THE COMMANDING OFFICER, RECRUITING OFFICER, AND MEDICAL OFFICER VERSUS DESERTION
By Captain J. S. Taylor (M. C), U. S. Navy
The Commanding Officer and Desertion
It may seem presumptuous for a medical officer to venture suggestions on such a topic, even though himself subject like every other component part of the naval personnel to discipline and under solemn obligation to promote it by every legitimate means. This paper was originally prepared at the suggestion of an officer of the line of the navy and the statistics are derived from an able presentation of his study of desertion submitted by Lieutenant R. E. Parsons, Medical Corps, U. S. Navy, to the Sixth Division of the Bureau of Navigation. Having been for 22 years a member of the naval service, a deeply interested observer of its growth and development and a constant student of human nature the following remarks are offered not in a spirit of hostile criticism but as perhaps possessing some value because, coming from "a looker-on in Vienna," they represent a different angle of vision.
In every branch of human activity there are certain guiding principles, certain moral and philosophical considerations underlying conduct. The successful administrator must fully understand these latent but compelling forces. The administration of discipline and the control of military organizations cannot be highly effective if it is done in a mechanical way; if justice is to be dispensed there must be full appreciation of the reason for as well as a knowledge of the provisions of the law.
The Articles of War and Navy Regulations, indeed the whole structure of discipline and military life are built on a profound knowledge of human nature. For example the force of habit, the instinct of self-preservation, gregarious tendencies, the spirit of emulation, all of which are exhibited in varying degree by animals as well as man, are utilized in training the units to be combined into an effective fighting force. Daily repetition of certain complex and difficult movements makes them easy; regular experience of alarming or dangerous situations robs them of their terror; rewards, promotion, honorable mention, medals and ribbons, distinctions in rank, insignia and uniforms, the change from dirge to quick march when the funeral is over have their justification in man's ambition, his inborn inclination to hero worship, his deep-seated respect for power and authority and the necessity of playing the game in spite of sorrow and calamity. The recruit is subjected to sights and sounds, surrounded by an atmosphere, initiated into a mode of life calculated from a knowledge of human nature to mold him to a desired type and the rules of military service embody in practical form the sum of observation and experience along these lines.
The cardinal error of many persons vested with military authority consists in losing sight of these basal facts. They accept the stereotyped regulations of the body to which they belong not as an epitome but as an encyclopedia. For them the regulations represent the first and last word, the embodiment of all duty and responsibility and a complete guide to conduct. Such men are not apt to be successful disciplinarians in the best sense. With them there is little chance for progress and development either of the individuals under them or of the organization as a whole. They follow the letter of the law to the neglect of its spirit and intent; they carry out the regulations but ignore the human nature on which the regulations are founded.
The majority of military commanders fall into one of two great groups; the mechanical and the spiritual. The mechanical disciplinarian is always within the letter of the law. He has, of course, never knowingly "incited a man to desert" and would be highly incensed at the suggestion of such a thing. His conduct is technically unimpeachable; no flaw can be found in his knowledge and interpretation of the regulations and no court could ever incriminate him. His officers and men comply outwardly with every law and requirement but the former are dissatisfied and the latter desert. His iron inflexibility, his excessive zeal for order, his attention to detail destroy individuality, smother ambition, benumb effort in his subordinates and divert him from functions of a higher order which are the peculiar field of the officer of command rank. One of these is to reason out the moral factors bearing on military life. Without realizing it he is himself a disintegrating factor in a body which needs above all else to be unified, consolidated and cemented together. Himself upright, he is nevertheless a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense to others. He passes with skirts unsoiled from promotion to promotion but leaves behind him a trail of wrecked lives and unhappy ships. Living according to the letter of the law and exacting its minute observance by his subordinates, his conscience acquits him of wrong, but he may have sinned daily and hourly by all that he has left undone in domains where the law could not condemn him because these fields of action are beyond its exactions: he treats men as machines, yet demands of them the fruits of the spirit—patriotism, self-sacrifice, courage, devotion to duty.
