When my cellphone buzzed in a Brooklyn bar and the voice at the other end told me a Marine I'd served with had been shot in Afghanistan, I looked around, searching for someone to talk to. The band setting up, the tattooed bartenders, any of them could have plausibly been a sympathetic ear. I've generally found civilians quite interested once you take the effort. And yet … I couldn't. It would, I suspected, be treated as a personal tragedy, as though I were delivering the news that a family member had been diagnosed with cancer. Not as something that implicated them.
Today, we're mobilized for war in a manner perfectly designed to ensure we don't think about it too much. Since we have an all-volunteer force, participation in war is a matter of choice, not a requirement of citizenship, and those in the military represent only a tiny fraction of the country — what historian Andrew Bacevich calls “the 1 percent army.” So the average civilian's chance of knowing any active member of the service is correspondingly small.
Moreover, we're expanding those aspects of warfighting that fly under
