CNN reported last week that suicide attempts among American military personnel are way up. In fact, they reported that the number reached over two thousand last year. Also, over the last few weeks the NY Times has been running a series of articles about the high level of violent criminal activity among returning GIs, attributing almost a thousand ‘killings’ to the troubled souls. No doubt, it’s a tough time to be an American soldier.

Of course, re-acclimating trained killers into civil society is a problem that’s plagued civilization as long as humans have been cultivating crops – its cultural portrayal can be logged in a trajectory that runs from Odysseus to Rambo.

Reflecting on the current trends, however, I am reminded of another troubling cultural icon: Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse Now. In one of his more memorable monologues (not that they’re not all memorable), he explains that American soldiers don’t have the wherewithal to go the distance and commit the kind of atrocities that are necessary for winning in the war in Vietnam. The problem as he sees it is that the Pentagon is too concerned with instilling a sense of morality within the soldiers that has no place on the battlefield.

To further make his point, Kurtz explains the ludicrousness of the brass forbidding GIs from painting cusswords or other such vulgarities on munitions targeted at the enemy. For example, if John McCain were to write one it might say, “I’ll never stop referring to you motherfuckers as gooks!” But I digress. The point that Kurtz conveys is that war (especially in its modern form) is the greatest form of vulgarity possible, and that it’s ridiculous for the Pentagon to seek its sterilization.

Though Kurtz’s stance is extreme, I find it kind of compelling. In fact, the postmodern ‘morality’ of the American military fascinates me to no end. For example, last year the LA Times reported that more Afghani civilians were killed by American bombs than by the Taliban. When pressed on the issue, the official American military response was that the statistic doesn’t shed a realistic light on the situation because Americans don’t intentionally target civilians. Ta da! Hands clean!

Without going too far off on a tangent, this position – in my humble opinion – encapsulates one of the major problems of the general American understanding of our role in the world. We mistakenly believe that as long as our intentions are ‘moral’ the rest of the world will forgive us when we do things like shoot down commercial airliners, bomb aspirin factories, or launch missiles aimed at the Chinese embassy. Oops – it’s all good, right?

Back to Kurtz and his criticism of American military SOPs: in the aforementioned passage, he is also referring to the confusion and demoralization caused by fighting an insurgency war. Of course, guerrilla (or asymmetrical) warfare has been around for a long time. It’s a natural, strategic response to armies that can’t be defeated on traditional battlefields (symmetrically), and for better of worse, one of the tools of the asymmetrical warrior is terrorism.

An important question remains, however: whether or not terrorism is a legitimate form of warfare. But isn’t the question moot if terrorists don’t care whether or not their enemy considers them to be legitimate political or military actors, as long as they believe themselves to be?

Okay, you’ve been really patient in continuing to read this post, so here’s the payoff: since the American military is singular in power (for example, the U.S. navy is five times larger than the rest of the world’s combined) it will perpetually be dogged by asymmetrical warriors including terrorists. This is simply because none of our enemies will ever be strong enough to face our military in head-to-head contests.

So here’s my recommendation: in order to tilt the scale back in favor of American forces, they create their own terrorism corps. Hell, we already have two thousand soldiers who want to commit suicide, why not hand out explosive vests and point them in the direction of the enemy? Wouldn’t that be a real ‘shock and awe’ tactic? Think about it, none of our enemies would ever expect us to do something so ‘immoral’ – so un-American.

But would it really be so vastly un-American? We honor our ‘fallen’ as those who’ve made the ‘greatest sacrifice’ for our country. Shouldn’t we want more people to be honored? Isn’t honor one of the most important threads of the American fabric? Moreover, we send soldiers off to war knowing that some of them will die, lose a limb, or suffer from debilitating emotional problems. If we have no ‘moral’ problem with this, it seems to me that my policy might have the same result, but be a little less convoluted.

Look people; the bottom line is that if we are going to keep messing up the heads of our youth by turning them into killers, we should at least capitalize on the situation. Why not turn a social problem into a strategic military advantage. Isn’t this the American way? To take lemons and make lemonade, I mean.

Perhaps you think this proposal would be hard to sell to the American public, but just image what a commercial for the new Freedomwarrior Corps might look like:

(Somber bugle music fades-in) The sun is rising (or is it setting) over a desert ridge – the landscape is unmistakably American (but may be shot in Australia if they give the film company a better deal on the location).

The close-ups of American faces fade-in and are super imposed over the landscape, one after another. The voiceover begins (the voice is deep and racially ambiguous):

“America has always been the land of the free (long pause) and the home of the brave.”

“Americans have always valued honor, valor (long pause) and sacrifice.”

“If you value your freedom, your family (long pause) and your country, you may be ready to make the ultimate sacrifice for freedom.”

The logo and recruiting phone number for the Freedomwarrior Crops appears across the bottom of the screen.

Voiceover concludes: “honor, valor, sacrifice, freedom.”

Dang! Sign me up.

We can win these little wars against all the disaffected brown people in the world, but we need to have that American, can-do attitude about it. We just need to spin a new yarn of ‘morality.’ We’ve certainly done that before. Remember, before our politicians started comparing Saddam to Hitler, he used to be one of our best buds; in fact, we gave him billions of dollars in military aid – not to mention tactical help in wiping out those pesky Kurds who were rising-up against him. I guess we just didn’t figure he’d go as far as to use the chemical weapons we funded to kill so many of them. Again, oops!

Please file under satire.