The Culture Wars, with warriors in the middle.

Bill, Dusty, and I all have a long view on this, with me possibly the longest, having been using military facilities since 1957. I'd love to hear their take on this. This is mine, I'm not speaking in Castle Voice here.

Usetabe, we'd draft people, send 'em off to war, and at least we'd give them cigarettes with their rations. That is until 1975, when the health of the soldier became paramount and busy-body do-gooders got the cigarettes removed from the rations. Can't have the government endorsing unhealthy behaviors, donchaknow. Since the government was also going to do a generally bi-partisan crap job of funding post-service care for those veterans there is an element of smugly smarmy self-righteousness contained therein... but I could just be projecting. Mind you, I'm *not* a smoker, and never have been, and I buried my Mother this year, who died of lung cancer late last winter. And my father has a smoking-related cancer. It's not like I'm unaware of the costs... There's a cautionary tale here.

We still got c-rats with coffin nails in them as late as 1980 in my personal experience, as existing stocks were used up. And, of course, the PX still provided cigarettes at lower prices and sans the sales tax (all other taxes collected, I assure you). So, the net effect was for some do-gooding busybody to make it slightly harder and more expensive for the stunningly well paid junior soldier to get his nicotine fix. Not to mention the training opportunities inherent in the creative load planning, now that the troop had to figure out how to pack his own cigarettes vice relying on a resupply with the ration sundry pack.

The troops survived, rucked up and moved out.

Then came the 1980s... Reagan is in office, money is starting to flow again (admittedly started in the last year of Jimmy Carter) and things are looking up. Except we got hit with the generals who subscribed to the Cult of the Lean, Mean, Fighting Machine. That brought us tightened up PT standards (a good thing) a fixation on a whipcord-lean look (leave aside the utility of having some beefy men around to handle beefy tasks, and who could march the stringbeans into the dirt). Being fleet of foot around an oval track was more important than the ability to do combat rushes with gear, and able to knock heads together when you closed with the enemy after rushing to get there.. But we got so wrapped up in the fitness craze of the time that we separated "looking lean in uniform" from fitness.

No, it wasn't enough to be able to score 270-300 on your PT test, you also had to "look fit". Or, we'd toss your sorry butt out. We went from a height-weight schema that had five different body types to essentially mashing them together, taking a mean, putting a bound around it, and said - "one size generally fits all" giving us the ability to toss a guy out who could score 100 on push-ups, 100 on sit-ups, and lumber in with a 70-100 on the run because he was long-waisted, big framed, and muscular, while we'd promote the sunken-chested no-endurance geek who actually had more body fat on him but was such a feathermerchant he didn't tip the scales.

Hey, I commanded during this time, and as one of those big-framed muscular guys who averaged 285 on a PT test, I kept up with this stuff. I never was fast in the long run, but I was a jack-rabbit on the combat rush part. That football stuff, donchaknow. And all through my career, I was subject to extra scrutiny. Heh. The best part is... the Army justified all this on the grounds of combat deployability... a standard almost instantly tossed over the fence when the Long War started, and we ceased tossing people for being chubby. Somehow, it didn't matter as much anymore as long as they could hang tough on the PT part.

Along with the adoption of the fitness craze of the culture-at-large, the Generals decided we couldn't hold our alcohol, either. Mind you - in some respects, they were correct. Back in the day, before I met SWWBO, I was pretty much a non-drinker. She turned me to the Dark Side. So I'd be the El-Tee who would drive the drunks back to the 'Q. And I freely admit, there were drinking problems all around. And we were losing soldiers to alcohol-related accidents.

So, of course, we reacted to it as we typically do. We banned alcohol in field (which caused our allies to laugh at us when we worked together and they were drinking the beer and wine that came with their rations), we banned alcohol promotions at the clubs. And we raised the drink prices at the clubs to be close to off-post.

I remember the Fort Sill O'Club when I went to OBC. It was a rockin' place with lots of college chicks looking for Lieutenants with more money than sense. Come back to Fort Sill in 1985 for the OAC... and the club is virtually dead.

Club membership declined precipitously. And the Leadership became concerned. And they leaned on us to all join the Club and USE THEM! Heh. We voted with our cars, and went off-post. So now our DUIs were off-post, we were driving more, and we found out that the world off-post had changed and didn't see any reason to go back.

Many many careers were ruined in this time. There's no arguing that all in all, especially with the greatly reduced isolation of military installations, the de-emphasis on alcohol was, in toto, a net good. But as ever, it was a hammer-like approach.

So, even though we still have a bi-partisan scattered approach to post-service health care (the real test is when the OPTEMP drops, and the troops drop off the news, will the meager gains we've made with the VA be sustained, much less will we be able to keep up the improvement of services) while we've got 'em, we're doing what we can to make smoking hard, keep alcohol consumption down, while still sending 'em off to stressful situations where they get to kill people, break things, get maimed, see friends die in their arms... and of course, should come back to the barracks for a nice glass of milk and a cookie.

Ah, but we're not done. There's still a whole level of busy-body do-gooding to go after!

Yes, they're after the troops porn again.

A couple of days ago, I came across a piece by Harold Hutchison, writing over at Strategy Page.

The Porn Wars by Harold C. Hutchison November 23, 2007

As if fighting the Global War on Terror was not difficult enough, the troops are now facing a loss of freedom in their choice of reading material. This censorship effort is coming from a number of anti-pornography groups who are not happy with the results of a Pentagon policy banned hard core porn, but allowed magazines like Playboy and Penthouse to stay in military exchanges.

This is not the first time such a problem has arisen. In 2004, an effort by an Oregon porn shop to send porn to troops was shot down. The military does restrict porn in some areas, but often for cultural and political reasons. This is particularly true in the Middle East.

Iraq and other Moslem nations are much more socially conservative than the United States. In fact, Saudi Arabia's religious police make the Religious Right seem like social liberals. Over in Bahrain, the rules are looser – as long as what happens in Bahrain stays in Bahrain. Many Saudis head over there to indulge in vice. It keeps the clergy in Saudi Arabia happy, and it keeps the Saudis who can get to Bahrain happy. It also is a matter of order and discipline – vital things needed in a combat zone.

But for areas where such things are not a problem, the DOD has allowed Playboy to remain on the shelves. Part of this is because of the fact that some rules are harder to enforce. Some troops will attempt to sneak stuff in (at least one soldier quoted in Al Santoli's oral history "Leading the Way" brought a Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue into Saudi Arabia and used it to calm down Iraqi prisoners). There is also the Internet – and Internet access for the troops means that they can surf the web and get porn (as many Americans do at home).

This of course, did not sit well with religious groups at home. They have launched an e-mail and letter-writing campaign to get Playboy tossed (as the State Department did in 2005). And so the troops find themselves fighting to protect the right of people to try to deny them the right to choose their own reading material. – (haroldc.hutchison@gmail.com) [©2007 Strategy Page, used with permission]

Just keep all this in mind, as the Dems fight over the right to make you bite their health-care bullet. Whether they do it via the less damaging mandatory insurance route or the horrors of gov't-run-and-provided health care ala the Brit and Canadian models... that elephant in the living room is going to just give the people who know how you should live your life more levers to legislate your behaviors.

It doesn't mean there isn't room for a whole lot of improvement in how we fund and manage health care... just remember who you put in charge matters in ways you can't imagine. But those of us who've been with DoD any length of time... we can imagine.