In recent weeks, a major scandal has rocked the German Army, the Bundeswehr. During an irregular field exercise during basic training, several recruits in one unit participated in a mock hostage taking, were tied up, sprayed with water, and in two cases subjected to electroshocks. Other cases of abuses have since come to light.

While to their credit, the German government seems to do everything required to get to the bottom of this (several instructors are facing a dishonorable discharge, as well as several years in prison), and all information that has come to light has been made available to the public), several politicians, including our Defense Minister Peter Struck, have expressed astonishment that none of the recruits involved filed any complaints.

As someone who has completed his term of military service only last year, that does not surprise me at all. Most of these politicians - including Struck - haven't been in the military, and even if they have, it was probably so long ago that they have forgotten what basic training was like.

Germany still has mandatory military service, even though it now only lasts for nine months, and even though most young men get around it in one way or another. Still, it becomes obvious to the recruit - who in most cases never wanted to be there - from day one that he has lost many of his rights as a citizen and much of his dignity. The instructors have more power over his life than even his parents exercised in most cases. In the first week, he is deprived of sleep, and even later on he will be woken up much earlier than he is used to. Soon he is forced into conformist clothing. He is forced to fill out his locker in exactly the same way as his room mates (if it isn't, the instructors will simply empty it out and tell him to do it again). He has to do lots of work and exercise, many of it apparently nonsensical and only designed to keep him busy - and he is so busy that he has barely enough time to think.

In other words, basic military training is a form of brainwashing. And that can break a young man.

It didn't break me, for various reasons. For starters, I was 27 and had a firmly developed personality when I entered the military, while most recruits enter between the ages of 18 and 21 - an age when you are still a lot more impressionable. All the instructors were younger than me - in one case, by eight years, and while I did obey their orders to the best of my ability, I did so only because I recognized them for their higher ranks, and not really because I saw them as some sort of authority figures. I got along fairly well with the instructors, partially because they saw that while I wasn't very fit, I did the best I could and wasn't out to make any trouble, and partially because they respected my university degree in physics (this is Germany, after all, where a diploma will get you instant respect - of course, I wasn't foolish enough to constantly rub it in their faces).
And thanks to some previous research, I had some pretty good ideas about my rights and what I could expect in basic training - and what's more, I could recognize the military point of many exercises that seemed so nonsensical to the others.

(And let me say that I never saw anything that I could recognize as genuine abuses such as those currently mentioned in the news in my unit.)

But for most, the group soon takes over. They are afraid to disappoint their fellow recruits (and "slackers" can get very unpopular...) and soon become "good soldiers" who go along with everything without (too much) complaining. So in the case of these recruits, how could they possibly know where their training crossed the line to genuine abuse? During their entire basic training so far, they have been told to just put up with their suffering!

And that, I think, is another good argument for ending the Draft. Volunteers are much more willing and eager to go to their limits. You can push them hard, and you will be able to make most of them into fine soldiers who will do fine in difficult assignments - such as the many international peacekeeping missions the Bundeswehr has become involved with in the last decade (and many more will follow, now that the Bundeswehr is shifting away from the "Homeland Defense" paradigm of the Cold War). But should we really do to that to (in theory) all male citizens? Should we deny them of many of their rights and their dignity as soon as they are coming of age and become full-fledged citizens? Should we teach them to obey Authority without being able to question it?

I think not.




Bonus material: Old pictures of me in uniform.

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