Local Heroes Shouldering Global Burdens
It is easy, even tempting, to think of them all as old, tough-as-leather Marines. But they were also Army and Navy, cooks and drivers, pilots and paratroopers. Most of them were young, and had never seen combat before.
The Marines' sacrifice in Beirut was disproportionate: 220 of the 241 killed in the headquarters bombing, plus 16 more hit by snipers and shrapnel. All told this year, 278 Americans who had volunteered to serve their country in uniform returned home from combat in coffins. The week most of them died, President Reagan reminded the public that the U.S. had "global responsibilities." That notion, a bit textbookish to most citizens, is a good deal less abstract to the 2.1 million members of the American military. The grittiest responsibilities are theirs.
Literally. The sand gets into everything, always. In Grenada and Lebanon, as in more peaceful G.I. terrains, the sand is in the dregs of the cloying powdered orange juice, gums up the bunkmate's cassette player, sticks to sweaty necks. The troops sit talking for hours in close tents and stifling bunkers, young men who hope, because they are lance corporals and gunnery sergeants, that they are above whimpering. The 1982 high school graduate from Pontiac, Mich., writing a letter home ("Don't worry, really!"), shakes his dried-up Bic. An infantryman with a tiny mirror, still not used to the G.I. buzz cut, stares at himself. A lieutenant from Live Oak, Fla., peeks nervously over the sandbag ramparts and wonders about the alien landscape. A private forks out the last globs of mushy tinned meat and then, dog-tired from worrying about mortar rounds all day, snuffs his cigarette in the greasy C-ration can and sleeps.
Each inhabits his own singular combat zone. Yet a provocative phrase cropped up in news reports: "Not since the end of the war in Viet Nam. . ." Some of the analogies were impressionistic and wrong: the Middle East, Central America and the Caribbean are not Indochina. But some of the bench marks were plain, blunt facts. Not since Viet Nam, until Beirut, had so many U.S. servicemen been killed in a single day. Not since then, until Grenada, had U.S. servicemen launched a combat operation of such size. Not since then, until a Navy A-6 was shot down over Lebanon, had a U.S. fighter pilot died in combat; not since then, until the capture by Syrians of the same A-6's bombardier, had a U.S. serviceman been a P.O.W. Lieut. Robert O. Goodman will be freed, the Syrians said, only "when the war has ended."
Who knew that a war had begun? The troops in Beirut were there to keep peace. Yet as Philosopher Herbert Spencer wrote, long before the U.S. became a superpower, "Soldiers are policemen who act in unison."
The year 1983 marked the tenth anniversary of the U.S. all-volunteer force. Americans expect national pride to draw enough youngsters into service, but such volunteerism is not universal. Elsewhere, including nearly all of Europe, conscription is the rule. In the U.S., about 6,000 new recruits, 600 of them women, are signing up every week. High unemployment is one prod. But there is another, probably more important reason: a Pentagon recruitment official calls it "a renewed spirit of patriotism."