Can Soldiers Become Peacemakers?

By Colman McCarthy

You’re a farmer in the back-country of Senegal. The crops are in and it’s time to cart them 10 miles to market. But a bridge over a creek has been washed away by a flood. Who would you rather be helped by to rebuild the bridge: someone just out of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers or an English major from Yale?

Not a tough choice. And it could he happening soon. The National Call to Service Act, recently passed by Congress and sponsored by Senators. John McCain of Arizona and Evan Bayh of Indiana, would allow members of Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines to join the Peace Corps for two years and have that time count as part of the time owed to the military.

Not so fast, is the reaction of many supporters of the Peace Corps—both former and current volunteers: if there’s one place the military assuredly has no place, it’s the Peace Corps. Soldiers, after all, are public employees trained to solve conflicts by killing or threatening to kill people, which isn’t exactly the mission of the Peace Corps.

As a pacifist opposed to all military violence, whether past, current or future, and as an admirer of the Peace Corps who believes there is no federal program more needed, more enduring or more honorable, I’d usually be among the first and loudest to tell the Pentagon to keep its grubby distance. But not this time.

The Peace Corps should be open to any applicant and accept anyone who can qualify. It shouldn’t matter where you’ve been—whether a combat veteran in Iraq or that Yalie in New Haven—as much as where you want to go. Since sending its first volunteers to five continents in 1961, and with Sargent Shriver as the inspirational first director, the Peace Corps has been a model of public service. Why discriminate against a certain kind of applicant? Is elitism at work here, as if the Peace Corps has a purity not be sullied by Pentagon baddies?

Opposing what soldiers do shouldn’t mean opposing soldiers themselves. The list is long of former soldiers who became champions of nonviolence: Phil Berrigan, Howard Zinn, Garry Davis, Andy Jacobs, George McGovern, Francis of Assisi, Ignatius of Loyola, Kurt Vonnegut and others. It was the combat veteran, President John F. Kennedy, who started the Peace Corps and then appointed another combat veteran, brother-in-law Sargent Shriver, to be the first director.

Peace Corps purists fear that a link with the Pentagon will increase suspicions in host countries that volunteers are secretly toiling as agents of the rapacious U.S. government.

There is merit to that argument—look at all the havoc the U.S. military, the CIA and the FBI have caused in their missions of madness around the world—but anti-Americanism isn’t directed at only Peace Corps volunteers. Is it really thought, though, that illiterate villagers in Malawi needing medical help won’t come to a health clinic because they suspect the volunteer who once served in the military is up to no good?

It isn’t likely that the Peace Corps will be contaminated by a link to the Pentagon. If troubles do arise, then Congress can scrap the whole idea. If enough soldiers do sign on, a moment might come to increase the Peace Corps budget. Right now, Congress gives more than $1 billion a day to the Pentagon, which is nearly five times what the Peace Corps gets in a year. That’s the real scandal. With more money, fewer Peace Corps volunteers would be turned away. And perhaps, with more slots, fewer people would be choosing the military in the first place.