Today The Wife and I took a trip to Azusa to witness a change of command ceremony for the California Army National Guard. My friend, and former law partner, was recently promoted to Lieutenant Colonel in the Guard and today was his ceremony to take command of a cavalry battalion. For those of you Loyal Readers unfamiliar with how the military is organized, this is a very big deal and a sign of great success for my friend in his military career. A big enough deal that I gladly (although I admit not without some regret) dropped watching the World Cup final match at halftime so we could go and be on time.
The ceremony took place at a brand-new Guard facility; we were told that it had just opened three weeks ago and the battalion had just moved in. We got the VIP treatment — a soldier ran over to a parking spot reserved for us, and opened the car door for The Wife; another soldier escorted us into the building and guided us into the VIP room for civilians and retired military personnel. The city’s mayor spoke, the general in charge of the division which this battalion is organized spoke. Then the colonel in charge of the brigade spoke, then the outgoing battalion commander spoke, and then my friend spoke.
I was a bit disturbed by some of the general’s remarks — many members of the battalion had recently returned from a long deployment at Guantanamo Bay where they were part of the prison security for the foreign combatant detainees (who, we now know, cannot be detained by executive fiat alone). That the general praised the troops for their good work, for the lack of glamour associated with the work, and the vital need of the work as part of the nation’s overall military strategy, was all appropriate and good. What bothered me was when the general referred to the prisoners as “savage dogs and wild animals.” These are people — dangerous people, people who mean to do our country harm, our enemies, whom we should keep careful control over. But they are still people. Dehumanizing them does not enable us to understand them better, and to defeat them we must understand them. Dehumanizing them also excuses us from treating them like human beings. To acknowledge the humanity of our enemies forces certain moral imperatives on us with regards to how we behave towards them, particularly when they are our captives. That our enemies feel no moral scruples about their behavior towards us is irrelevant. We should welcome our moral imperatives and obey them scrupulously, because they make us better than our enemies.
But I digress. A lot of our old friends were there, both military and civilian. It was good to catch up with so many of them. Hopefully we can get together more frequently, and for more happy occasions like this, in the future. And I’m very, very pleased for our friend and the significant success he has just realized for his military career. I wish him all the best for the future.