The spiritual group includes men who at any given moment of their careers could perhaps be proved guilty of some minor infraction of regulations but who lead happy and useful careers and have happy ships and efficient crews. With them regulations and instructions are not like mathematical theorems or the laws of chemical combination. They recognize that while chlorine and sodium in certain definite proportions always combine to give a definite weight of common salt no such formula for conduct is applicable to men. The "human element" is ever uppermost in their minds. Not the law's observance but the accomplishment of the law's ultimate purpose is their guiding principle. They require all men to be in uniform but do not allow themselves to forget for a moment that identity of externals does not assimilate individuals or obliterate marked variations of personality. The culprits brought before them in the administration of justice are not viewed by them as mere cogs in a wheel but as plastic material that must be so handled as to be welded into conformity with the most comprehensive aims and purposes of the ship and the service.
The commanding officer, who administers his ship through trusted and competent heads of departments, has under his direct observation his officers, his orderlies and the quartermasters and helmsmen, but at drills and maneuvers and in the ordinary day's work the bulk of the crew are merely groups of men seen en masse. It is mainly when infractions of discipline occur that the captain of a ship comes into contact with his men as individuals and the administration of justice on such occasions is at once the most difficult and the most important of his many and onerous duties. It is one which cannot be performed in arbitrary and perfunctory manner because, though the law may be satisfied, failure to consider both the spirit of the law and the spirit of the offender will produce the most widespread and disastrous effect on the entire personnel.
Offenders are either occasional or habitual. Young and inexperienced must be the officer who fails to distinguish between them. Rare indeed is it to find a captain who would not assign a different punishment for the first offence and the fifth. To waive punishment altogether for a first offence is often the part of wisdom if a consideration of the culprit and the attendant circumstances seems to put the offender into the occasional, the offence into what might be termed the accidental class. These well-established distinctions are important and referred to here because they illustrate a discriminative, selective action which should go further than it does and be far more general than it is. There should be a distinction, too, between the violator of regulations and the offender against the fundamental laws of society. The man who steals a watch commits the crime of theft and at the same time is guilty of a deed peculiarly opprobrious because of the conditions under which men live aboard ship. The man who thoughtlessly violates the sanctity of the quarterdeck or the tenets of the sea, as by whistling, is in another class. Yet on at least one occasion these two offenses were punished in an identical manner with disastrous results to the morale of the ship. The minor culprit conceived that he had been punished as severely as the common thief who preceded him at the mast. He went away with a grievance. The rankling sense of injustice made him a potential deserter and did the same for the man who had been robbed. As a matter of fact the captain gave the whistler or loafer a legitimate but maximum punishment. In the case of the thief there was no doubt of the guilt but there was lack of proof and the error of judgment lay in assigning a trivial punishment rather than none at all for a major offense when the two incidents were so conspicuously juxtaposed. The interpretation put on the captain's action was a false one. The crew decided that he deemed whistling on the quarterdeck over his head an offense of equal magnitude with the theft of a poor enlisted man's watch. This was doing the captain a great injustice but he would have been wiser, as well as in keeping with strict judicial procedure, to let the thief go unpunished in view of the lack of proof. The occasion might with propriety have been marked by a thoughtful comment on the heinousness of theft aboard ship and the reason why the suspect did not receive punishment and what an adequate one would be.
In a general way our enlisted men appreciate justice and accept without a murmur the proper legal punishment of their misconduct but let there be with the award a conspicuous manifestation of other than judicial bearing and deep discontent with incalculable consequences follow. Discontent cannot always be prevented. There are men who are never satisfied and the more they receive the less they give. To coddle and pamper men with the idea that they will be happy and so do good work is the most fatal of errors. The happiness which promotes production is that which flows from tranquility of spirit and complete harmony with associates; from fitting into the position assigned. To make a pet and a favorite of a man spoils him and tends to general disorganization because it is bound to destroy harmony between him and his fellow workers who envy him though they may not themselves desire to be petted.
The lowest of men recognizes in a dim way that he has a something called soul; he must be very far along the road to perdition before he loses all sense of what is due him as a mere man, before he will endure certain indignities intolerable to a human being regardless of his calling, his rank or his status before the law. That is why flogging was such a failure as a disciplinary measure. Men bore the pain without flinching but their souls were wounded beyond recovery and the cat-o'-nine-tails bred hatred, rebellion, mutiny in those who endured it and in any man of spirit who witnessed the ordeal.
