AWOL: The Unexcused Absence of America's Upper Classes from Military Service-and How It Hurts Our Country

by Kathy Roth-Douquet, Frank Schaeffer

Overview

“This impassioned, convincing manifesto” from two policy experts with military family “calls for class integration of the military” (Publishers Weekly).

Military service was once a natural part of good citizenship, with Americans of all classes serving during wartime. Not anymore. As Kathy Roth-Douquet and Frank Schaeffer assert in this groundbreaking work, there is a growing disconnect between the cultural “elite” who guide military policy and the rank-and-file servicemembers charged with carrying it out.

While the privileged lack the benefits and perspective gained through military service, those who do serve feel under-supported and morally distanced from the rest of the country. And when only a handful of congressmembers have military experience, it can become too easy—or too hard—to send soldiers into combat.

Based on extensive research and firsthand accounts of service, AWOL is both informative and personal. As the father of a former Marine, Frank Schaeffer knows the anguish and pride of seeing a child deployed into combat. Kathy Roth-Douquet, wife of a career officer, knows struggle of keeping a family together with a husband at war, as well as the satisfaction of raising children in an ethic of service. Intimately acquainted with the glory and the sacrifice of military service, these co-authors offer the urgent wake-up call that America needs.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780061874666
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	01/17/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	815,118
File size:	554 KB

About the Author

Kathy Roth-Douquet is a veteran of the Clinton White House and every presidential campaign of the past twenty-four years and is the author with Frank Schaeffer of AWOL. She lives with her marine officer husband on Parris Island, South Carolina.

Frank Schaeffer is a New York Times bestselling author whose books include Keeping Faith (as seen on Oprah) and Crazy for God. He lives in Salisbury, Massachusetts.

Read an Excerpt

AWOL

The Unexcused Absence of America's Upper Classes from Military Service -- and How It Hurts Our Country

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By Kathy Roth-Douquet

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Copyright © 2006 Kathy Roth-Douquet
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0060888598

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Chapter One

It's Personal

The evidence is that those who serve and those who don't are looking at each other with growing uneasiness and across a widening philosophical, ideological, political, and even religious social gap.

Frank and Kathy

We were the last people who expected to be drafted into the military. People like us -- Frank, a novelist, Kathy, a lawyer with political connections -- never would be, we thought. Yet here we are. The last draft in America is a draft of the heart -- it takes women and men, it takes parents and grandparents. Someone we love is in the military, and before we know it -- sometimes against our will -- we, too, are part of the military family.

Of course, like the professional military, this "family draft" doesn't take many people from our demographic. The extended military family, like those in uniform, increasingly includes fewer and fewer of those who are particularly influential in affecting the opinions and policies of the country.

It was not always this way.

During World War I, World War II, and the Cold War, we had conscription,and many people from the influential classes served, either through the draft or by volunteering. About half of the graduating classes of Princeton and Harvard entered the service for a tour of duty in the fifties. Today, less than one percent do.

The change has everything to do with the Vietnam War. After the Vietnam War, America made what turned out to be an almost universally popular decision to create an all-volunteer military. For the first time in history, the country had a large military, wars, and no conscription. It seemed like a perfect solution to our problems of domestic disputes over the use of our military and the blowback from the draft. If you wanted to join, fine. If you didn't, that was fine too. Military service became just another item on an ever-lengthening list of personal choices. And how connected you wanted to be to your country's foreign policy entanglements was optional. If you wanted to live as if the world ended at our borders, that was fine, and if you wanted to take personal responsibility for your citizenship, that was fine too. To use the vernacular of the time you could "do your own thing."

As a result, it has become increasingly comfortable for most young adults of all social classes to avoid even thinking about military service. This nonservice is a reflection of the idea that service is just a choice in the same category as deciding which college to go to, what car to buy, where to go to church or not to go. Those with "better options" simply choose not to join the military.

We believe that the increasing gap between the most privileged classes and those in the military raises three major problems: It hurts our country, particularly our ability to make the best policy possible. It undermines the strength of our civilian leadership, which no longer has significant numbers of members who have the experience and wisdom that comes from national service. Finally, it makes our military less strong in the long run.

And then there is also an intangible, something as real as it is hard to prove: the sense of lost community and the threat to democracy that results when a society accepts a situation that is inherently unfair. When those who benefit most from living in a country contribute the least to its defense and those who benefit less are asked to pay the ultimate price, something happens to the soul of that country. It may be legal, but is it right?

