The Price of Liberty

Readers are probably familiar with Rudyard Kipling’s poem, “Tommy.” Although a chauvinist, imperialist, and claimed-to-be-racist warmonger, Kipling had a way with words, and was a keen observer.

I thought of that poem (reprinted below) as I read of how many National Guard troops were treated by the staff of the thugs that “represent” us and our States in DC on Thursday. One Guardsman is reported to have said, “Yesterday dozens of senators and congressmen walked down our lines taking photos, shaking our hands, and thanking us for our service. Within 24 hours, they had no further ruse for us and banished us to the corner of a parking garage. We feel incredibly betrayed.”

Shocking? I guess, but NOT unexpected. American politicians and “leaders” have virtually ALWAYS treated serving American soldiers (sailors, Marines, airmen, Coastguardsmen, and now guardians) like dirt beneath their feet.

This time, it was injury added to insult: the demand by Congress (I understand this originated with the corrupt High Chancellor Nancy Pelosi herself) that the 25,000 Guardsmen be vetted to remove “unreliables” who posed a threat of more “insurrection.” And then there is injury on top of injury: at least 100 of the deployed Guardsmen have already tested positive for CCP virus. This is blamed by some on living in close quarters and being exposed to the weather in stationary “guard” posts that demanded little or no movement and few breaks while long-winded politicians and entertainers did their thing from heated platforms.

But again, nothing that power-mad, greedy, and conniving politicians and “leaders” have not done to American military members since there WAS an American military. Colonial, revolutionary, republican, northern/southron, and more. In the swamps of the East Coast, the neat farmsteads of Ontario, the swamps of the Deep South, the windswept Plains and frigid Rockies, the pits of France, the nasty islands of the Pacific, jungles of Burma, dark forests of Germany, jungles of Panama and Vietnam, Frozen Chosen (Korea) or the Rockpile and the Sandbox. Billy Yank, Johnny Reb, Doughboys, GIs, and more.

To say nothing of the rotten rations, the shoddy cloth, the lousy, misfiring weapons and useless ammo, and other junk the politicians and their parasitic Beltway Bandit industrial and union collaborators shoveled at us to go out and fight and win, then come home to pain and agony and socialist-style medical care and pitiful pensions.

Back to Washington, a Jarhead friend of mine shared backdoor message traffic from a buddy of his who got deployed to DC for this latest coronation. They got to stay in really nice quarters: a three- or four-star hotel for his unit. The buddy got the honeymoon suite! Sounded really nice until we found out it was him and six of his comrades. Even a California king bed is a wee bit crowded with six or seven people sleeping on it.

But that does beat sleeping in the bed of a rattletrap GMC “Commercial Utility Cargo Vehicle” (CUCV) at 10,000 feet elevation in February. Or sleeping in a slit trench fifty miles from an FOB in another set of mountains at 10,000 feet, or beside the tracks of your armored vehicle getting buried by sand overnight in a Mesopotamian desert. But this was DC!

Of course, we current military members have only ourselves to blame. We didn’t get drafted (the last draftee retired a long time ago); we volunteered, following family and community tradition and thinking we were defending the Constitution, our homeland, our neighbors and other people, and trying to defend and protect against all enemies, foreign and domestic. While still trying to respect and obey (within limits) their civilian “masters.”

We understand (or soon do, after enlistment and training and our first tour) the meaning of an old saying of the French Foreign Legion, applied to Congress: “You legionnaires are soldiers in order to die, and I am sending you where you can die.”

And in the meantime, we will be treated as dirt and worse, scraped off their shoes and spit upon.

But sooner or later (and perhaps this is what the High Chancellor fears in her dotage), enough of us will remember that our oaths are NOT to Congress, nor to President, nor to any political faction, but to the Constitution and the principles embodied in that and the Declaration of Independence.

Here is Kiplings’ Poem on YouTube: https://youtu.be/wzLjkIKWH6c And here is the first stanza:

I went into a public-‘ouse to get a pint o’ beer,
The publican ‘e up an’ sez, “We serve no red-coats here.”
The girls be’ind the bar they laughed an’ giggled fit to die,
I outs into the street again an’ to myself sez I:
O it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ “Tommy, go away”;
But it’s “Thank you, Mister Atkins”, when the band begins to play,
The band begins to play, my boys, the band begins to play,
O it’s “Thank you, Mister Atkins”, when the band begins to play.