PC DEADLIER THAN OBL?

Granted, Osama bin Laden killed thousands on 09/11/2001. But I submit that our peculiar American penchant for "political correctness" is killing Americans, American soldiers at home and in the war zones.

Some backround first. I served five years of active duty in the US Navy Medical Corps. Those were years in the Regular Navy, not the Reserve. I started as an Ensign and ended as a Lieutenant Commander. A few friends in medical school and I drove to Milwaukee to sign up for service. We were hoping to get better training, experience, duty stations, and rank by signing up for a Navy program than by waiting for the draft. (In those days a doctor was drafted right out of training unless he was blind in one eye and losing vision in the other, or dying of a lethal process, or from New England.) Just half kidding on that last one.

I am sure that my being in the Navy's Ensign 1915 Program helped me land a great internship at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, MD. Excellent training and a great duty station but not a way to learn the ways and people of the US Navy. For that one must serve in the Fleet. And that came about in a fortuitous way.

Medical School, Madison, Wisconsin

I talked to residents and fellows and staff about choices for duty after the Postgraduate Year 1, or internship year. Our internship group was told we could opt for two years duty in Viet Nam, or other. The others for me were Northwest Cape, Australia, or a base in the outer Aleutian Islands where the people were taller than the trees. Alcoholism and/or frostbite, or opt for a three year tour. Easy enough so far. One of the choices for a three year tour was Charleston, SC. And, as luck would have it, one of the doctors at Bethesda was from the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston. Since I was from Wisconsin, and since this was a turbulent year of racial unrest, I was a little uneasy about the idea of the Old South. My wife was more adventurous and had a good feel about SC and about Charleston, even though she had never been anywhere in the American South except Florida--and St. Petersburg, FL, is hardly Southern. (For that matter, neither is the Washington, DC, area where people quipped that the city enjoyed a combination of Northern charm and Southern efficiency.)

Charleston Harbor, beginning of the Atlantic Ocean

My wife and I opted for the Charleston tour, and we will always be grateful for that experience. There was an adjustment period. Our realtor told us we would not enjoy the South unless we slowed down a bit--Charleston then and Charleston now are not the same place. As one example: my first day on base started well enough, but as I was leaving the house I found the garbage scow and crew blocked the driveway. I was very upset and about to yell something when one of the men said "mornin' Cap'n, ain't it a fine, lovely day!" Well, I definitely got an on the spot education in the mores and manners of the Old South.

My first year in Charleston was spent in the fleet: Destroyer Division 42 of COMCRUDESLANT, an organization of the Atlantic Fleet with ships and crews and Division officers. Each of my ships had a petty officer corpsman on board, often as not a chief petty officer. The Navy has its own way, but it's been around a long time and it works well. (The slogan "shine she must, work she might" is a joke.) Look closely and you see that the Navy is run by Admirals and Chiefs. That is worth a post all by itself. This experience allowed me to get to know the Navy from the bottom up. Experiential knowledge is better knowledge.

The second year of the tour was spent at the US Naval Base Dispensary. I was the assistant medical director with five doctors on staff. The Medical Director was a board eligible psychiatrist. (We saw all the sailors and marines who claimed they needed to be excused from service because of this or that reason, mostly psychological reasons. The psychiatrist was to be our solid resource for these clinical judgements.) But the psychiatrist was absent more than present. This impacted the work load of each of us but none of us complained about it or about our Director. We just got the work done with the four of us.

My final year was spent as a general medical officer on the Orthopedic Service at the Charleston Naval Hospital. This is knowledge and experience that every doctor ought to have. If nothing else, it helps a person with orthopedic complaints, and that is something we all have, doctors included. Added up, I got a good grounding in military medicine and the military. This allows me to make a few judgements of my own with regard to the Fort Hood massacre and what is going on in today's Army.

The Fort Hood massacre will turn out to be a disgrace for the Army and Army medicine. The initial announcements by Army spokespersons and by command that the "alleged shooter" (was there any doubt about who did the shooting?) was not engaged in terrorism will turn out to have been outright lies. The extraordinary concern for the "diversity" of the military, at the expense of lives of soldiers, likewise is preposterous. The good army is a homogeneous band of brothers and sisters who obey orders instantaneously, can cross train, share rations and ammo, carry out missions and their own wounded, and that is anything but diverse. Not to mention the demographics which show fewer than one in twenty soldiers is not Christian. If the army wants to attract Muslims, it should do it in some way that does not neglect the safety of the vast majority of its own soldiers. If the army is so politically correct that its high command jeopardizes the lives of Americans, most especially of Americans in uniform, then we need a top down retraining.

The psychiatrist/jihadist Muslim/shooter should have been drummed out of the service as soon as he spoke out with jihadist views so publically and so loudly. He should have been investigated years before this terrible tragedy. This is a train wreck that should never have happened. We need courageous investigation and vigorous prosecution. And we need to hope for change.

And why do civilian police have to bring down the shooter on a military base? Does the army not have its own military police? Have we outsourced that to civilians, too?



Worse than the wounded and dead in Fort Hood is this: I think that we lose soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq because of the same deadly, idiotic political correctness. I know of cases where a soldier was killed by a friendly Afghan. If there is a blithe indifference toward Muslims who might or might not be a massacre in the making, there is no reasonable solution but to pull the military out of the war zone to protect Americans. Political correctness kills more than Osama bin Laden, at least at this point post 9/11. PC DEADLIER THAN OBL?

At best, a burial ground for empires.

Are we Americans going to allow our soldiers to be killed by and for Political Correctness? We and they are better than that. This nonsense has gone on long enough. Time for common sense to prevail--if not in our society at large, at least in the life and death world of the war zones.