Dave Barry: Bad Habits

So the Communists would have to use a psychological approach. They’d win the Texans over by such ploys as holding barbecues, wearing big hats and promising to extend the football Season. Once Texas went Communist, Oklahoma would follow quickly, followed by Nebraska, followed by whatever state is next to Nebraska, and so on until the entire nation had turned Communist except Massachusetts, which is already very left-wing and consequently would turn Republican.

It is to prevent this kind of tragedy that we’re sending bales of your tax money to buy guns for the corrupt, murderous slime buckets who run El Salvador. And for those of you weak-willed, sob-sister, namby-pamby probable homosexuals who think this is wrong, let me point out that if we don’t prop up our slime buckets, the Communists will install their corrupt slime buckets, and you can bet your bottom tax dollar that the peasants down there are much happier being oppressed by ours. “Anything to keep Texas safe” is the traditional El Salvadoran peasant motto.

Besides, the El Salvadoran rulers have started showing a real interest in human rights since we put them on this clever incentive plan under which we threaten to stop sending them guns if they keep using them to shoot their own citizens. This plan is working very well: Reagan administration observers have been bringing back rave reviews. “They’re not killing nearly as many innocent women and children,” the observers report, beaming with pride. “Let’s send them some more guns.”

But guns alone are not enough, which is why Texas does not control the world. You also need troops, and the Communists are sending Cuban troops to Central America. Truth to tell, you can’t wave your arms in a world trouble spot without striking Cuban troops. They’ll go anywhere, because if they stay home they have to listen to extremely long speeches.

I say that if the Communists are sending troops, they must have a damned good reason, and we should send troops, too. Only I don’t think we should send our armed forces, because I have serious reservations about how they’d do in an actual war. I suspect most of them enlisted because of those really slick, upbeat TV commercials suggesting that all you do in the armed forces is grin and jog and learn meaningful career skills such as tank repair. If we sent these kids to Central America, they’d go jogging into the jungle, grinning and clutching their tank-repair tools, and the only question would be whether the Communists would get them before the insects did.

So I say we send the people who really understand the Communist threat in Central America, the very people who alerted us to it in the first place. I’m talking about the Reagan administration’s foreign policy strategists. I say we arm them to the teeth, smear them with insect repellent, fly them over the jungle and drop them at night. We could even give them parachutes.

If you can possibly manage it, you should avoid being a young person or a wheat farmer when the president starts feeling international tension. Nine times out of ten, when a president gets mad at the Russians, he does something nasty to young people or wheat farmers, and sometimes both.

For example, when the Russians invaded Afghanistan, President Jimmy Carter was so angry that he ordered teenage American males to register for the draft; told the U.S. Olympic team it couldn’t go to the Olympics; and told farmers they couldn’t sell wheat to Russia. If you didn’t know any better, you’d have thought Afghanistan had been invaded by teenage American wheat farmers, led by the U.S. Olympic team. I imagine that if Jimmy had been really angry at the Russians, he would have had the Olympic team lined up and shot.

But eventually everybody got bored with Afghanistan. The Russians remained there; the farmers went back to selling them wheat; and the Olympic athletes found occupations that are less directly connected with international tension than, say, the parallel bars. Jimmy went on to other pursuits, such as losing the election. But draft registration continued.

When Ronald Reagan was campaigning for president, he said he was dead set against peacetime registration, on the grounds that in a free country the government shouldn’t go around forcing people to do things. It turns out he was just kidding. He recently decided to continue registration, using the same logic that Jimmy did: Although at the moment we are not technically in a war with the Russians, we could get into one any day, and if we do, we could have our Army up to snuff six weeks faster if we have the teenagers already registered. I see only one minor flaw in this reasoning, which is that if we ever do get into a war with the Russians, we will probably be melted, teenagers and all, in the first half hour or so, which would tend to disrupt the training process.

Aside from that flaw, I think registration is a terrific idea. When the national security is at stake, I think everybody should be obligated to register, regardless of age, sex, religion, or occupation. The only exceptions should be children, women, and anybody else who is not a teenage male.

Perhaps you’re wondering why we single out teenage males. Some people believe it’s because teenagers are the most physically fit, but that is stupid. If physical fitness were the main reason, we would register professional athletes first. The truth is that we register teenage males because:

We always have. Many teenage males are sullen and snotty and could use a little discipline. There are fewer of them than there are of us.

If we tried to register older people, they would write letters to their congressmen and hire sharp lawyers, and we’d never be able to get anybody into the Army.

So when we draft people, we always start with teenage males. This means that the President, his advisers, and the members of Congress usually don’t get a chance to serve, but that is one of the burdens of public office.

Many Army officials would like to start drafting teenagers right away, but unfortunately they don’t have any actual war going on at the moment, so they’re stuck with trying to get people to volunteer. This is very difficult, because the Army is not generally perceived as being a fun organization. Most people think that the Army is a place where you get up early in the morning to be yelled at by people with short haircuts and tiny brains.

The Army has been trying very hard to change its image. It has produced a bunch of television commercials suggesting that it is really just a large technical school, where everybody is happy and nobody ever gets sent to wretched foreign countries to get shot at. I think these commercials are on the right track but don’t go far enough. I think they should make the Army look more as it does on “M*A*S*H,” where the characters have so much fun that most of them have remained in the Army for ten years:

HAWKEYE: Boy, war sure is awful, isn’t it? Ha ha.

BJ: Ha ha, it sure is. Say, I have an idea: Let’s go drink a bunch of martinis and flirt with attractive nurses and play practical jokes on various stuffed shirts, as we have every night since this series began.

HAWKEYE: Ha ha. Good idea,

BJ. But first let’s fix these wounded soldiers, who are a constant reminder that war is an enormous waste of human life, although fortunately the major characters never get killed.

BJ: Ha ha.

If the Army commercials were more like “M*A*S*H,” I think lots of teenagers would want to enlist. In fact, I think just about everybody would want to enlist, for a chance to pal around with Alan Alda. The Army would have all the people it would need, and everything would be swell—unless, of course, we got into an actual war. Then we’d have to turn things over to the teenage males.