As the type of man coming into the navy has become steadily better and higher so it has become necessary to dispense with every form of punishment for mere infractions of discipline which was in any sense degrading, and the fine and reduction in rating with consequent loss of pay have largely superseded the brig which to the sensitive soul was like a cage for an animal. The reader who recalls some of the rough characters that have passed in review before him in the navy may smile at the expression "sensitive soul" but it is the sensitive being from whom may be expected the sublime deed of valor and heroism, the self-sacrifice, the unswerving loyalty, the unreasoning daring that crowns our flag with glory and makes the navy the true school of citizenship. We must preserve, modify and utilize men's sensibilities, not obtund and stultify them. Quick reactions in emergency are not to be expected from the callous; those whose feelings have been dulled and perverted by a lack of discernment in the controlling power are the men who desert without a blush or put self before duty in moments of grave peril. Irons single or double have been wholly discarded. To humiliate a man by creating in him a sense of the seriousness of his offense is legitimate: to humiliate him by a degrading form of punishment is to crush out his spirit and ruin him and some of his associates forever. We want men of spirit not galley slaves in the navy and the best captain is he who knows how to develop capacity, enterprise and daring; whose punishments awaken and quicken instead of deadening the human spirit. The hectoring, bullying, swaggering, choleric captain may survive in fiction but there is no place for him on an American quarterdeck. Even the commanding officer who indulges in biting sarcasm, who withers the culprit with his contempt and makes him cower before a haughty, heartless demeanor is guilty of a serious error for such conduct begets bitterness. Often it is not the law's sentence but the semblance of a sneer accompanying the verdict that leads to desertion.
A certain captain returned one night to his ship and was horrified to find a member of the crew sunk in a drunken slumber on his erstwhile inviting brass bed in a cabin that he had left immaculate but was now filthy and disgusting. The captain was naturally indignant and what passed between him and the sentry is not known but his handling of the situation was remarkable. Needless to say that by "turn-to" in the morning the incident was known all over the ship and everybody was on the tip-toe of expectation about the fate of the unfortunate man who under the influence of liquor had violated and defiled the sanctity of the captain's cabin. At the proper time the offender was brought to the mast, sentenced to five days in the brig for returning to the ship intoxicated and dismissed with a simple but emphatic reminder that liquor often leads a man to make a fool of himself. There was not a reference to the invasion of the cabin, no hint of lese majeste.
The effect of this impersonal treatment of the affair was enormous. The man remained on the ship two years and never again took a drop of liquor in that time. The captain had reformed him and he acknowledged the fact gratefully. As for the crew they were more than ever the loyal and devoted admirers of their commanding officer whose methods were novel but effective and well illustrated by the incident cited. There were many irregular things on his ship but they were constructive and not destructive. He wanted his officers and men to be efficient; was not satisfied with the routine performance of duty, with the minimum that could be regarded as satisfying the regulations; exacted all that the regulations were designed to secure. His ship was a happy one and a smart one too.
It would be unpardonable to intimate that a commanding officer is ever intentionally partial but it is true that conditions often prevail on a ship that, to the enlisted men, suggest partiality and the practical administration of affairs sometimes lends considerable color to the suggestion. This breeds the kind of discontent that makes for desertion. The better the man the more intensely he resents anything that savors of injustice and once the idea that he is victimized in favor of another takes root in his mind he becomes a potential deserter whom the merest trifle may convert into an actual one. Yeomen, cabin and ward room stewards, the men who come into most frequent and direct contact with officers so that they are better known and have their good qualities more highly appreciated are very apt to receive special privileges. This may be right enough in one way but it is a policy of doubtful wisdom.
In general there is no greater promoter of sound sleep than the tonic of work. This is universally recognized and to keep the men busy is generally accepted as the best recipe for contentment but there is such a thing as overdoing this. Unless the idea is carried out with tact and judgment it may be productive of harm. There is usually enough to do on a ship or at a station to keep all hands reasonably busy if inspections of compartments, magazines, storerooms and living spaces, etc., are rigid and a high standard of cleanliness is insisted on. Men are very quick to discover it when work is simply manufactured for them after the regular requirements have been met and they deeply resent such a policy. If the upkeep of a ship or station and the training of the crew do not absorb all the time available what remains should be assigned to legitimate recreation planned and supervised not so openly but with as much care and forethought as is expended on any feature of duty. The point is to have men occupied. It is idleness, not leisure, that does harm and the spare hours devoted to athletics, dramatic performances, games, etc., are fully as useful in promoting a proper frame of mind as work and infinitely more salutary than an excess of work which appears unnecessary to the crew and often is unnecessary and irksome. The ship that coals on Sunday when other ships are sending hundreds of men ashore for liberty, while every one on board knows it is not imperative (a knowledge confirmed by a delay in sailing until Wednesday); the ship on which an enthusiastic but overzealous and indiscreet gunnery officer prolongs the drills and repeats general quarters again and again in a single day through week after week of preparation for target practice, pursuing a policy that no physical trainer would employ for man or beast; the ship on which the men have no regular definite time which they can call their own; on which their plans for relaxation and amusement are arbitrarily and summarily interfered with in times of peace without a vital and urgent necessity will not be a happy ship but one whose complement is never full.
