Who Says The Elite Aren't Fit To Serve?

Then one day in 2005, I found myself geared out like those Learning Channel guys, face painted, lugging a 60-pound rucksack and a rifle across Fort Benning and rappelling and picking my way through a dark forest with night-vision goggles on my face, and in my head the prospect of swift punishment at the hands of my trainer should I lose my way in the dark or lose track of any member of my squad.

After that, I was on to my first unit to flounder about and find my way as a new officer. Then last year, I found myself amid the maddening impenetrable politics of Anbar province -- sipping chai with sheiks, doling out reconstruction cash, living in an Iraqi police station and wondering just how much good will our hosts really bore toward me and my guys.

Along this road I discovered something about myself, and about the military.

About myself, I discovered that there were within me -- within everyone -- latent abilities, tendencies, temperaments that only an environment such as this will bring out. And yes, I'm speaking to you bookish types now. However well you may think you know your own pacific constitution, be assured that there is someone more physical and forceful within you -- someone you will meet, given the right circumstances.

About the Army, I learned that it can be a hard -- and hardening -- environment, but by and large the people in it are just people. They are not uniquely tough by nature, though they become so through training and preparation and habit. And their toughness is leavened with a deep sense of common humanity -- a basic unquestioning take-them-as-they-are compassion rarely found in the "softer" cosmopolitan world of ambition and sophistication from which I hail.

The privileged of prior generations were more likely to consider military service a natural expression of their own privileged relationship to the state -- the least, you might say, that they could do in return for the opportunities the nation had granted them. Consider a young John F. Kennedy working connections to obtain a commission that his health would have denied him otherwise. How many from Harvard pull such strings today? To chalk this up to the ethos of a "simpler," less questioning time would be easy, but it would also be facile.

All else being equal, staffing the armed services with citizens from the broadest range of backgrounds is still the best course. Further, we are in a time, and a conflict, in which the unique demands placed upon the military make the need for innovative leadership acute. (My artillery battalion, for example, conducts foot patrols in Ramadi, performs base security, trains Iraqi police recruits, mans outposts in the desert, forms neighborhood councils, oversees reconstruction projects and . . . oh yes, shoots artillery.) How better to achieve this than to cast a wide net?

Am I simply recruiting among the elite, then? No. But I would regret knowing that some who might have served did not do so because of the same lazy prejudice that I once held -- the barely conscious assumption that some Americans are at once too good, and not good enough, for the military.

john_renehan@hotmail.com

John Renehan is assigned to the 1st Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division, and is currently stationed at Camp Ramadi, Iraq.