FARLEY: Mr. President, since we continue to police the world, how do you intend to maintain our military presence without reinstituting a draft?
BUSH: Yes, that's a great question. Thanks.
I hear there's rumors on the Internets (sic) that we're going to have a draft. We're not going to have a draft, period. The all- volunteer army works. It works particularly when we pay our troops well. It works when we make sure they've got housing, like we have done in the last military budgets.
An all-volunteer army is best suited to fight the new wars of the 21st century, which is to be specialized and to find these people as they hide around the world.
We don't need mass armies anymore. One of the things we've done is we've taken the -- we're beginning to transform our military.
And by that I mean we're moving troops out of
In Europe, we have massed troops as if the Soviet Union existed and was going to invade into
So to answer your question is, we're withdrawing, not from the world, we're withdrawing manpower so they can be stationed here in America, so there's less rotation, so life is easier on their families and therefore more likely to be -- we'll be more likely to be able to keep people in the all-volunteer army.
One of the more important things we're doing in this administration is transformation. There are some really interesting technologies.
For instance, we're flying unmanned vehicles that can send real- time messages back to stations in the
It also means that we can target things easier and move more quickly, which means we need to be lighter and quicker and more facile and highly trained.
Now, forget all this talk about a draft. We're not going to have a draft so long as I am the president. ------
October 8, 2004
The Second Bush-Kerry Presidential Debate
SECOND PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES'
SPEAKERS:
GEORGE W. BUSH
PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES
&
U.S. SENATOR JOHN F. KERRY (MA)
DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE
Chapter One
Sometime they'll give a war and nobody will come. ~Carl Sandburg
The internal alarm clock woke him up at 5:30 a.m. exactly. After months of waking up at 5:30 a.m. for work, his body simply adjusted to the god forsaken hour. James soon discovered that he now only had to tell himself to wake up at any particular time and his body would do it, disregarding any pre-established sleep pattern. If he had dreams, he could never remember them.
He sat up in bed. His eyes were not blurry. He was not tired. He was fully functional, awake, and ready for the day. He quickly made his bed and took a cold shower to make his muscles alert. He ate some toast, drank some orange juice, brushed his teeth, packed his back pack, put on his winter cap, and walked out the door.
The walk to work takes him two hours. Every day his legs strengthen and his calluses harden. Sometimes, just for fun, he will run the six miles to work to prepare himself for a day when, by the off chance, he wakes up late for work.
On the way to work he passes a park with basketball courts and a playground with swings. The park is never without children playing, even in the coldest of weather. He smiles at the kids as the fall down and get back up laughing. At night, he sometimes walks to the park and will climb on top of the playground, playing more dangerously, testing his strength and balance. He often takes off his shoes and socks to climb the smooth, metal poles. The calluses on his feet allow him to run around on the wood chips without any care.
The park was at the bottom of a hill, the street almost towering above it. In the winter, the slope became a monstrous sledding hill. A bench sat atop the hill, overlooking the playground. During the day, parents could watch where their kids were playing and would never lose sight of them. At night, there were no parents, the playground desolate. One night, a man stood behind the bench, leaning forward with his arms resting on the backrest. James looked up at the figure, seeing only the shadow’s outline. James stood sideways, head cocked and carefully watching the figure. Neither moved or made a gesture toward the other. The stranger then slowly stood upright and walked away, only looking away a moment before falling out of view.
Training:
The pain becomes unbearable. Some faint while others wait until the nerves dull. Those that faint are washed out, “reprogrammed for society”, which really means chopper dropped into some vehemently anti-American insurgent camp. Those whose nerves dulled soon longed for the adrenaline rush associated with the excitement of pain.
