The Making of a Man

December 12, 2007

When I was at the gym, working on keeping the holiday pounds down, I overheard a conversation in which the tag line was: “Maybe the Army will be the making of him.” And the reply was, “Well, maybe.  It was for me.”  I had to look over at the speakers.  The man who had said the Army was the “making” of him was someone I had seen before and I knew that he could not have been in the military since 2001 and was way too young to have been in Vietnam.

I was in a surly mood and mumbled to myself. “Yeah, it will be in the making of him as a wreck.  It’ll make him have PTSD.  It’ll make him one of the 120 suicides a week.  It’ll make him one of the 25% of the homeless who are veterans.” 

“Easy for you to say that since there wasn’t a long, bloody war when you were in the military.” I continued to mutter to myself.

A few crunches later I thought better of my rant.  I thought of my friends who had learned a lot from being in the military.  Many of them are now conscientious objectors, but could look back at the good they received in the military.  I thought about the CCC camps as well. 

Did you know that the CCC camps –the Civilian Conservation Corp camps—created in the height of the depression to provide paying work for the unemployed young men of the time were, in part, patterned after the military?  The museum of the CCC tells the history this way:  President Franklin Roosevelt proposed “to recruit thousands of unemployed young men, enroll them in a peacetime army, and send them into battle against destruction and erosion of our natural resources.”

Ironically, it was the CCC camps upon which the CPS camps—Civilian Public Service Camps—the first alternative service outside the military, were patterned.

So maybe, if he avoids PTSD, the Army will be the making of the man.

Maybe.