Kathy

I've had a lucky life, even a glamorous one at times, so that in today's culture nothing would predict I would be at home on a military base. I was raised in an upper-middle-class neighborhood where a high-achieving Jewish child could grow up to be anything he or she wanted to be: a doctor or a lawyer. Shaker Heights, Ohio, as I knew it, was an earnest place, proud of its SAT scores and the racial and religious diversity of its professional families. The civics lessons that loomed largest in the minds of the class of '82 were the Holocaust, the civil rights movement, Vietnam, and Watergate. The moral of these seemed to be that one should distrust authority figures and find and act on an internal moral compass -- not a lesson that leads people to serve their country through a tour of military duty.

After high school I entered the little utopia that is Bryn Mawr College. There I discovered feminism and parlayed my tiny high school leadership experience (running a previously defunct literary magazine) into starting a women's group. We did things like organize issues seminars and rallies to support women's health clinics. At various times in my "activist career" I was arrested for protesting nuclear weapons at an Army base and for civil disobedience at the South African embassy. These were all such scripted and risk-free affairs that my mother, a schoolteacher in town to visit me at the time of the demonstration, decided to join me in the paddy wagon after singing "We Shall Overcome" illegally on the South African embassy's lawn.

I also launched what turned out to be my political career. I met members of Walter Mondale's staff when Mondale was running for president in 1984 and made enough of a nuisance of myself that they let me come out on the road with them. I did advance work for Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro, and have done advance work for every presidential election since then, ending only in 2004.

Advance work led me to fall in love with my country -- you get to travel to big cities, small towns, rural farms, inner cities. You put together events to showcase local initiatives that your candidate likes or to spotlight individual people's situations -- family farms, AIDS support groups, after-school programs. It really is a big, beautiful country, filled with many sincere people trying to make things better.

Continues...

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Excerpted from AWOL by Kathy Roth-Douquet Copyright © 2006 by Kathy Roth-Douquet. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Foreword   General Tommy Franks     XV
Introduction     1
It's Personal     9
"Not for People Like Us": Or How the Privileged See the Military     29
The Military's View of What It Does     67
The Emergence of the Gap     97
The Rights of the Individual Trump the Virtues of the Citizen     127
How the Gap Affects the Military and the Mission     141
Why Do We Even Need the Military?     175
What If We Don't Fix the Problem?     193
Solutions     219
Afterword     239
Acknowledgments     247

What People are Saying About This

"As America looks for balance in a dangerous and complex world, AWOL is a great place to start."
---General Tommy Franks (retired)

"AWOL drives home...the need to address the evaporating sense of duty and service to our nation."
---General Les Palm (retired), President and CEO Marine Corps Association

Editorial Reviews

In their compelling and inspiring cri de coeur , Kathy Roth-Douquet and Frank Schaeffer trace this societal shift, arguing that the schism between America's military and its opinion-making class threatens the nation's welfare. Both authors qualify as opinion-makers, and both have personal connections to the military. Roth-Douquet, a self-described "former agitator, feminist, Ivy Leaguer, Clintonite," is married to a Marine pilot. Schaeffer, a novelist, painter and film-maker, saw his plans for his children -- "top college, good grades, smart jobs, wife/husband, Subaru/Volvo, membership at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, IRA started early, kids, college fund" -- derail when his youngest son enlisted in the Marines after high school.
— The Washington Post

Nathaniel Fick

In this impassioned, convincing manifesto, Schaffer (Keeping Faith) and Roth-Douquet, a former Clinton White House and Department of Defense staffer, call for class integration of the military. Their arguments are personal: Roth-Douquet is a military wife and Schaffer's son is a marine, and the authors fall within the demographic they critique. Alternately narrating, they relate their experiences with the military and detail the liabilities of the present all-volunteer "corporate" force: the hindered policy-making ability of a civilian leadership without significant ties to the military, the weakening of the armed forces themselves, and "the sense of lost community and the threat to democracy that results when a society accepts a situation that is inherently unfair." While Schaffer proposes a lottery draft and Roth-Douquet suggests the military "convince" people to sign up, they both call for all young people to submit to some form of national civilian service. Though the authors occasionally exaggerate ("we are fast approaching the day when no one in Congress and no president will have served or have any children serving"), they make a clarion call in the face of increasingly controversial foreign policy and a military stretched thin. (May 9) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

AWOL drives home...the need to address the evaporating sense of duty and service to our nation.

General Les Palm (retired)

As America looks for balance in a dangerous and complex world, AWOL is a great place to start.

General Tommy Franks (retired)

AWOL is unique in its scope, intent and implications. [It] is clearly written and meticulously researched.

Leatherneck Magazine

As America looks for balance in a dangerous and complex world, AWOL is a great place to start.” — General Tommy Franks (retired)

“AWOL drives home...the need to address the evaporating sense of duty and service to our nation.” — General Les Palm (retired), President and CEO Marine Corps Association

“AWOL is unique in its scope, intent and implications. [It] is clearly written and meticulously researched.” — Leatherneck Magazine

From the Publisher