All Men Are Created Equal T-Shirt

Society increasingly tells us that we’re all winners, that we should avoid bad things, hide our children from the possibility of failure, and surround ourselves with giggles, sunshine, and rainbows. And people are buying it. Everyone gets a trophy. Parents are harder on teachers when their kids fail than on their children. And when anything bad happens in their lives, it’s never their fault – it’s the corporations, or the government, or bad luck.

It all sounds great. It sounds inclusive. It sounds loving. It sounds kind.

The problem is that all of that is bullshit.

The world is a harsh place and the most successful people in the world fail big and they fail often. But they continue along their path regardless, getting up after every failure, replacing successes with the next challenge as soon as they complete it – always looking forward.

And then there’s an even more elite group, the less than 1% of all Americans who join the military. They abandon the world they’ve always known and ask to see the harsh reality of the real world. They’re tested in Spartan conditions, told to rely on only their wits and their friends around them, starved, deprived of sleep, and asked to put aside their personal desires – that which society claims is most important – in order to take care of their brothers and sisters in arms.

Still others search for more. The test of service alone isn’t enough. They want the harshest possible test – a test that remains the same throughout the course of mankind – the test of the infantryman. Can they survive in any condition? Can they fight any enemy on any ground and win? Can they walk away from the technological advances that our larger weapon systems provide and meet the enemy man-to-man with only their rifles and knives and emerge victorious?

I can’t possibly top Heinlein’s description of who we are and what we do: We are the boys who go to a particular place, at H-hour, occupy a designated terrain, stand on it, dig the enemy out of their holes, force them then and there to surrender or die. We're the bloody infantry, the doughboy, the duckfoot, the foot soldier who goes where the enemy is and takes him on in person. We've been doing it, with changes in weapons but very little change in our trade, at least since the time five thousand years ago when the foot sloggers of Sargon the Great forced the Sumerians to cry "Uncle!" Maybe they'll be able to do without us someday. Maybe some mad genius with myopia, a bulging forehead, and a cybernetic mind will devise a weapon that can go down a hole, pick out the opposition, and force it to surrender or die--without killing that gang of your own people they've got imprisoned down there. I wouldn't know; I'm not a genius, I'm an M.I. In the meantime, until they build a machine to replace us, my mates can handle that job--and I might be some help on it, too.