<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" Back in 1982, when I was a baby alternative journo, I was in Washington on assignment when the Reagan Administration handed the Veterans Administration over to a guy named Robert Nimmo, and one of Nimmo&amp;#039;s first acts as a loyal Reaganaut apparatchik was to close all the VA&amp;#039;s outpatient psychiatric clinics that had been doing such yeoman&amp;#039;s work dealing, especially, with Vietnam veterans who were suffering from PTSD and other consequences of that horrible war that ruined so many lives so long after it ended. This, of course, happened while that same Reagan Administration was inflating the Defense Department budget to gigantic proportions. And it struck me even then that we were spending an awful lot of defense while short-changing the human beings who actually did the defending. (And thus doth fall one of the great wingnut myths of all time \u2014 that draft-dodging hippies trashed the Vietnam veterans when they got home. It was the antiwar Left and its remnants that ran the GI coffeehouses, and that listened to the terrible stories and took them seriously. It was those remnants \u2014 and, if I can brag a little, the alternative press of the day \u2014 that helped force the issue of PTSD, and the complications from Agent Orange, and the other ancillary horrors into the spotlight. By contrast, the conventional veterans groups were next to useless; I still remember Vietnam vet sources of mine cursing what they called &amp;quot;the class of &amp;#039;45.&amp;quot; And the Reagan people told them what a noble cause it was in which they had fought, and then cut the funding that was helping them back here.) I mention this because, with the nomination today of Chuck Hagel for Secretary Of Defense, we might finally be seeing a serious swing back in the opposite direction. Ever since that thoroughgoing, bean-counting, soulless bastard Robert McNamara was in charge of it, the Defense Department steadily has moved away from the notion that its primary constituency is the men and women in uniform. Certainly, to name one recent example, Donald Rumsfeld proved to be far more in love with his own brilliant theories on defense policies than he cared about the fact that we weren&amp;#039;t sending enough poor sods in inadequate body-armor to carry them out. This is a problem that Chuck Hagel never will have. Hagel is a grunt. He always has been. He always will be. He&amp;#039;s one of the people who has to kick in the doors. He&amp;#039;s one of the people who has to look gingerly around the corner. He&amp;#039;s one of the people who had to live at war 24-7, and who walked through Indian country and nearly died there. (By comparison, as he himself has said, until he got shot down, John McCain had a pretty good Vietnam war, flying back to the carrier every day for hot meals.) He is the first grunt to make it as far as he has since Elliot Richardson, who landed in the first wave at Utah Beach. The rest have been a passel of career spooks and think-tank bombardiers. It is impossible to imagine Hagel sending an army into battle without proper body-armor, or suggesting, idiotically, that &amp;quot;you go to war with the army you have.&amp;quot; Unless he&amp;#039;s changed radically since I talked to him last, Hagel&amp;#039;s primary constituency in his new job will not be the men and women who have to kick in the doors. (This is why his earlier comments about gay people do not trouble me. Gay Americans can now serve openly, and that is all Hagel really needs to know.) His vote in favor of the AUMF in Iraq still mystifies me, especially since, in explaining the vote, he sounded very much like a man who was going to vote against it. (He baffled his own brother with that one.) And I probably wouldn&amp;#039;t vote for him for president, because his ideas on entitlements are pretty daffy. But, for this job, at this time, with two wars winding down and thousands of battered and damaged people coming home, I can&amp;#039;t think of anyone better to run the department that sent them all to war.  (And, not for nothing, but if the Republicans gear up to fight this nomination, can we hear no more about the need for &amp;quot;bipartisanship&amp;quot; in Washington? If they oppose Hagel, a conservative Republican nominated by centrist president, it&amp;#039;s because their ideology transcends any professed desire for bipartisan cooperation.) There are good, solid, deeper political reasons to approve of his nomination. (Peter Beinart does a good job laying them out, although the cynic in me insists in pointing out that the best thing Hagel can do in his new job is not to buy the kind of snake oil that Beinart and others were selling back in 2002. And I would suggest to Beinart that Hagel changed his mind because he knew what was happening to the soldiers he sent there, while George Will changed his mind because he didn&amp;#039;t want to look stupid on ABC. There is a difference.) But this is the best one. Chuck Hagel knows what the basic job of soldiering really is and, therefore, I think, he knows what the basic job of being Secretary Of Defense is. It&amp;#039;s to fight for people, and not for weapons systems. It&amp;#039;s to care for the human beings in your charge more than the fanciful bloodless academic exercises held at a distance.  With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation&amp;#039;s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations. In a season when Lincoln&amp;#039;s Second Inaugural is the big finish of a box-office bonanza, Hagel has lived the peroration as well as anyone has.  READ MORE: Pierce&amp;#039;s 2007 profile of Chuck Hagel "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a17808/chuck-hagel-defense-secretary-nomination-010713/?src=rss>