Quote Originally Posted by JMA View Post
Looking deeper into all this I believe soldiers are indeed a breed apart from the average citizen which is why both careful and stringent selection processes are vital. This would be for a standing army as opposed to during a general mobilisation when just about anyione gets accepted into the military.
Carl,in support of this contention I borrow from Lord Moran in his Anatomy of Courage

It is a grey world these clever people live in; they see in human nature only its frailty. These little servants of routine, these poor spirits whose hearts are with their bankers, who sought safety in life and still seek it in the turmoil of a bloody strife, can they impart the secret of constancy in war? ‘All warlike people are a little idle and love danger better than travail.‘ That love of danger has the ring of another day, but it is still true that the pick of men, as we knew them in the trenches, were not always the chosen of more settled times. These clever people when it came to the choice between life and death called vainly to their gods, they helped them not at all. Success, which in their lives had meant selfishness, had come in war to mean unselfishness. If we once believe that the capacity to get on in life is not everything, we shall be in a fair way to employ in peace tests of character as searching as those which the trenches supplied in war.

I contend that fortitude in war has its roots in morality", that selection is a search for character, and that war itself is but one more test - the supreme and final test if you will - of character. Courage can be judged apart from danger only if the social significance and meaning of courage is known to us, namely that a man of character in peace becomes a man of courage in war. He cannot be selfish in peace and yet be unselfish in war.
Here I repeat my theme from my earlier posts in SWC that recruiting needs to be carefully targeted and certainly no reliance on the use of 'walk-in' recruiting offices - on Times Square for example - made to draw the 'right' candidates into the service.

I add this link: Charles Wilson, 1st Baron Moran to allow wm to provide a rapid character assessment of the author.