Soldiers vs. Stockbrokers...

I have no love for the military as an institution, but one cannot ignore the titanic injustice suffered by soldiers and their families. This is a gross unfairness that has existed since states arose millennia ago and began making war on each other.

There is no one, no one who pays a higher price than soldiers. There is no profession that has a greater potential sacrifice. How many other careers are there in existence where death is a potentiality of the job that must be accepted? In death’s place sometimes comes the kind of privation, suffering and ennui that is suffered in no other employment in the world. Shattered bodies, long-lasting and occasionally permanent psychological illnesses, these are just some of the prices soldiers are routinely expected to pay. They can literally be ordered to go die, all that’s required is any handy plausible excuse for the sacrifice from their commanding officer.

So why are they paid so little, why are their bereaved families left with scraps? Even the most progressive government support programs are little more than patchwork welfare. Some might argue that death or severe physical injury is something that’s understood when you enter into the army, but so what? That’s hardly the point. The fact is that whether the kids understand or not, if you’re going to employ people to sacrifice their bodies and sometimes their lives for your policy, how can you not pay them or their families enormous amounts? Why does a stockbroker or a pharmacist make so much more than a soldier? Is their service more valuable? Not according to the glory-trumpeting propaganda used to recruit the soldiers and support the politicians’ use of them. But that’s where the political and governmental support for the soldiers ends. Once you’re in uniform, you’re cannon fodder.

Imagine a parts factory where a guy slips and falls into the machinery and gets ground into hamburger…the company might pay a large or perhaps massive sum to his family, even though it was an accident. It shouldn’t have happened. Now, the Army is a job where death is, in fact, part of the job. There’s no way around that. So, this is some kind of reasoning for paying less?? A soldier’s death in combat can hardly be characterized as an accident. I mean, otherwise why do they give them guns? You don’t send a bunch of guys with guns up against a bunch of other guys with guns and then say ‘Oh my, what terrible accidents! How did that happen?’ when the corpses start rolling in. Yet there is nothing like the same amount of restitution for the bereaved. There should be, but there is not. Probably one month’s car payment and rent, maybe…and a little felt box with his picture, a meaningless posthumous medal and a rubber-stamp signature from the President.

Here’s another good reason to pay soldiers top dollar: There’d be a lot fewer wars, if any. The Army would be extremely difficult to transform into a juggernaut abused by power-hungry politicians. The military would have to be much more careful with its soldiers, because of the tremendous extra investment that had been made in them. On the bright side, they certainly wouldn’t have as much of a recruitment problem, they’d be turning most of the applicants away! Hell, if they were paying $85,000 a year to be in the military I might even sign up for a spell! Go kill me some folks. See foreign lands. Burn some stuff.

But when all the strategy and statistics and political arguments are pushed aside, the glaring injustice still squats there for any who care to look at it: How can you ask people to enlist and perform in such a potentially disastrous and deadly profession, and not place them among the highest-paid professionals in your economy? When a young man is blown to pieces in the desert, supposedly making the “ultimate sacrifice to protect and honor his country”, how can you not set up his family essentially for life? Their father and husband just DIED willingly for your policies! How is that not worthy of a massive paycheck? You can’t put a price on human life, but you can at least repay the family for the loss they've endured as fairly as can be managed. The sort of amount that makes the government think twice about sending people off to die for no good reason.