“And I will give children to be their princes, and babes to rule over them. And the people shall be oppressed, every one by one another, and every one by his neighbor: and the child shall behave himself proudly against the ancient, and the base against the honorable.” Isaiah 3:4-5

On Sunday May 29th our Pastor asked everyone who had ever served to stand up in the Church. (Most churches don’t differentiate between Memorial Day, for the War Dead and Veteran’s Day for the living.) Out of a sanctuary that holds 1,000 persons maybe a dozen people stood up. How different it is today than it was in the early 70’s; when I was a child. 46 years ago we had vets from WWI, the “Central American Wars,” WWII, Korea and Vietnam. When asked to stand, almost half the men in the Church stood up. This practice was by and large discontinued after the fall of Saigon, in 1975 and when it was reinstituted after 911, it was a shadow of its former self.

In my experience there are two factors that account for this difference. One has to do with quantity and the other has to do with quality.

• Quantity: we are more technologically advanced, so we can do more with less manpower. However, there are two draw backs to high tech warfare. First, when you fire a $20,000,000 missile; that is harder to replace than it would be to produce less complicated armaments. Second with fewer men, you sacrifice defense in depth and if our high tech forces were to lose, America could be crushed like a soda can.
• Quality: The corrosion of the Chaplains Corps has led the corruption of our troopers and thus our vets. I don’t know any vets younger than me who are committed Christians. When I was a Marine, there was a ‘sin city’ outside of every military base, and there was no shortage of servicemen turning themselves into piglets on their 96 hour passes. However, the Chaplains and the Gideons were preaching full on, and it did convict the conscious of some, including myself. In talking to today’s vets, they hate Christians, some have converted to Islam, some are vociferous atheists and some want to smoke marijuana to deal with PTSD. I have no respect for such attitudes.

It is small wonder that between the average “I won’t serve I will go to Canada,” mentality of a typical suburbanite teen to the anti-Christian ethic inculcated in Obama’s military that there are not many younger vets in Church these days. I’m sure there are exceptions to this phenomena and I’m not writing this as a personal attack. I believe we must, as citizens and as Christians start taking measures to organize and train to provide for our defense. Such a view is not without precedent, after all the “Committees of Safety” established prior to our American Revolution were tasked with providing firearms to the local citizenry. I would rather depend on God than depend on a group of people who hate me.