The Discovery:
“Sure, we’re under some third party military contractor. But there is an elaborate front over the whole damn thing. We’re supposedly some security agency helping protect the military and establishing safe, workable businesses uninfluenced by insurgent backing. We sure as hell know that’s not what we are doing here. I have a friend in Washington who I asked to look into some stuff for us, mostly money trails and the like. This company is neck deep in a shit storm cover up, and they are doing a damn good job of it too. There is this guy, some top level military official who has been getting paid in substantial grant, payments way out of his pay range. I’m talking millions upon millions of dollars over just the past couple of years. The strange thing is that this money just disappeared. It hasn’t been done in research, hasn’t been sitting in some fund, it isn’t sitting in this guy’s bank account. Not in an offshore account, not invested in any other programs. Just gone. At the same time these grants were awarded, Raven Security, the umbrella corporation that owns us, was created simultaneously. The first stock investment was by a guy under the alias of Simon Adams. As it turns out, Simon Adams is the same alias used by our same top level military executive. He only invested a third of the money brought in by grants, three months later he invested another third, and then six months he invested the last third, totaling exactly the money awarded. I mean, it’s careful, but still sloppy enough to piece together. Now, what’s really intriguing is that this same guy was supposed to be preparing all of the information and documents necessary in the event that a draft was reinstated. But the bottom line is that Bush and the higher ups had a no go on an official draft. Yet, shit still had to get done. It was getting pretty bad for a while, troops kept getting stretched further and further until they started just snapping. Hell, look at us, insurgents could walk through our lines with a horde of elephants and we would never notice. So the government must have decided to have this program created under some false corporation to get an illegal draft going. That program is what brought us all here. You, me, and every other guy. The snatched you guys off the fucking street. It was abduction. They told your families, if you still had any, that you had gone missing and that everything was being done to find you. Thing is, you’ve been here the whole time and they threaten your family if you try to leave. We have no choice but to work alongside the official military. We get the same objectives, same intelligence, same communication lines, same weapons, some of the same training. Only difference is that we are non-volunteer. We do all the dirty work. Mercenaries for exploitation. We don’t get pay, or benefits. We fight for our lives and the lives of our families. Just think about it, all of you were selected with similar criteria. Males aged 18-30. Healthy. Physically fit. Observant. Adaptable. Quick to learn. Studious. All they had to do was grab you and break you down mentally, threaten your families to get you with the program. Even then, they tried to select the loners, the guys distant from the families, the only child whose parents died tragically in a car crash. Shit like that. They had to make warriors with nothing left to lose. They made you thirst blood and the fight. You are a soldier who doesn’t exist. You are most definitely not in the employ of the United States Government. When they are done here they will move you onto the next battlefield. You will want that battlefield. You will crave it. If not, they will throw you away. Shove you onto some street or desert and everyone will think you are crazy. Then we do all the dirty jobs and if we get caught then the accountability rests on some third party contractor who didn’t have a handle on its people. If you think that you can get out then you are dead wrong. If you think that the bona fide US certified military personnel are expendable, we are ten times that. They leave no one behind, we are trained to walk away. James, we are the real forgotten soldiers, we just don’t get a fucking monument.”
“Sometimes, in order to win, you have to sacrifice yourself. You can’t sit back and watch anymore. You have to take the responsibility onto yourself and fight for everyone else so that the greater good is achieved. If you are cut down on the way there, hopefully someone will take your place and lead the rest. At least you die knowing you did something.”
Iraqi Police Officer (befriends):
“You take out a leader, but the people fight on. Not for the fallen leader, but to get you out of their damn country. You don’t belong here. You never did. You can’t walk in and blow up the factories and crush their industrial strength. It simply doesn’t exist. It’s a different war here. They fight for Allah and their mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, sons, and daughters. You will surrender to save your life in the hope of living another day, but they will die in order to preserve a future generation. You and the rest of your soldiers are fighting a war you cannot come to terms with. If you cannot understand it, you will lose. You fight only to kill. You kill and you kill. Your generals tell you to kill until all the insurgents are dead. But they don’t understand that you will either lose the war or kill until the entire people have been exterminated. If you eliminate a people you are no better than the leader you claimed to oust in the first place.”
He paused for a moment. He looked out the window into the orange, setting sun over the rooftops and then returned his gaze to James.
