Duty and Service
My name is Dave Thut. I am an orthopaedic surgeon. I have been a member of five UU churches over the past 20 years. I am a healer, a pacifist—and a veteran. I served 7 years of active duty in the United States Navy. Despite being active duty from 2000 through 2007, I never deployed to the Middle East, or on a ship. I never shot a real gun. And despite being an orthopaedic surgeon, I cared for very few combat wounded. I am, however, extremely proud of my military service. I emerged from the experience with a deep appreciation of those who serve—and a better understanding of my own core principles and values.
I joined the Navy for the usual reason. I started medical school in the fall of 1991. I took out loans to pay for the first year and as I started to fill out financial aid paperwork for second year, my wife and I decided there had to be a better way. I was commissioned in 1992 and then was in the inactive reserve, with no Navy interaction until I finished my residency in 2000. I spent that summer studying for boards and trying to get in shape for Officer Indoctrination School. I got to spend 6 weeks in Newport Rhode Island in the fall with about 250 other doctors, lawyers, nurses, and engineers learning to wear a uniform, salute appropriately, and how to lead a Navy department. There was some running, a lot of marching and a very little bit of hazing. It was fun.
The highlight came in the third week or so when we got to participate in some hands on training. On vast mock-up ships we learned (with limited success) to keep water from filling a torpedoed ship by filling the hole with mattresses, and how to put out fires in the many locations that fire can break out in a Navy ship.
I am not sure that I learned enough in those two days to have been terribly useful in saving a ship. But what I did learn is that in the Navy there is a rating or specialty called “damage controlman.” These enlisted sailors who were our teachers are the guys who really head to the flooded bilge to try to save the ship while any sane person is climbing to the highest deck. And people volunteer for the job. I was and still am awestruck by the notion. These folks will never have any more say in the mission of their ship than each of us has. There is no glory in what they do. After joining the Navy to gain an education or a chance at advancement in life, some 18 year old kids choose to be damage controlmen. It made me wonder what made them willing risk their lives and it started me thinking about what exactly I had signed up for.
Surely I would never really be at risk. I was a doctor, a noncombatant after all. And as a Navy surgeon, if I deployed it would certainly be on a big white hospital ship with a red cross on the side. During the run up to invading Iraq after 9/11 I learned that I was sadly mistaken. I had not realized that anywhere the Marines were asked to go, Navy medicine followed. And in a combat situation, orthopaedic surgeons tend to be busy.
The first 18 months of the war went by and for various reasons I was never deployed. Then, in about 2004, I was assigned to a unit that was to go to the Middle East. By that point, there were not missiles flying, but the terrain was still risky, even for medical personnel. I found that I was faced with another reality I had not planned for. We were sent to Camp Pendleton to prepare to deploy. We did not shoot real guns, but I spent quite a bit of time on an M16 simulator shooting computer-simulated people in the world’s most realistic first person shooter video game. In real life, we practiced disembarking large trucks, and learned where to take up position to lay down fire against people attacking the convoy, how to wear body armor and helmets, and how to win a victory in a small skirmish. It really looked like I was going somewhere scary. And now I was stuck with the fact that not only might I go somewhere that put my life in direct risk, but that despite my being a doctor, a “noncombatant”, I might be asked to kill another human being. Both seemed a high price to pay for three years of education.
My UU friends were incredulous. “How,” they asked, “can you go to risk your life in support of a war you don’t agree with—started by a president you didn’t vote for?” “Are you really willing to die for George Bush’s horrible mistake?” I thought long and hard about that. It was a difficult question to answer. It was true. I had not voted for President Bush. I thought that his foreign policy was a disaster and his policy of torture and preemptive war was wrong. But I, like 1.5 million others was in the military. He was my commander in chief and I had sworn an oath to follow his lawful orders. While I never ended up deployed to a war zone, I came to feel comfortable with the notion that if I had, I would have been risking my life in the service of a system of government, not an individual. In the United States we have the most powerful military in the world and, remarkably, we, as citizens, control it.
We elect a president, who may not even have any military experience him or herself, and that president commands the military. Civilian, democratic control of our military depends upon the fact that a few of us are willing to risk our lives in support of the collective will, as interpreted by our elected Commander in Chief. The soldier or marine does not have the right to follow orders only from a president she voted for. To my surprise, I learned that I, like so many others, was prepared to die—and even to kill—if asked to do so by the collective wisdom of my fellow citizens. I am still amazed by that realization.
There is not a strong Unitarian Universalist military tradition to be sure. But we do have a strong tradition of—and faith in—the democratic process. In this country, we need people to carry out orders. We must have no illusion about the fact that those orders are, in fact, ours. We should not allow ourselves to hide behind a “not in my name” ethos that assumes that we are individually without culpability in what the society we live in asks of its military. While the soldier’s duty is to follow our orders (and they will do so), our job is, as one of my favorite hymns exhorts, to “build a land where sisters and brothers anointed by god create peace.” We must elect leaders who make war rare. We should work toward a time when everyone who joins the military leaves whole, able to apply the new skills they paid so dearly to get, in a society that honors them and their sacrifice. We must be as committed to holding up our side of that bargain as the soldiers, marines, sailors and airmen who serve us are to upholding theirs. They deserve nothing less.
- Duty and Service - February 16, 2013