There is no plea here for the relaxation of discipline, for condoning neglect of duty, disobedience or insubordination, but merely that the idea of discipline must be enlarged. The discipline of the modern navy includes improvement and development of mind and heart and body to mold the whole man to the purposes of the navy and the will of authority. Swimming is obligatory; so is setting up drill. Every ship has its library. A chaplain is one element of the officer personnel; so is the fleet or ship athletic officer. The high discipline is that which utilizes every measure to bring out the good in men and fend off possibilities of wrong doing. It involves forethought and constant study on broad lines.
It may as well be recognized that the era of "driving" has past; that unless the navy offers a livable and attractive program and fulfills it—one in which hard work and healthy play are properly balanced in the day's schedule—we will not get the men or, getting them, will not be able to hold them. We may punish all we please but punishment remains largely a negative measure, an aftermath of evil with scant reforming power.
Less than a quarter of a century ago there was open mutiny on a certain vessel of the navy followed by the inevitable courts-martial which awarded sentences of penal servitude for periods reaching as high as seven years. The culprits were guilty and the punishments in accord with justice and law and yet the mutiny was preventable. Two main causes were responsible for the outbreak. The crew was composed in the main of faithful, hardworking men who had experienced peculiar conditions and always responded in an exemplary manner to unusual but legitimate demands. When a period of rest came they objected to doing work which they regarded as imposed merely to keep them busy. Nothing would have come of this feeling, mainly one of humiliation, had not a draft of recruits come to the ship about this time. The new accessions had no conception of military requirements, having never been properly indoctrinated, and conceived that their situation was not different from that of the workmen in civil life who may organize, protest and refuse any employment not to their liking. The influence of this new leaven was not perceived and the inevitable happened. Had the circumstances been different wholesale desertions would have manifested the general discontent which actually took the form of open insubordination. A good rider knows better than to come to an open contest of strength with his steed and circumvents instead of trying to overpower him. The temper of the men and the ignorance of the more active fomenters of disorder among them on the ship referred to should have been perceived and their outlawry forestalled.
Many a good man deserts in a state of temporary discouragement or discontent who would not do so if he had a full sense of the gravity of the offense. This is particularly true in the case of young recruits. Not to warn them is a serious error on the part of the officer responsible for their conduct and training. The first solemn caution should be given at the recruiting office and the enlistment papers might well contain a statement over the recruiting officer's signature that he had fully explained the nature of this act. At training stations and on ships the same instruction should be given and periodically the captain himself should briefly carry borne the lesson by a few judicious words.
Major General David C. Shanks (National Army) U. S. A. considers this matter to he of the greatest importance in combating desertion. He says:
In large part desertion will cease as soon as the soldier knows that he has thereby committed a crime which makes him despicable to his comrades in civil life. While I am sure that desertions in our army are largely the result of the fact that the seriousness of the crime is not appreciated by our civilian population, I am confident that the number of desertions in our army would be greatly lessened by proper effort on the part of our officers. Too many of our officers apparently go on the supposition that the only way to check desertion is by punishment after the crime has been committed and the soldier is again within military control. They never do anything to prevent the crime from taking place. I state it as a fact, which I believe could be established without difficulty, that a very large proportion of our men who desert leave the colors and break their oath without even having heard a single officer raise his voice to caution them against this crime. Many of our officers when asked about desertion merely state that a certain number of men have deserted and then on their part ask, "What are you going to do about it?" If any officer is satisfied to have men desert from his company without his ever having taken any steps whatever to prevent it, he has failed in his duty and he has not done what the government has a right to expect. The officer has a certain duty which he owes to himself and to his government and if he shirks it, the blame, in part, at least, can be placed upon his shoulders.
