The What Generation?

Harper's has published (August 2014) a provocative article by William Pfaff in which he argues against the militarization of America. Most of us join him in opposing militarization. But he makes a peculiar comparison that contrasts the current army with what he sees as the more honorable drafted generation that won World  War II. In Pfaff's vision the old army had a mandate "to treat prisoners honorably and act under Army regulations and Geneva rules at all times." The current army sends drones to kill civilians by the handful. My trouble with this is that I can't get out of my mind the civilians on the ground during our firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo, not to mention Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I'm trying to recall the Geneva Conventions, which I read while in the army. I suspect that nuking  60,000 civilians at once might have been a step too far.

Pfaff notes that when Gen. David Petraeus retired in 2011, he wore more than 50 ribbons and badges to the ceremony, including three that celebrated the fact that he had parachuted from an airplane. And so he put Audie Murphy to shame. 

(Wickipedia says that the 19-year-old Murphy received the Medal of Honor after single-handedly holding off an entire company of Germans for an hour at the Colmar Pocket in France in January 1945, then leading a successful counterattack while wounded and out of ammunition.)