US soldiers recapture a peak in public esteem
Since Sept. 11, the firefighters and police officers of New York have been lauded by symphonies and sports teams, mayors and movie stars, as lights of courage on one of the most harrowing days in American history.
Now, as the war scenes shift overseas, it is the men and women of America's armed forces that are increasingly seen as modern-day heroes.
The script is not unfamiliar. In times of war, the nation has almost always rallied around its troops. But on this Veterans Day weekend, the immense outpouring of praise for US soldiers points to a unique confluence of cultural change and combat objectives that have led Americans to embrace the military as strongly as ever before.
The persistence of good feelings will depend on a variety of factors, ranging from operational success to the terrorists' response. But most experts agree that, in the years since Vietnam, Americans' feelings toward their military - and their troops in particular - have gradually but fundamentally softened, making a return to the spite that characterized the Vietnam era almost unthinkable.
In fact, this war comes at a time when baby boomers and Generation Xers have been turning to books about those who fought in "The Greatest Generation" as well as films like "Saving Private Ryan" for glimpses of greatness and sacrifice. Now, with the historic resonances of an attack on our soil by forces with evil intent, Americans once again see soldiers as guardians of a just cause.
"Maybe from time to time we need heroes ... and often they're from the military," says Clifton Bryant, a military sociologist at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg.
In the past few months, requests for enrollment on Defense Department websites and by e-mail and telephone have doubled. Some recruiting offices from Nashville, Tenn., to San Francisco have also reported an improvement in the number and quality of people signing up for duty.
"What we're tending to get more of ... now are people who have gone to college and already have a career, but they also want to serve," says Sgt. First Class Bajun Mavalwalla of the California Army National Guard here. "It's an attractive notion for a lot of folks here: Even if the money is not here, they're doing an important job that takes a lot of brains."
Yet perhaps the most obvious sign of support for US troops - besides storefront cut-out flags and lapel pins - is opinion polls. A Gallup Poll conducted early this month shows 86 percent support for military action - a number that has remained virtually unchanged for two months.
To Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, a distinguished veteran of the Vietnam War who later led an antiwar movement, the reason for that support is obvious. "This is a war we have to fight," he says. "[It's] about issues that touch us deeply."
Unlike any other war in a half century, this war is being fought with the knowledge that the enemy can effectively attack the American people. That makes US soldiers more than an expeditionary force seeking an abstract goal halfway around the world. They are directly fighting to shield their nation from harm.
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