The Home Front Comes to Life

[Snowden]

<DIV>The Home Front Comes to Life
America supports the troops--privately, and online.

BY DANIEL HENNINGER
Friday, November 26, 2004 12:01 a.m. EST

At last for the troops fighting the war on terror, there is a home front. There are no victory gardens on this home front, no Rosie the Riveter. It's on the Web.

When this column appeared last Friday--praising the high quality of the modern American soldier and knocking the government for not rallying the home front--an official called from the Defense Department to draw attention to precisely such an effort. Better late than never.

The Defense Department has created a space on its Web site called "America Supports You." But once you click onto this link, you notice that the government itself isn't behind the creation of this home front. The DoD Web site collects in one place a partial listing of groups that have sprung to life all over the country to help the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.





During the past year, I've chastised the government for not giving the American people some official way to show support for the troops. I see now that this was a wholly misguided thought. Support for the U.S. soldiers fighting the war on terror is coming together in a traditional American way--as spontaneous, private, voluntary pro-soldier groups of like-minded citizens. This is the real American home front in the war on terror. It properly has little to do with Homeland Security, Defense, the White House or any other part of the government.

The groups have names like Adopt a Platoon, Homes for Our Troops, Soldiers Angels, Operation Mom and Operation Gratitude. The larger, traditional organizations are also there--the VFW, the American Legion and the USO. The Intrepid Museum Foundation, which runs the famous battleship site in Manhattan, has a strong program called the Fallen Heroes Fund.

Some of the Web sites have put up snapshots and letters home from the troops, bringing the group's members "closer" than what is available elsewhere to the young soldiers and the triumphs, goals and fears of daily life in this war. The USO site has photos up of a visit last week to the troops in Kuwait from actors James Gandolfini and Tony Sirico of "The Sopranos." Good goin'.

This is the first home front of self-organized citizen support we've had for men and women under arms since World War II (the troops in Vietnam had its direct opposite). This one is different. During the War, Hollywood filmmakers made movies and shorts to sustain morale during war, something disallowed now by Hollywood's deep antipathy toward this war's supporters. As to journalism, the Ernie Pyle style of war reporting is dead, replaced by something closer to World War I's "All Quiet on the Western Front." But around the Web, one can find remarkable accounts of traditional valor and pride in mission, often written by soldiers--a kind of American samizdat, the underground literature of the old Soviet Union.

It's better that home-front support for the troops should come bottom-up like this rather than from the government. Many in the U.S. are still having difficulty coming to grips with the nature of the war on terror or are discomfited by the war in Iraq. World War II was fought on many well-known fronts and without each bad day or explosion elevated to top-news status (with today's electronic world, we'd have never made it to 1944). Now we have a volunteer home front for a volunteer army.

Kept in the private sphere, separated from any formal alliance with the government, people who consider themselves part of the home front, no matter who they voted for Nov. 2, are free to act by their own lights, with their own money and for their own reasons. Finding a pro-soldiers group one wants to support doesn't require passing muster before some Madame Defarge at a blue-state dinner party. This August, Newman's Own, whose charities aren't normally associated with military matters, partnered with the Fisher House Foundation to give grants to volunteer military-support groups. The biggest recipient was Angels of Mercy, which helps soldiers badly wounded in Iraq or Afghanistan and who are now at Walter Reed Hospital.





To divert just a moment from the war, this is a good time of year to consider the nature of charity and outreach in the U.S. This country's social fabric might have been better integrated than it is today if more of the war on poverty had been left to voluntary associations, such as the Salvation Army, the bright beacon of the holiday season. Public politics is a necessity, but it's also a killer. Fought for 30 years, the war on poverty stalled, failed and forced passage of welfare reform to clean up the mess. President Bush's faith-based initiatives is an admirable recognition of voluntary power, but one wonders if it too will break under the weight of federal appropriations.

The Iraq war itself hasn't been immune. Many of its manifest problems are due to the complex bureaucracies (like the ones that were in charge of prewar intelligence) that created chokepoints rather than pathways to good decision-making in Iraq after we arrived there in March 2003.

This isn't intended as a simple rant against our fatso government, though we do damage to the targets of our good intentions if we refuse to recognize government's lumbering ineffectualities. The government can organize men and women to fight well, but it appears no longer able to organize the American people to support the fighters. Now we have this largely private support network that is reaching critical mass on the Web--without fanfare, with little official support. Sounds like a coalition of the willing. Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/dhenninger/?id=110005953

[Hoss68]

I posted about the America Supports You program last week when it was announced. http://www.trackpads.com/forum/showthread.php?t=257281

I love to read stuff like this. Thanks Marianne.

[Woodmonkey]

This is great. Thanks, Marianne.

[Snowden]

It was good to see this, wasn't it?

Yes, Hoss; I wondered about putting it with your thread, but by the time I had it copied, I just went ahead and put it here.

I am glad something positive is being done along these lines - and really, I think it's more meaningful in the long run to have it a grass roots thing.