No More Calleys, Please

Apparently, the army is having trouble meeting its recruiting goals these days. By a lot.

We sincerely hope that this does not mean that the army will lower its standards for new recruits, but it’s beginning to look like that’s exactly what they’re doing. Army recruiters are desperate to make quota, and quite willing to overlook criminal records, bad behavior, or incompetence. They’re not being particularly smart about it, either; one group of corner-cutting recruiters was actually exposed by an investigative report by a teenager writing for his school paper at Arvada High in Colorado.

Steve Gilliard, one of our favorite bloggers, points out that the infamous Lt. Calley of the My Lai massacre was a good example of the last-in-his-class-at-officer-candidate-school kind of screwup the army gets when it relaxes its standards. His point could not be clearer: send the screwups to fight, and the fight gets screwed up.

Right now, it seems like the army’s ground forces are largely made up of patriotic kids from small towns, idealistic inner city kids trying to get ahead, and immigrants trying to get citizenship. It’s not necessarily fair that that’s who’s fighting, but better them than Lt. Calley.

War is always a crime, but sending actual criminals to fight a war turns it into some kind of major felony.