March 10, 2006

Joe Duran: The antidote to bad news

I don't think the Administration is on the cusp of losing the support and morale in any significant way, nor will the negative feeling spread in a way that effects our performance in any substantial way for 2 reasons.

The first reason is that the Marine Corps is very good at managing the education and informational input of its troops and by extension, what we think and feel. I first noticed this shortly after the attacks of 9/11 when the hallways of work were filled with professionally produced posters bearing the image of the burning and smoking Twin Towers in the middle and photos of Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein on either side of it. It was a very powerful image, and very wrong. It is no wonder that, "while 85% said the U.S. mission is mainly "to retaliate for Saddam’s role in the 9-11 attacks," 77% said they also believe the main or a major reason for the war was "to stop Saddam from protecting al Qaeda in Iraq." (Zogby , 2/28/06).

These astounding percentages nearly 5 years after the attacks and over 4 years after the invasion of Iraq is a testament to the power of this administration’s management of information and education of its citizen soldiers. They have only begun to flex their power.

I can further describe what the Pentagon has created within its forces with this quote:

It is a "culture of silence - rather than being encouraged and equipped to know and respond to the concrete realities of their world, (the soldiers) are kept submerged in a situation in which critical awareness and response are practically impossible - and it becomes clear that the whole educational system was one of the major instruments for the maintenance of the culture of silence". (Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 1970).

Freire’s culture of silence is an apt description of our current state of the union and or armed forces and how any negative feelings that you mentioned will not spread in any real way. No one talks about them. They come secondary to the task at hand.

The second reason the president has to do no further than what he has done to keep our morale at sufficient levels is more visceral to me. As the Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps, Sergeant Major Estrada, told a small room of NCO’s of which I was a part of today, "it comes down to doing our job, a job that not many people would step up for, one that we might be asked to kill, or be killed, doing. That is why we are the few, the proud." Almost 300 years of military tradition will squelch any significant negative feelings from spreading quickly throughout the military, and if it does, we are being trained to wear that hardship as a badge of honor. I could feel the goosebumps rise on my neck. It is a powerful antidote to bad news.

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