Whirl

When you take an oath, you are taking the long view. Committing yourself to a standard of truthfulness or allegiance for a period of time—often years.

We don’t do that very often. Our lives tend to revolve around short term promises and objectives.

Seriously, how many times in your life have you taken an oath? I don’t mean the tiny little promises you make as part of your normal day: finish the report by Friday, pick up the kids; help someone move. Those are certainly important, but how often is it that you have taken a real, no shit, honest to god oath?

Unless you are OJ Simpson’s witness-for-hire, you probably will only take such an oath a few times in your life–usually when you make a commitment to the person you love.

There are groups of people who, as a requisite to their chosen occupation, take oaths upon embarking down that path. Usually these are vows to serve or protect the rest of us. Examples include: police officers, firefighters, physicians, and the primary subject of this essay, those who enter military service.

Here is the enlisted oath of office for the U.S. military:

“I … do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice.”

This is a no shit serious oath. The men and women who take this vow are committing themselves to go wherever ordered; to voluntarily relinquish many of the freedoms we enjoy; to fight and possibly, to die.

What are they dying for?

In the oath, they have pledged their lives to the defense of a concept, an ideal, a noble experiment. That is what our constitution embodies—a noble experiment in humanity.

Here’s another, no shit, honest to god, oath:

“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

So, the president’s oath is almost identical to the lowly enlisted person serving under him. With a few exceptions:

First, the president gets a mulligan. It comes with the phrase: “…to the best of my ability…“. I call this the idiot’s clause. As in: “If I screw this job up and rob you of your freedom and security, that’s ok, cause I did the best I could”.

If the enlisted person is a moron, he or she may end up in Leavenworth. On the other hand, our president will likely get a $20 Million dollar book deal (about $5,000 per word, or $4,750 per syllable for W), and also spend few lucrative years on the evangelical speech circuit. Nice gig.

Back to the enlisted oath: “…I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me…”

I call this the “do whatever the moron tells you” clause.

It’s necessary. You can’t have a debate on tactics at the bottom of a foxhole. Someone has to be in charge. Perhaps the founding fathers never anticipated we would elect a total dunce to be commander in chief. They probably marked inbreeding off the list when they ditched the royal family.

Look, I know that oaths are mostly symbolic—with little binding force of law. Like a flag, the oaths of office serve to ceremoniously reinforce the central notion of our republic: we are devoted to a concept of key individual rights and a government which, based on its’ structure, is limited from infringing upon those rights.

But the constitution is only as strong as the interpretation of those who execute it. When the document was ratified, only white men could vote and thousands of people were held in slavery. Yet many of the very men who wrote and signed the document interpreted those conditions to be just hunky-dory. Few American citizens would agree with them today, and many feel we have much further to go.

This is the power of the concept – our collective understanding of freedom has grown. Even though many of the men who conceived the idea and put it into action were unable to see where we were headed.

And where are we headed now?

We send brave men and women overseas to die. In the process we engender hate that will span generations and place our children in greater mortal danger than ever before. More importantly, we turn a blind eye to our own hypocrisy oversees and allow our fear to degrade our freedom at home.

I was privileged to serve my country as an enlisted serviceman and I took that duty seriously. Were I were under that oath today, I would obey my orders and go were told to go. The fact is, unless told to storm the U.S. Capital, the average U.S. serviceman will not have the luxury of deciding the constitutional implications of the order he or she has just received. That is up to the President to determine. By invading Iraq, our president has betrayed the men and women he leads by sending them on a mission which degrades the very concept he and they are sworn to uphold—freedom. He has broken his oath and tarnished theirs.

© 2007 by Rodney Gleghorn. All rights reserved.