| March 17, 2006 Editor’s Desk by Aaron Selbig, insurgent49 It’s been a deserted week here at Insurgent Headquarters. So the Marine Corps is tracking down Vietnam War deserters. Seriously. Vietnam War deserters. Gerome Conti was twenty-four years old when, feeling a growing opposition to the war in Vietnam, he fled the California Marine base where he was training. That was in 1965. Conti is now sixty-five, and was recently released from a five-month prison term for desertion. Allen Abney, a fifty-six year-old resident of Kingsgate, British Columbia, was arrested at the US border just last Thursday on desertion charges and transferred to Camp Pendelton, where he remains in custody for his crime, committed thirty-eight years ago. Abney is a retired husband and father who made the mistake of thinking the Marine Corps, after nearly four decades, had forgotten all about him. The guy in charge of this renewed effort on the part of the Corps, Chief Warrant Officer James Averhart, is proud of his duties as bounty hunter for elderly deserters. “My job is to catch deserters. And that’s what I do”, Averhart recently told the St. Petersburg Times, who were investigating the case of another sixty-five year-old retiree who had been nabbed in the sweep. So far, Averhart and his team have captured thirty-three men. In case you were wondering (and I sure was when I heard about this new level of madness), President Ford offered clemency to Vietnam War deserters in 1974. The only problem was that only 27,000 of 350,000 eligible people applied. As for the rest of them ... apparently, forty years later, they’re still fair game for a Marine Corps with a curious amount of extra time on its hands. Aren’t we supposed to be fighting terrorists? Isn’t there a war going on right now, in which our brave Marines are supposed to be “confronting the enemy abroad so we don’t have to fight them at home”? Aren’t they busy? Well, it turns out that some of those brave fighting men and women in Iraq (8,000 of them, to be precise) have already become fed up with their mission and deserted this war, and that is the primary reason for the recent crackdown on their parents’ (and sometimes grandparents’) generation ... to set an example. To be fair, we do have some sympathy for the Marine Corps here. It certainly hasn’t been easy for the military to recruit and retain soldiers lately, for some reason. Enlistment bonuses of $20,000 and higher haven’t been able to boost those sagging recruiting numbers. Extending the acceptable age of recruits, and drastically lowering the testing standards for them, hasn’t worked either. Even the hidden provision in President Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act that requires access to students’ personal information hasn’t quite done the trick. The only thing that’s saving them from not being able to have a war at all is the nifty trick of endlessly extending the tours of soldiers who are already on active duty (some of whom are on their second and even third tours in Iraq). I don’t think kids are buying that “Army of One” line anymore, either. So what’s the Marine Corps to do? Well, I have a couple of suggestions for them. First, you’re thinking too small. Why limit the dragnet to Vietnam War deserters? The pool of available Korean War and World War II deserters is probably much smaller, but still ... they’re out there. Go look for them. You know ... just to be fair. Second, why go through all the trouble of tracking down these elderly gentlemen when you’re just going to stick them in the brig for a few months then let them go? Why not throw a uniform on ‘em and ship ‘em to Iraq? Sure, they’re old ... but a warm body is a warm body, right? And lastly ... it’s really great that the Corps has a hard charger like Warrant Officer Averhart, who obviously relishes his mission and is getting good results. Maybe he should be sent to Afghanistan to look for Osama bin Laden. |
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