Every recruit who joins a company ought to be talked to on this subject; he ought to be instructed thoroughly by his officer as to the difference that exists between a mere civil contract and an oath of enlistment. He should understand the difference between a man who makes a bargain in civil life and then changes his mind, and the man who raises his hand and takes a solemn oath to serve his country and follow the flag, and then breaks that oath. It is up to the officer to explain this difference to the young soldier, not by long sermons, but by such brief talks to his men as will put into the company a spirit of detestation for that man who engages to serve his country and then violates his oath.
This surely applies no less to sailors than to soldiers and no less to naval officers than army officers. If commanding officers of all training units were to vigorously put into practice the recommendations of General Shanks, there would, without doubt, be a measurable decrease in the deserter roll.
One of the most difficult features of ship and station administration arises in connection with the granting of special liberty privileges to men who ask to go home on account of sickness or death in the family. Every commanding officer knows that the grounds for a goodly per cent of these requests are fabricated and this tends to make the decision a perfunctory matter, one determined by reference to a schedule showing whether the petitioner has any furlough due him or not. The man who has offered a trumped-up story and been refused will slouch away and talk large of injustice but his shipmates usually know he has been lying and the general tendency will be to admire the officer who saw through the ruse. Where the case was a bona fide one the results are different and very serious. An officer must put himself in the man's place so far as he can and try to realize what it means to be tied hand and foot by military restrictions, or to be refused in an apparently indifferent, mechanical, offhand manner when the loved wife, mother or sister is sick or dying at home. He should consider the independence of conduct and movement the man enjoyed before he voluntarily placed himself under the powerful restraints of military life and realize that if the request is a proper one the chances are that the man will say to himself when refused: "I did not have to come into the outfit and I do not have to stay in it." Family ties are the strongest a bluejacket has. He will incur the gravest risks for their sake. Many an excellent man deserts when refused the furlough he sought because there is trouble at home. A thousand cases of desertion at the Portsmouth naval prison were recently analyzed by Lieutenant R. E. Parsons, Medical Corps, U. S. Navy, and showed that more than 22 per cent (228) were due to the call of sickness or death in the home, drink accounting for 38 per cent and "no reason," "wanting liberty," desire "for a good time" combined amounting to 36 per cent. Very few men but will take the law into their own hands and feel they did right in "jumping ship" in obedience to the wish of a dying mother to see her son once more.
This question of unusual furlough privilege is therefore clearly one of immense importance to the man and to the service and each case should be investigated with the most painstaking care and it would seem better to have a good many men get unmerited furlough than to deny a single meritorious appeal. Some uniform system of verifying the facts might be devised and employed as a routine measure. For example, on returning from furlough, a man might be required to produce a set of papers and vouchers stipulated in advance and failure to do so could be punished by a heavy fine not ostensibly viewing the omission as an evidence of fraud but of carelessness and neglect of the ship's regulation requirements. Cases of fraud and misrepresentation can often be detected and should be punished with great severity.
The group of a thousand deserters above referred to contained 120, or 12 per cent, where failure to return was due to fear of the consequences because the man went without leave or overstayed it. Steps should be taken to explain thoroughly to every man going on leave, particularly recruits, the vast difference between "overtime" or "jumping ship" and desertion. Of course it is not practical to preach a sermon on rectitude to every man going on liberty but it is worth while to take a good deal of trouble in this matter for it saves more trouble later on. It might be delegated to the chaplain to bring out these points periodically in a sermon. A captain assuming command might advert to the subject and every man going over the side might be given a small printed slip summarizing the points about desertion, etc., until all the crew had had one liberty and thereafter every new man reporting aboard could be given such a slip at least once. Better measures than these can be devised. They are offered merely as a suggestion.
On every ship and at every station the greater part of the offenses committed can be brought home to a relatively small group of men who appear again and again at mast and are often habitual attendants at sick call. By reason of mental, moral or physical abnormalities they are wholly incapable of adapting themselves to conditions of military life and hence constitute the ship's delinquent class.
