Marvin J. Wolf
At 17 I finished high school and enlisted in the U.S. Army. My basic training platoon was a cross-section of America: two cousins from a little-known West Virginia holler; a trio of Alaskan Inuits, whom everyone in the unit called Eskimos; two Arizona Indians, one a Hopi and the other a Navajo; several African Americans, mostly from Southern California cities; an assortment of Latinos, primarily Mexican-Americans from the farming communities of the San Joaquin Valley; a majority of whites of various ethnicities: German, Polish, Scots-Irish; a not-quite-ordained LDS minister waiting for his paperwork and one Jew: me.
At first, we were a collection of cliques, coming together into unofficial groups of similar backgrounds. But to our leaders in the U.S. Army, we were all equal and were treated as such. As trainees, we were required to work together night and day through challenging circumstances toward the common goal of learning to be good soldiers.
Over my 13 years in uniform, including eight as a commissioned officer, I worked with or for almost every sort of American. We are, after all, a nation of immigrants and their descendants. At no time did anyone I served with care who voted Democrat, Republican or Independent. Our ethnicities, politics, and religion were forgotten by the overriding necessity of joining together to accomplish difficult and sometimes dangerous missions. This was especially true of my service in Vietnam — in combat, color ceased to exist. We were all Americans, fighting a common foe and helping each other to go home alive and in one piece.
Since 1973, the armed services have been entirely volunteers, and partly as a result of America’s political, ethnic and racial divisions, the several services now struggle to meet their annual recruiting goals.
At age 16, my father, of blessed memory, joined the Depression-era organization called the WPA — the Works Progress Administration. He was an orphan and in his teen years became unruly and aggressive. Helping to re-seed millions of acres of forest, build walls and bridges in National Forests, all the while learning to weld, work with sheet metal and drive a truck, gave him important skills for a foothold in post-WWII America, meanwhile teaching him how to get along with people from every walk of life.
The skills he learned with the WPA were essential to his first profession as a sheet metal worker and later to a career as one of America’s first recycling engineers,
I believe that obligatory national service in the armed forces or other fields — teaching, medical, public works construction, child care, etc. — would go a long way toward healing our divisions. In addition to maintaining our national military strength, there is much to be done to make America stronger, more unified and better educated.
Rural and inner-city schools could become far more successful with various kinds of helpers assisting teachers. Hospitals would be more efficient with nursing assistants and apprentice maintenance workers. Public work projects such as roads, bridges, airports and schools could be repaired or built for far less public funds. Child care would become more available at a lower cost with public service caregivers. Such programs would also turn out a legion of trained men and women with work experience to take their place in the workforce.
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A year or two of obligatory national service would go a long way in instilling both national pride and replacing factionalism with a spirit of cooperativeness. It would also turn out a legion of trained workers to take their places in the national workforce.
And most of all, working for a year or two with Americans of different races, ethnicities, religion and political views would serve to help heal our divisions. If two months of basic military training can create a unified Army platoon, think of what a year or two of obligatory national service could do.
The author of many books, Marvin J. Wolf is a member of the Writers Guild of America and the American Society of Journalists and Authors. He lives in Asheville.