YOU CAN STICK YOUR HAT, GENERAL
For some reason, if you’re going to defend your country, you have to wear a hat.
It’s a big deal. Almost as important as marching in step and being able to do push-ups.
If you’re in the Army, and you go outside without a hat, something really bad will happen. Probably the Canadians will come across the border and burn down your grandmother’s house and make you speak French or something.
Or an angry man named Sergeant will yell at you.
But whatever it is, it’ll be bad.
That’s what I learned in the Army.
And must be nothing’s changed.
Because the chief of staff of the Army – the way up muckity muck – has figured out how to make America even safer, and it involves hats.
Which is why I never made it past corporal. Because I figured if we were going to do something to improve the defense of the country it would probably have to involve guns and tanks and bombs and stuff.
But I was wrong.
It’s hats.
See, to improve morale in the Army – where people are bailing out like rats off a burning ship – they’ve decided to change the hats.
This is not a joke. I’m not kidding.
See, when a soldier wears the Class A or Class B uniform – the one that looks like a funny green suit, or the one that looks like a sports shirt and some slacks – right now he has to wear something the regulations call a “garrison cap.”
It’s hard to describe, and I can’t tell you what soldiers call it, but there’s a picture of one on page 426 of “Gray’s Anatomy.”
The one without the fallopian tubes.
Anyway, you put this thing on your head and it sits up there several inches like one of those ridges on the back of dinosaurs. Very odd. The Marines have a cool one, the guys in World War II had cool ones – unfortunately, the modern soldier has a big envelope on his head.
But they’re going to change that.
The garrison cap is gone, replaced by a black beret.
Now, when I heard this, it kind of rung a bell.
Because I had heard something about a black beret out of this administration one time before. I couldn’t place it exactly, right at first, so I thought about it.
And then it hit me.
Harmonica Lewinsky.
Yeah, special counsel to the president Harmonica Lewinsky always wore a black beret. See, in the old days, women would wear a yellow ribbon in their hair to remind them of their soldier who was far, far away.
(Any of you who know the song, feel free to join in.)
Anyway, from now on, the soldiers will wear a black beret to remind them of their (soon to be former) command-in-chief’s special friend. Maybe they will call the new beret a “Lewinsky.” Which, if you think about it, is not so different from what they call the garrison cap now.
Now, you might think that soldiers – who routinely have their careers ruined by engaging in shenanigans like those which involved Harmonica Lewinsky – would be upset by this Clinton-era memento. But they’re not. Mostly they count themselves lucky they don’t have to do anything with a cigar.
(OK, I think we’ve milked the Harmonica thing enough for one column.)
Of course, she wasn’t the only one to wear a black beret. There was one more person with a special place in the heart of this administration who was famous for such headwear.
Che Guevara.
(If you don’t know who that was, it’s because you’re young.)
Surprisingly, the bigwigs at the Pentagon don’t point to the resemblance to a sleaze intern or a Communist guerilla as the morale-building aspect of the black beret.
They point to the Army Rangers.
The Rangers eat nails and crap fire, or something like that. They’re rough, tough, smart, deadly. They are arguably the most elite of America’s armed forces.
And they wear black berets.
It is a sign of great honor and accomplishment.
Which is why the brass wants to pass the berets out to everybody. If the Rangers walk tall with the berets, they figure, so will everybody else.
Which is dumb.
Way past dumb, really. This is in the neighborhood of stupid.
Because it’s not the look of the Rangers’ black beret which give it its cachet, it’s the great feats which one must achieve to wear it. And if you remove the feats, you’re left with a doofy French hat.
The Ranger beret builds morale because of what it stands for. If you give it to everybody in the Army, it ends up standing for nothing – not even to the Rangers who’ve earned it – and you’ve done little more than trade one ugly hat for another.
Which is an example of what’s wrong with military thinking under this administration. It’s one more example of ignoring reality to fiddle with window dressing.
The fact is that the Army is wildly under strength and ill-prepared. It is strewn over a variety of peace-keeping postings which disrupt soldier families and break soldier pride.
It is inadequately financed, housed, paid and equipped. Soldiers are asked to do too much with too little and for too little. They are treated like dogs.
When the vice president says this is the strongest and best-prepared military in the history of the world he is lying.
Repeating for emphasis: Lying.
Morale is down in the Army because soldiers are not stupid.
They know they’re getting hosed. They know where they stand with this administration. They know Washington doesn’t give a damn about them.
And some stupid hat isn’t going to change that.
- by Bob Lonsberry © 2000