Under the most favorable conditions in civil life the shortcomings and peculiarities of such men do not attract much attention but they fail to measure up to the standards of a highly specialized life like that in the navy with its prescribed routine. Those who cannot conform to the general pattern and are constantly running foul of some provision that their biased intelligence will not accept are best disposed of at once by survey or inaptitude and bad conduct discharge in the same manner as the chronic invalid or the victim of patent and active insanity. As a matter of fact a certain proportion of all court-martial cases, and a very large percentage of men tried for desertion, have a mental defect of some kind. Thus, in the group of a thousand men serving sentences for desertion referred to above, fully 50 per cent belonged in the class of feeble-minded or showed constitutional inferiority, constitutional psychopathic state, dementia praecox, a neurosis of some kind, paresis, chorea, neurasthenia and allied affections.
It would certainly seem the part of wisdom to require a medical officer to be present at mast, especially at training stations, so that he may study the bearing and face of each offender, hear the often remarkable excuses offered in palliation of an offense and perhaps discover later by careful study any cases of mental defect among the habitual offenders. Moreover it should be the established rule for drill officers to refer to the medical officer for study such recruits as prove hopelessly dull at their tasks, incorrigible, insolent, peculiar, the objects of general ridicule or unfavorable comment from their shipmates.
A captain should be supreme on his ship but some commanding officers wrapped around in a mantle of satisfaction at the punctilious way in which their orders are executed fail to make the subtle distinction between obedience to their orders and the fulfillment of their wishes. The captain's essential wish of course, is to have an efficient ship, one marked by smartness at drill, swift and correct maneuvers, an active, well-behaved crew, redounding to his prestige; but though his word is law he does not always succeed in getting his heart's desire. There is no way to make men reenlist against their will and on certain ships they cannot be prevented from deserting. Failure to reenlist and desertion are the enlisted man's reaction under defective discipline. The discipline may be administered in a spirit of intolerance, be characterized by high-handed methods and an excess of militarism or the reverse of all this, but unless there is in the cabin a profound appreciation of the human element, and if the ship is run without a complete understanding of the enlisted man's attitude to life and to the service, without a carefully developed policy based on a broad consideration of the times in which we live and of all the conditions that prevail, the desired results of navy training will not be obtained. Officers embarked for life in a military career are prone to forget that a certain stratum of society is made up of men who constantly shift from one occupation to another; from the automobile business to real estate, from that to life insurance, to selling goods and to an infinity of other pursuits. The enlisted man is similarly unstable, especially during a first or even second enlistment. He has no commission, no social and personal interests to hold him in the service, he has not chosen it as a career but entered it as an experiment and is easily diverted from an employment fraught with discomforts and privations and offering no glittering reward in the future. Necessary discomforts and privations he cheerfully endures but let the carelessness or callousness of a superior impose too much and the cord that holds him is easily snapped.
The loyalty which enlisted men display when their officers are in trouble or need is proverbial. They do not hesitate in times of stress or deadly peril to risk their lives even for an officer who is personally unpopular. This is accounted for by the fact that, grafted upon the best instincts of human nature, there are feelings of obligation to the shipmate, the partner in the vicissitudes of the sea, the leader. This loyalty and devotion calls for a corresponding recognition on the officer's part of the ties that bind together those who wear the uniform of the navy. This appreciation of common interests and a common lot, as well as of a common humanity, should manifest itself not by a relaxation of strict discipline on the part of the commanding officer and his associates in authority but rather by concerted measures to render the enlisted man's life as healthy, as happy, as natural as possible under the abnormal conditions that attend seagoing, abnormalities that fall most heavily on the young and untried recruits who are also those most likely to desert.
Perhaps the most important single asset that a commanding officer can possess for wisely conducting the internal administration of his ship is such a lively imagination that he can appreciate the feelings of others when petty disappointments and humiliations occur, for when these are reiterated they cause more desertions than some great thing.
Contrary to what many suppose it is not always the officer who was once an enlisted man himself that makes the considerate commander. Too often such a one has forgotten how he used to feel or else he belongs to that class of men who conceive that as things have been so they must always be. Unless he has the qualities specified by Taine in his immortal definition—"the most perfect gentleman is he whose intelligence is most cultivated, whose heart is most devoid of selfishness"—the ex-enlisted man's rule will be; less tolerable than that of the officer of very different antecedents possessed of delicate sensibilities, capable of broad concepts, surveying life on a broad horizon.
