Within minutes of the recent shooting rampage by Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan that left 13 dead and 30 wounded at Fort Hood, Texas, the incident would take center stage in just about every major newspaper and television station in the country.
But then, as with most of the "if it bleeds, it reads" stories that make up so much of today's news, the Fort Hood shootings would gradually yield its lead-story status to other, newer and more immediate items.
And so, other than a stunned nation's unanswered question as to the circumstances surrounding this latest mass murder, nothing will have changed. The alleged killer, if he survives the wounds received during the rampage, will be charged and brought to trial. His victims will be mourned and buried. And the public, again a reluctant witness to yet another horror, will move on.
Overlooked in all of this is the paradoxical position in which our land, air, and naval service personnel find themselves today. At military installations throughout the country, members of America's armed forces are being deployed time and time again to Afghanistan and Iraq, while those of us on the home-front go about our daily business all but oblivious to the plight of those repeatedly put in harm's way in the brutal war zones of those two deeply conflicted nations.
Indeed, it was only a week earlier that millions among America's civilian population were preoccupied with which team of multi-millionaires would win Major League Baseball's World Series. Would it be the average $7 million per player New York Yankees, or their less fortunate, $3.5 million per player rivals from Philadelphia?
During the public conversation that ensued in Red Sox Nation around here over what many considered to be a matter of vital importance to the entire country, nobody thought to bring up the fact that the average yearly income for military personnel, like the Fort Hood soldiers killed by one of their own while preparing to deploy overseas, ranges anywhere from $20,000 to $45,000. Oh, yes, the government would have sweetened the deal by throwing in another $150 a month to the Fort Hood dead, had they made it to the actual war zone.
Such an enormous gap in wages tells you something about our priorities. Baseball's Alex Rodriquez is paid $20 million a year for playing a kid's game, yet the majority of America's military personnel receive only a tiny fraction of that for their labor and sacrifice on behalf of the people of this country. But the glaring wage disparity doesn't end with those who do the grunt work.
It extends all the way to the top of the military chain of command, with America's top commander in Iraq earning approximately $160,000 a year, a figure far short of the average $11 million in annual compensation received by the Fortune 500's top executives, a group whose idea of being in harm's way is restricted to the trauma experienced when served an improperly broiled pound of prime beef at one of Manhattan's most exclusive steak houses.
One can at least try to imagine the stress levels experienced by those who find themselves being repeatedly deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, or one can choose not to think of such things at all. Unfortunately, perhaps because America has for some time relied on an all-voluntary military, the latter option is apparently what most of us prefer.
Unless a family member or loved one is serving in the military, those of us on the home-front are not particularly inconvenienced by America's war in Iraq and Afghanistan, or so we have been led to believe. We are free to go to school or to work every day, shop at the mall, and tune in nightly to our favorite television shows, knowing that the people who are doing the fighting and dying in those two far-away war zones all volunteered, all knew what they were getting into, all understood and accepted the pay rates and risks involved.
Still, there is something troublesome in this strangely emotionless state of detachment, this public disconnect that we civilians display regarding the plight of our nation's service personnel now on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan. There is likely to be an enormous price to be paid for all of this, the nation's skewered system of financial compensation and other of the many inequities inherent in our current, all-volunteer military and increasingly uncertain foreign policy positions.
Many believe the impact of that steadily-mounting bill is already being felt in the nation's double-digit unemployment level, emptied federal, state, and municipal treasuries, runaway companies and corporations, environmental foot-dragging, alarming rates of drug and alcohol abuse, increasingly bitter and divisive political sectarianism, and so forth.
Some even suggest that it's at the root of such tragedies as last week's fatal shooting of 13 soldiers at a secure military installation in Texas — far from where those of us at home would prefer the killing fields to remain.
Jim Munn is a regular Times' contributor and the boys' track and field coach at Gloucester High School.
