Speak Loudly & Carry a Tiny Stick
Vieques and the Flower Children.

By Jim Boulet Jr., executive director, English First
August 15, 2001 8:55 a.m.

n Friday, August 17th, the president of Puerto Rico's Senate, Antonio Fas Alzamora, will visit the United Nations in an attempt to force the U.S. Navy to cease all training on the island of Vieques immediately.

His visit may well illuminate the underpinnings of the Vieques controversy more than he intends. Vieques is a place, after all, where the U.S. Navy and Marines prepare to land American troops on a hostile shore, sometimes at the request of the U.N.

The curious thing in the Vieques debate is how many of the politicians involved fail to notice the damage an ineffective American military will do to their globalist dreams. Take for example, New York's junior senator, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Hillary has been demanding an immediate halt to American training on Vieques. Her husband treated the U.S. military as cannon fodder for every conceivable U.N. initiative during his presidency. It seemed the only time either of them thought of American forces is when our men and women were dispatched to risk their lives as part of some U.N.-sponsored boondoggle.

This conflict between grandiose visions of U.N. peacekeeping coupled with miserly treatment of American troops suggests there is more than a quest for the Puerto Rican vote at work here.

The debate over Vieques once again allows the radicals of the 1960's and those who admired them from afar to demonstrate their hostility to all things military.

This sort of fashionable dislike of the military is not new. It served as an unexpected conclusion for the film, The Caine Mutiny. Military service during peacetime is unglamorous at best and poorly paid. There are easier ways to earn public applause.

Thus Robert Kennedy Jr. names his new son Aidan Caohman Vieques Kennedy and is hailed in some quarters for doing something so noble. But the men and women in our armed forces do something at least as noble and far more dangerous: they have chosen to undertake strenuous training to be ready to deter foreign aggression.

Admittedly, in these days of cruise missiles and smart bombs, the need for American troops to practice beachfront assaults of enemy territory is not quite as high as it was during World War II. But America's demonstrated ability to do so transforms the mere appearance of U.S. warships in a trouble spot into a statement of national seriousness which has often been enough to prompt peace talks.

Now if the only places American troops will ever be sent are areas where U.N. peace negotiations have already settled matters, then the Vieques training exercises might be unnecessary. But America is likely to have national interests not always endorsed by the U.N. General Assembly.

Abandoning Vieques also risks American lives by requiring our troops to depend solely on the latest electronic gadgets, Tom Clancy's novels describing American military techno-wizardry notwithstanding.

Robert Heinlein's 1959 staunchly pro-military novel, Starship Troopers, makes this point. An infantry recruit, complains: "if we can use an H-bomb, . . . isn't it kind of ridiculous to go crawling around in the weeds, throwing knives and maybe getting yourself killed?" His sergeant replies:

War is not violence and killing, pure and simple; war is controlled violence, for a purpose. The purpose of war is to support your government's decisions by force. The purpose is never to kill the enemy just to be killing him
. . . but to make him do what you want him to do" (emphasis in original).

Those who see no use for military training on Vieques would do well to remember the recent spectacle of American troops prevented from landing on the coast of Haiti simply because people were standing on shore yelling at them. The dubious reasons for U.S. involvement in Haiti notwithstanding, it does America no good to be seen as speaking loudly while carrying a tiny stick.

Of course, the ability of our military to do its two jobs: Defending this land from its enemies and carrying out the decisions of the American government seems to matter little to the trendy "U.S. out of Vieques" movement. Perhaps it should.