The Marine Corp's esprit de Corp fell a little last year, with 350 felons saying Sempre Fi in 2007, up from the 208 accepted the year before. According to Schor, citing a study done by the Palm Centre at the University of California, nearly 35,000 felons filled boots on the ground in Iraq in 2006, almost 20% of all the boots.

 

The AP's Lolita C. Baldor quotes the Pentagon's deputy chief of staff for operations, Army Lt. Gen. James D. Thurman responding to the numbers released by Chairman Henry Waxman's House Oversight and Government Reform Committee report, reassuring the nation; 

• "We are growing the Army fast and there are some waivers; we know that." adding; "It hasn't alarmed us, yet."  

Clearly, America's military men and women are made of sterner stuff than those appalled by the wreck and ruin reigned down on Iraq these past terrible five years and more that they can continue not alarmed carrying out coolly their orders to commit daily the most serious of crimes: war of aggression; the crime from which all other crimes must follow.

 

Given the general milieu of the occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. Thurman can afford to turn a blinkered eye to the not quite petty trespasses of the law in his troop's past.

 

He defends the army's approbations saying challenges to recruitment merit the lowering of moral standards. According to Thurman, the reasons for that decline include: low unemployment, a protracted war on terror, and "a decline in propensity to serve."

It brings to mind Arlo Guthrie's classic, 'Alice's Restaurant,' an epic tribute to George Carlin's famous oxymoron, "Military Intelligence." In Guthrie's ballad, a young man trying to evade the draft cites his dark desires to "kill, kill, kill."

 

 

 

But, the malingerer is disappointed to find; instead of getting a 4F from the army psychologist, the shrink has caught the spirit and is jumping up and down gleefully chanting "kill" "kill" "kill" along with him.

 

The reluctant draftee is finally disqualified for a littering conviction, prompting him to say;

• "Sergeant, you got a lot a damn gall to ask me if I've rehabilitated myself, I mean, I mean, I mean that just, I'm sittin' here on the bench, I mean I'm sittin here on the Group W bench 'cause you want to know if I'm moral enough join to the army, burn women, and kids' houses and villages after bein' a litterbug."  He looked at me and said, "Kid, we don't like your kind, and we're gonna send you fingerprints off to Washington."
  

What a difference a few decades make. Where once the people of America could be sure the boys over there perpetrating My Lai and the myriad other undocumented massacres were at least well behaved at home; today killers, rapists, child molesters and all manner of reprobates are employed and receive martial training before being armed and sent off to represent liberty, democracy, and the rest of the things America thinks worth killing and dying for.