By Salena Zito
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Sunday, January 8, 2006

We Americans stopped raising warriors and started raising young people who have more baggage than Paris Hilton at a Louis Vuitton sale.
Even our cowboys now are marginalized in movies about forbidden love.

But a five-minute conversation with Nathaniel Fick will make you start believing that not all is lost; reading his book, "One Bullet Away," will confirm it.

Fick, a 1999 Dartmouth graduate, now is pursuing master's degrees in international security and business at Harvard. In between, he became a Marine. He wanted to be "part of something bigger than myself," partly because his generation is "not asked to be other than self-indulgent," he said in a telephone interview.

Dartmouth and Quantico could not have been more different; each Marine Officer Candidate School course is a grueling process to motivate, train, evaluate and screen potential officers. "It was the first thing that I ever did ... that I did not know how it would end," Fick says.

He learned to be precise, to make decisions, to set the tone as a leader. He learned that it was never about him; it was always about his men. That the measure of trust was unbreakable. That every Marine needed to know each other's jobs. Because the difference between each was just one bullet.

Fick joined the Marines in peacetime; Sept. 11, 2001, changed all that. Sitting with fellow Marines in an Australian bar watching the twin towers fall, he knew he and his men would be first with boots on the ground; they were closest to Afghanistan.

"There was an overwhelming feeling of pride and gratitude. ... We were lucky that we got to go first. ... We were psyched," he recalled. You can still hear the pride in his voice.

Later, his deployment to Iraq produced a different feeling. There was no visceral connection to 9/11; it was strictly professional. And from the infamous "Mission Accomplished" declaration in spring 2003 to today's Beltway debate, Fick has insights that deserve close attention.

"I would make the argument that when Bush landed on that aircraft carrier ... at that moment, the mission was accomplished," he says. "The insurgency had not yet begun. The regime had ended. It was not until August of 2003 that Iraq became more violent."

As for withdrawing precipitously from Iraq, he offers rational reasons not to:

"On a humanitarian level, the current low-grade civil war would become an all-out civil war without U.S. forces keeping a lid on the violence. ... On a strategic level, there is a very real danger of a failed state in the heart of the Middle East ... ."

Finally: "Reputations matter, commitments matter and Iraq must not be added to that list of jihad PR victories."

To allow the cut-and-run platform of the Howard Deans of the debate to be our guiding light is chilling. Had George Washington adopted their philosophy, we'd all have British accents. We have no future of values if we tuck tail when the going gets tough.

As for those who think our young people should not join the military, think again: The all-volunteer, professional U.S. military does not serve one policy or one president. The military doesn't make policy, or even comment on policy. It executes policy. Our troops take an oath to the Constitution, not to an administration.

This country needs its best and brightest in uniform always -- but now maybe more than anytime in recent history.

Apologists for cut and run need not apply, or re-enlist.

Salena Zito is a Trib editorial page columnist.