Natural Born Killers

The laurel wreath is ready now
To place upon his loyal brow
And we'll all feel gay
When Johnny comes marching home
--When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again

Being a hero is about the shortest-lived profession on earth
--Will Rogers
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The Washington Spectator (May 2007) offers a provocative view of the problems at the core of the Walter Reed scandal (''The Army's Abuse of it's Own Extends Far Beyond Walter Reed''):

''Naturally, we aren't meant to think of soldiers as trained killers or of any military installation as part of an institution of mass murder. It might help if we did. Certainly it would help aspiring recruits better understand what they are getting into, and help wounded veterans understand why they would be degraded as soon as they'd outlived their usefulness to the trade.

''The truth is, a system dedicated to transforming psychologically healthy people into people capable of performing what in any other setting is considered a pathological act can't help behaving badly—not all the time or in all of its realms, not monolithically so that everyone associated with it is scathed. But inevitably the ends deform the means, and inevitably someone pays. No one is talking about it, but what happened at Walter Reed to soldiers injured in war is not shocking at all if one ponders what happens at Army posts to soldiers injured in basic training.''

The article goes on to discuss the Physical Training and Rehabilitation Program (PTRP)--''where the Army, desperate for bodies in a time of war, puts broken enlistees whom it is committed neither to curing nor to releasing, nor even to respecting as soldiers and human beings.'' Injured soldiers can be kept here for months until such time as they pass PT tests and go on to battle-readiness, or are chaptered out or medically discharged.

The article implies that in a warrior culture, such as is the military, weakness is reviled. Injury beyond fitness is not consonant with a healthy Army. Therefore, the goal for the injured soldier is recycling into fit for duty status. Otherwise, that soldier has no further pertinence to the force.

It is the same in the promotion concept of ''up-or-out,'' and can leave a lot of soldiers feeling rudderless after being disgorged from a system which one time courted and feted them, and not so many years later dubs them irrelevant.

--by Lisa