[lit-ideas] Re: Warrior world.
- From: John Wager <jwager@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 26 May 2010 12:17:06 -0500
Veronica Caley wrote:
. . . . I have heard soldiers say numerous times, on TV, in magazine
articles, that they do what they do because that is their job. Not in
context of reprehensible behavior, but in general.
There is probably more "dis-obedience" than most people would expect in
the military, some of which comes under the heading of "just doing my
job." From the outside, it looks like the Army (with which I was more
familiar) is a very strict hierarchy, with superiors issuing orders that
enlisted men carried out. From the inside, there is a lot of ambiguity
and independent judgment.
Here are some possible examples:
1. A lieutenant orders a patrol to go out at night. The leader of the
patrol goes out 50 yards and then just waits there until the morning,
comes back in, and reports that they didn't see anything. The leader of
the patrol considers it his "job" to keep his men safe, despite what he
is ordered to do.
2. A colonel orders a captain to send his company into a position that
the captain finds is indefensible. He makes a change of a hundred meters
to form a more defensible position, and then calls back into HQ the
actual new location. Nobody every says anything to the captain.
3. A brand-new officer orders a sergeant to lead a routine patrol into
a particularly violent sector without enough troops to deal with the
probable engagement. The sergeant replies that radio static is making
the officer's transmission inaudible, and no matter how much the officer
tries to get through, the sergeant keeps on saying that he doesn't
understand. The patrol never happens, and afterward, the officer is
replaced by a more seasoned officer. The sergeant says, when
questioned, "I was just doing my job."
4. The President orders the invasion of a neutral country. A sergeant
refuses to participate in the invasion, and in a special court-martial
receives a six-month suspended sentence as well as reduction in rank
from E-6 to E-1 for the last month of the sergeant's enlistment (or,
realistically speaking, no real punishment).
5. A divisional commander is ordered to move his division to a new area
of operations. The divisional commander knows that this area has
extensive enemy prepared positions, and that the current location of the
division is successfully protecting local populations against enemy
action as well as currently controlling the ground through narrow raids
into the new area of operations. Moving the entire division into this
area will, in the divisional commander's best judgment, result in a huge
number of American casualties, relatively few enemy casualties, and a
much less effective job of defending the local population. The
divisional commander tells his superior that the division will try its
best to fulfill the mission, but that if the order goes through as
proposed, the divisional commander would like to be relieved of his
command and his commission, serving as an enlisted soldier for such a
move. The superior commander re-thinks his position and agrees that the
division should not move. The divisional commander is "just doing his job."
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