{"id":26358,"date":"2014-07-18T00:01:13","date_gmt":"2014-07-18T05:01:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=26358"},"modified":"2014-07-17T17:55:33","modified_gmt":"2014-07-17T22:55:33","slug":"qotd-the-duty-of-the-soldier","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/07\/18\/qotd-the-duty-of-the-soldier\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The duty of the soldier"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>Every young American today is subject to military service; most of them, as shown by the Mayer Report, <em>et al.<\/em>, are not prepared for it, either emotionally or by formal schooling&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>He doesn&#8217;t see why he should expose himself to death; nothing in his experience justifies it. The whole thing is wildly implausible and quite unfair &mdash; like going to sleep in your own bed and waking up in a locked ward of an insane asylum. It strikes him as rank injustice.<\/p>\n<p>And it <em>is<\/em> &#8230; [sic] the rankest sort of injustice.<\/p>\n<p>My basic purpose, then, was to promote in that prototype youth-in-a-foxhole a better understanding of the nature, purpose and function of the ridiculous and dangerous predicament he found himself in.<\/p>\n<p>There were various ancillary purposes but this was the main one &#8230; I was forced to limit my scope to: &#8220;Why in hell should a young man in good health be willing to fight and perhaps die for his country?&#8221; &#8230;<\/p>\n<p>I do not expect you to like the book, nor to speak approvingly of it, since you quite clearly do not like it and do not approve of it. But, in fairness, I ask that you, in published criticism of it, (a) read more carefully what I <em>did<\/em> say and not impute to it things which I did <em>not<\/em> say, and (b) judge it within its obvious limitations as a short first-person commercial novel and not expect it to unscrew the inscrutable with respect to every possible facet of an extremely complex philosophical question (i.e., don&#8217;t expect of me more than you require of yourself).<\/p>\n<p>Robert A. Heinlein, letter to Theodore Cogswell 1959-12-04, quoted in William H. Patterson Jr., <em>Robert A. Heinlein, In Dialogue with His Century Volume 2: The Man Who Learned Better<\/em>, 2014).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Every young American today is subject to military service; most of them, as shown by the Mayer Report, et al., are not prepared for it, either emotionally or by formal schooling&#8230; He doesn&#8217;t see why he should expose himself to death; nothing in his experience justifies it. The whole thing is wildly implausible and quite [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,7,10,28,41],"tags":[31,313,86,478],"class_list":["post-26358","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-history","category-liberty","category-media","category-quotations","tag-army","tag-conscription","tag-criticism","tag-robertheinlein"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-6R8","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26358","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26358"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26358\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26360,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26358\/revisions\/26360"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26358"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26358"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26358"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}