“We are just pawns you and I. This is a very complex game. If only we could move the pieces. If only we could step back from the playing board, shake hands with the enemy and walk away. A mutual understanding of conflict, of boundaries, of each other. Sadly we know that is not the case. One day we will be taken off the board and others will get ready for another game. ‘Just another game’. They will say. ‘Come on, just play one more game’.”
Police Station Bombing
The ringing still in his ears and vibrating his skull, he slowly brought himself to his feet. He grabbed for his rifle, but it was not there. “Where had it gone?” He asked himself. The noises around him were very dull, but slowly getting louder and more distinguishable. As his hearing returned, so too did his perception of the chaos around him. Dozens of Iraqis were moaning, crying, running, screaming, bleeding, stunned, alone, confused. One man was carrying what may have been his wife, her head limp, unconscious or dead - James did not know. The man did not seem to know either, and amidst his anguish he did not notice his own gaping gash in his side, blood slowly pouring from his wound. James turned, attempting to discover why his body had been pressed to the cement so violently. Before looking up, he noticed that his entire left leg was covered in blood. He felt no pain but decided to investigate; he rolled his fatigues up past his shins and over his knee, revealing his thigh. Although his skin was red, he saw no cuts, gashes, or holes to illicit such bleeding. He looked at the ground where he had been lying and noticed he had fallen in a pool of blood from a limb no longer attached to its owner. Thankful that he was not bleeding, he looked up at the police station where, less than a minute ago, he had been talking to Mahmood. The station was now devoid of any glass, most of which littered the street and pestered those who had lost their sandals. James looked towards the fourth and highest level in the building. To his astonishment a large hole had been created in the face of the building. Flames poured out anywhere they could reach their precious oxygen. Smoke, they later said, could be seen for several miles.
James slowly walked towards the building. It was a bomb, his mind finally relayed to him. He stepped over bodies, rubble, twisted metal, shattered glass, clothing, dropped baggage and baskets, fallen bicycles and backpacks. He arrived at the front door. The metal doors had been blown ajar. Iraqi officers who could still walk assisted the others, propping them up on their shoulders. Other officers found cots or long boards to carry the more severely wounded out to the street. James stepped onto the thousands eight and a half by eleven sheets of paper that were gently floating to the ground. Glass crunched under the soles of his feet. Smoke and dust still lingered in the air, illuminated by the unfiltered sunlight. The chaos and destruction gave James felt surreal among all of the carnage. However, the smoke that choked his lungs reminded him he was most certainly alive in the fiery depths of hell.
James’s brain related another news flash. A memory now seemed to come from the smoke flowing around his head. He remembered walking down the stairs after talking to Mahmood. He saw the man carrying a briefcase. Strange he though. Their eyes met, but the man looked away as they passed. James still watched him. Months of training to notice strange behavior. James dismissed it. Just a briefcase he thought. He stepped into the bustling street. A car honked. Then a yell, perhaps a shriek, pierced the noise of the traffic. A shot rang out from behind James, and as he turned, crouched, and reached for his sidearm simultaneously, a brief silence fell over the street. Then a blast thrust him to the ground. Now he was here.
James left the main entrance and went into the stairway. Some of the stairs had collapsed, making the climb difficult. Dead soldiers and police officers filled the doorway. The smoke grew thicker, forcing James closer to the ground to hint for oxygen. James finally reached the fourth floor. There was no doubt that the black mark on the floor near the security desk was the center of the blast. Nothing remained of whoever had detonated the blast. James walked straight to Mahmood’s desk. Small fires raged James first saw Mahmood’s carefully polished black shoes, now scratched and covered in a light brown dust, sticking out from behind the desk.
If we let people see that kind of thing, there would never again be any war. ~Pentagon official explaining why the
If it's natural to kill, why do men have to go into training to learn how? ~Joan Baez
In war, truth is the first casualty. ~Aeschylus
They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in modern war there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason. ~Ernest Hemingway
Anyone who has ever looked into the glazed eyes of a soldier dying on the battlefield will think hard before starting a war. ~Otto Von Bismark
O Lord our God, help us tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it. ~Mark Twain, "The War Prayer"
The aim of military training is not just to prepare men for battle, but to make them long for it. ~Louis Simpson
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