Not long ago, I asked John what he was doing at the precise moment when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. "Truth be told, my boy," John said, "I wa… - Jack H. Jacobs

When you have nearly completed the ROTC program and are approaching graduation and commissioning, you request a specific branch assignment. There are many occupational specialties whose smooth integration into the whole of the Army produces the well-oiled military machine we know well. Soldiers and contractors have to get paid, so there is a Finance Corps. The Army is a large bureaucracy, and there is plenty of paperwork to do, and so some officers join the Adjutant General's Corps. The Army can't fight without supplies, and so the Quartermaster Corps is critical to combat success. Indeed, among many of my brethren in ROTC, the large majority of them selected noncombat branches, almost certainly because for some of them these administrative specialties afforded far less chance of becoming a casualty. Let's face it: some people talk a convincing game, but they shrink at the point of decision, when, in the harsh glare of sunlight, the consequences of their selected course of action appear overloaded with personal danger. This does not make them bad people, but it is instructive of the axiom that you should believe half of what you read and none of what you hear.

Today, a small number of brave and dedicated young Americans have answered the call, and whatever else one can argue about the merits of recent uses of military power, it is impossible not to revere the patriotism of these volunteers. More Americans were killed in New York on September 11, 2001, than were lost on December 7, 1941, and yet the response was a small fraction of that after Pearl Harbor. What is interesting, and more than a little distressing, is that the number of people wearing the uniform is only a bit more than 1.5 million on active duty, and that this represents only one-half of one percent of Americans.
One may reasonably inquire why, if the war in Iraq is so unpopular, there aren't riots in the streets as there were during the war in Vietnam. One answer is that our service members are all volunteers, and no one else has to serve. This country has been going about its business almost as if nothing catastrophic has occurred, while the sacrifice has come from only a few citizens. Those of us who don't serve have thus outsourced our defense to those who do. One could argue persuasively that if all citizens had a stake in the protection of our freedom, the arbitrary use of the military instrument of power, as a first resort, would be very difficult to engineer.

Today, the oldest living recipient of the Medal of Honor is John Finn, who was decorated for action on Pearl Harbor Day. Born in 1909, John joined the Navy in 1926, and, loquacious as we all tend to be when we findally grasp that we have too many stories and not enough time, he will transfix anyone who cares to listen with tales of what it was like to grow up before the First World War and to ply the Yangtze River as a young sailor aboard an American gunboat.
In 1941, he was stationed in Kaneohe Bay, with a squadron of Navy patrol planes. Rudely rousted from bed by the cacaphony of the Japanese bombs destroying the fleet anchored at Pearl Harbor, John raced from his quarters, sped to the hangars that housed his aircraft, and manned a .50-caliber machine gun mounted on an exposed section of a parking ramp. For the next two hours, Finn, in the open and suffering from more than twenty shrapnel wounds in his back and stomach, blasted at the attacking enemy planes, hitting many of them and not relinquishing his post until the attack was over. Even when we were young, those of us who were raised on stirring John Wayne war movies assumed there was more than a little hyperbole and cinematic license in them. But for forty years I have known a man whose real-life exploits render the movies limp, pallid, and ineffectual in contrast. Art can often approximate life, but it has a hard time doing it justice.