More Than Killing Machines

In October 1967, Arlo Guthrie released a song called “Alice’s Restaurant”. It was 18 minutes long and very little of it has to do with Alice or her restaurant.

Instead, over the course of those 18 minutes, Arlo tells two stories.

One involves his life of crime. 

Two years earlier, Arlo and a friend spent the Thanksgiving Day holiday at a deconsecrated church on the outskirts of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, which their friends Alice and Ray had been using as a home. As a favor to them, Guthrie and the friend volunteered to take their large accumulation of garbage to the local dump in their VW Microbus, not realizing until they arrived there that the dump would be closed for the holiday. Unable to find an appropriate place to dispose of the garbage, they notice a pile of other trash that had previously been dumped near the road, and they added theirs to the accumulation.

The next day, Arlo and his buddy are arrested for littering.  It is, as Arlo tells it,  “the biggest crime in the last 50 years" in Stockbridge.   Among the evidence collected against them were "twenty-seven 8-by-10 color glossy pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was" – even including some aerial photography.

Guthrie and his friend stand trial the next day, encountering a presiding judge who is blind, relying on a seeing-eye dog, thus rendering the police's extensive and painstakingly collected visual evidence irrelevant. Guthrie and his friend are relieved to be fined $50 and told to go pick up the garbage and dispose of it properly.

The second story involves the Vietnam War draft. 

Guthrie appears for a physical exam related to the draft. Among his strategies to be found unfit for military service, Arlo attempts to convince the army psychiatrist that he’s homicidal.  (“Kill! Kill! Kill!”)

This does not work. Being homicidal is seen as a feature, not a bug.  

But then Arlo’s life of crime is discovered, his arrest and conviction for the crime of littering.   Arlo notices one of the questions on the paperwork asks if he has rehabilitated himself since the crime. He can’t help but note the irony of having to prove himself reformed from a crime of littering when the realities of war were often far more brutal. The army officer says they didn't like "[his] kind".

And that’s the end of that. 

Coming out of World War II, there was a lot of appreciation for the U.S. military. It helps that we fought Nazis. Nazis suck!

By the late 1960s, the bloom was off that rose as the war in Vietnam dragged on and on. Fighting communists in the jungles of southeast Asia just didn’t have the same allure as fighting Nazis.

Vietnam was kill or be killed. Essentially, soldiers were often viewed as killing machines, brutally mowing down a faceless enemy before they could kill us back.

Hence the humor in Arlo Guthrie's tale that behaving like a homicidal maniac earns him praise from the army psychiatrist.   

The truth is that being a soldier is more than being a killing machine.

My father served in the army. Thankfully, he didn't have to pull a stretch in a war zone. He was by many accounts able to strip and reassemble a rifle in seconds. It was an attribute extolled at his funeral. 

I have trouble picturing my dad as a "killing machine". 

I had an uncle who did do time in the delta in Vietnam. He did pull the trigger on machine guns and doubtless took out dozens of North Vietnamese fighters. It was a necessity of war, I suppose, but it haunted him for all his days.

My uncle may have killed in war time but he was no "killing machine". 

The idea of a soldier being a "killing machine" has become a topic because Donald Trump fails to understand what a soldier is.

He has recently intervened to pardon 2 soldiers convicted of war crimes and reverse the demotion of a third who was charged with committing unsanctioned violence on the battlefield.  

Li'l Donnie's logic (such as it is) is that "soldiers are trained to be killing machines then have to second guess themselves on the battlefield." 

How little Donald Trump understands about the American soldier. 

Our soldiers are tasked with defending America and its interests.  Killing our enemies is a fraction of what a soldier is tasked to do. 

Killing anyone, even our enemies, is the last thing a good soldier wants to do.

Our soldiers should represent what is best about America.

Our soldiers should not be dismissed as mere "killing machines".