Here's a kind of riddle: what does a short-haired Marine have in common with a long-haired hippie? Answer: both probably see themselves as some sort of "libertarian."  The hippies are gone, and my concern here is with the military. But if "modo" military people are really like hippies in even one fundamental way, that says something about the self-image of the military-namely that it doesn't jibe very well with reality.
 
The writer Ayn Rand, author of such cult novels as Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead and a heroine to many on the right for her "damn the rabble" views, famously called libertarians "hippies of the right." Libertarians are the ones who insist on doing it their own way, perhaps with their own big "guns" - biceps (and possibly a real gun or three-right to bear arms is guaranteed in the Constitution, you know) all by themselves in a log cabin they built themselves on the edge of Injun territory. The libertarian says: Nobody is going to tell me what to wear, think, or do. The world outside is hostile; whatever defending gets done will have to be done by me. My job is to protect my womenfolk and kids, whose job is to let me protect them.

Many people in the military have libertarian leanings or at least sympathies. They're the rugged individualists, at least in their own mind: doing it their way. Many people in the military had to overcome adversity to get where they are, or at least put up with drill sergeants and COs. It made them tough. They have no sympathy for the weak ones, those not hard.  As a result, they'd probably choke on the word "hippies" in Ayn Rand's remark: hippies, for many of those in the military, personify all that went wrong with America in the '60s: not just the hippies' long hair and their refusal of military service, but the general lack of respect they seemed to show, their apparent rejection of the work ethic and inability to see the sacrifices of those who had gone before. Still, the hippies "marched to a different drummer," in a phrase of Thoreau's much quoted in the l960s. The Marines, and all the military services, are proud of the fact that they too march to a different drummer than the civilian world outside. Both groups would be able to sing along with Frank Sinatra's song, "I did it my way." Both are natural libertarians.

For a time beginning in the l980s the Republican Party seemed the more attractive party for libertarians (there's a Libertarian party too); undoubtedly for this reason it became, and largely still is, the default party of the military. During the Reagan years, the tendency of the Republican party was to blame everything on big government.  Starve the beast! chorused the Republicans, referring to government. Get rid of welfare, social security, the threat of "socialized medicine." Some libertarians, following the Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman, say we shouldn't even license doctors. The market will put them out of business! Damn the fact that they have to kill a number of people first to have this happen. Life's tough. Suck it up.

People in the military note that they sacrifice and give their all daily. The notion of handouts for nothing tends to be deeply repugnant to them. The Reagan-years nightmare of the "welfare queen" (which, unsurprisingly, focused on wildly atypical, sometimes invented cases) made it seem as if most welfare recipients could work if they wanted to but found it easier to mooch-and worst, were laughing at the rest of us for being dumb enough to support them.

Libertarians didn't typically want to crunch facts and figures, be told that most welfare handouts saved money in the long run (if the children have minimum food and health needs met, they aren't taken to the ER so often, and some may actually make something of themselves). It's in the libertarian/military gut that each (wo)man does it on his or her own. Adversity builds character, which is about getting your behind in gear when the going gets tough.

This is the individual libertarian's image of him- or herself: No excuses, "An Army of One." And this is the level at which it's so attractive to those in the military. I'll add that I too find this point of view very attractive, and try to practice it myself insofar as it's practicable. I can't do this all the time. That's the point: it's even less in sync with  military reality than it is with an academic one.

Having military libertarians insist that they alone are the surviving individualists, the last surviving goats, has as its flip side that most if not all people outside has to be a sheep. And goats despise sheep. That's not a good result for a number of reasons.

First of all, let's check out this hatred of government that's so central to the libertarian mind-set. Um, the fact is that the military itself is part of the government libertarians rail against-though it's almost always left out of sermons against the evils of Big Brother. Look at the current budget proposal: everything for the military, nothing for anything else. The military is the government, folks. They pay your paycheck, and mine. And it all comes from taxes. And by the way, what's this hatred of "socialized medicine"? Does any medicine get any more socialized than military medicine? Choice of doctors? Hah.  They tell you when to go, what shots to get, and where to get them.

Many libertarians revere the competition of raw capitalism: may the best man win! But the military isn't raw capitalism. Quite the contrary. Two people don't compete for the same slot. The work is done by a single person, who does it well or ill. The Republicans broke up many of the monopolies in the 1980s in the name of free-market capitalism. The military is by definition a monopoly: there aren't two competing U.S. Navies. And then, if you do your time, whether you've performed well or badly, you're guaranteed certain benefits. The VA is there for you, you get intangible credit in society at large, and (last but not least) you get to feel proud of what you've done.

Most fundamentally, there's the fact that the military isn't about being Rambo. It's (no-duh)  about doing what your superiors tell you to do, saying "Ma'am, yes, ma'am." Where is the rugged individualist in that?

This suggests a contradiction between the reality of the military life, and the self-perception of many of the people who lead that life. The hippies of the l960s suffered from their version of this contradiction as well. They saw themselves as rebelling against Dad, but in fact were utterly dependent on Dad's cash and the society Dad's generation built. Sure, sing rock songs about how phony the Establishment is: but you need multi-thousand dollar speakers to pump the sound. Sure, go to Berkeley or Harvard, and then wear tattered jeans and march against the Man.

It's bad when many people in the military persist in thinking of themselves as rugged individualists with control over their own destinies, completely unlike the people they look down on. I'd say: look in the mirror. We're all pretty dependent on each other. And that's a good thing.