Sometimes I get angrier than I’d like or turn on a movie for the kids a little too often.  ometimes it’s hard to fall asleep at night. 

I could say all those things, and people would nod sympathetically.

What was harder to say was that I found it was a privilege to hold my family together so my husband could go to war, because our country and our president — even one I didn’t vote for — asked him to do so. Through the mechanisms of democracy, the country had asked something of us, and we answered, and it felt like an honor.

It’s hard to say the latter part of this “speech” because I know how foreign it sounds to people with professional, upper-middle-class lives. I know how much of these lives are oriented around preventing the kind of uncertainty and risk that my children and me experience, let alone what my husband experiences. This book is Frank’s and my attempt to bring people to a place where statements like the one above make sense. 

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