Posted on Sat, May. 03, 2008
What was he thinking?
It's bad news for Adam Martin that he skipped out on Airborne School at Fort Benning. But I'd rather read that he was holed up with his girlfriend in Nevada than read another soldier's obituary.
On May 2, 2003, President Bush announced the end of the "major combat operations" in Iraq. Sadly, that was not the case. According to icasualties.org/oif, from January 2004 to December 2007 U. S. casualties in Iraq averaged about 854 per month.
Reading about any casualty is difficult, but it seems doubly so if it's a young person such as Martin, who is only 20.
Many 20-year-olds in college can't decide on a major. So his having decided to join the Army -- in the midst of Operation Iraqi Freedom -- was a major decision. But that's not the issue. Legally, he was old enough to join the military. He did and he had an obligation.
The fact that he was old enough to join the military and had a commitment to the Army notwithstanding, the parent in me wonders what he was thinking when he enlisted.
Military service is noble, but it is not glamorous. Vietnam took care of that, at least for those in my generation. Vietnam legitimized post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). But today, soldiers returning from the Middle East have put PTSD in the record books.
It has been estimated that 30-40 percent of soldiers returning from the Middle East have signs of war trauma -- depression, anxiety, nightmares. These are the components of PTSD. But the signature injury of the war in Iraq will be traumatic brain injury. Two-thirds of the soldiers who suffer blasts from improvised explosive devices or IEDs suffer traumas to the brain.
At this point we don't know what happened to Martin. Did something spook him? Did he come to some kind of realization. Or did he simply fall head over heels? That happens to some soldiers a lot, you know.
Martin is young -- and I know I'm not the only one who'd like to take up for him -- but the world doesn't work that way. We can't simply not show up and expect that there will be no repercussions.
(And by the way, I think that business of not realizing he was in trouble with the Army is a the kind of tale a young man tells his mother.)
If Martin didn't understand anything else, he should have understood that Uncle Sam doesn't fool around with commitments -- especially in today's military environment. He disappeared from Benning in November and was later declared a deserter. This is the most serious of the "not being where one is supposed to be" military offenses.
Former middleweight boxing champion Rocky Graziano served nearly a year in prison for going AWOL from the Army.
During the Vietnam War era, there were stories of what happened to draft dodgers and others who were not where they were supposed to be. Some of the more dramatic tales told were of young men in shackles being escorted to recruiting stations and other facilities.
We don't know the particulars, but it's probably safe to say the honeymoon is over.
Contact Kaffie Sledge at 706-571-8585 or ksledge@ledger-enquirer.com