The Recruiting Officer and Desertion
It is legitimate, it is highly desirable, for the officer in charge of a recruiting station to wish to secure as many men as possible but he should realize from the start that for "the good of the service," which is the true life purpose of every officer, numbers count less than quality. We want good men and men with physical defects are not good for military purposes generally speaking. It is undeniable that in battle, in the ardor of attack, many a man with serious blemishes both physical and moral may make good, but there is something more trying than the day of battle and that is the long course of training with its monotonous round of daily duties, its unvarying discipline, its privations and all the artificial and unnatural conditions of life at sea.
No recruiting officer wants a blind or deaf man enlisted and he is willing enough to have the medical examiner reject exaggerated cases but he often regards his doctor as indiscreet and overzealous in turning away men with defects of a minor character and it not infrequently happens at a recruiting station that the officer in charge and the medical examiner are in constant disagreement. Young medical officers often are overzealous and older ones seem to take a delight in sticking to the letter of the law and the officer in charge thus comes to regard his examiner as a spoke in his wheel. This is unfortunate. The safe rule for the doctor is to reject if in doubt, because that represents the best interests of his employer and that employer is not the recruiting officer but the government.
It is important, therefore, for the officer in charge to have a thorough appreciation of the vast significance of apparently trifling defects. A man with a crooked nose or a facial blemish that makes him the subject of constant ridicule seems like good timber for fighting but will he be good material for four years of training and eight or twelve years of service? Now the doctor who has had experience at sea knows that three-fourths of the daily attendance at sick call is made up of men with apparently trifling defects and in 50 per cent of them the defects antedate enlistment. A coal passer with obstructed nasal passages must breathe through his mouth and that means a dry throat, catarrh and from this, perhaps, ear trouble later, etc. He is forever hanging around the sick bay or going there for treatment. A deck-force man with an old ear trouble or weak arches does the same. He is constantly late for or absent from drills and formations and periodically he has recurrences of deafness and discharge or declares himself unable to parade or stand a watch. Such a man is a nuisance in a division and unless unusually strong in morale is apt to become a loafer and shirker.
The apparently trivial defect at the recruiting office looms large at sea and with the first chagrin, disappointment or grievance the sufferer begins to magnify it for the purpose of getting a discharge or to avoid work. Often the man with a slight defect becomes hipped on the subject and comes to believe that he has a really serious ailment and the more disproportionate to its seriousness are his fears about himself the more valueless he becomes to the service.
The recruiting officer then should fully appreciate that the capable and experienced medical examiner who turns away one good man through excess of adherence to technical requirements usually turns away 50 whom he might perhaps pass technically but for his appreciation of service conditions and the conviction that such candidates would not last six months.
It might seem the part of wisdom to accept doubtful men on a chance because they can always be gotten rid of later by medical discharge but this is a superficial view of the case. A man who has a trifling ailment or defect and voluntarily enlists with it is not entitled to be surveyed the moment he becomes aggrieved at some detail of discipline or awakes to the fact that the navy is not all he had dreamed it to be. If he is refused a survey he at once begins to nurse a grievance, he feels he has been unjustly treated and so becomes a potential deserter.
Incalculable harm is done to the navy by accepting men who must eventually be surveyed or failing that will desert. Surveys are almost as demoralizing as court-martials and desertions, because in the minds of the dissatisfied they put a premium on infirmity. They are demoralizing not only to the ship but to the public. Men who are surveyed for defects antedating enlistment or desert because of physical defects and their consequences, have usually been in the service only long enough to experience the hardship inseparable from all beginnings and new enterprises and not long enough to appreciate the good features of the service. In the home communities to which they return, discharged men, or men who pass for such though actually deserters, must explain their early return and they do so at the navy's expense reviling and misrepresenting the service. They thus become foci of misunderstanding and hostility among people not too inclined to military obligations and often harboring a deep though latent hostility to the service for its supposedly harsh administration. The young officer feted and petted in strata of society from which we get no enlisted men (in times of peace) is apt to underestimate the importance of this spirit and attitude of the public. For purposes of recruiting we want the sympathy and esteem of the great middle class of the population. It is not by balls and parades that the navy is popularized but by the presence and testimony in countless communities of men who go home with an honorable discharge at the end of a completed enlistment, conscious of what the navy has done for them and eager to tell of it. The recruiting officer then should consider his service successful only in so far as he gets men who will stick and defectives do not stick. They fall by the wayside.
Be on good terms with your doctor. Do not let the young examiner feel that he incurs your displeasure every time he rejects a man but encourage him to maintain a high though just and reasonable standard. Make him feel that you will share the responsibility of accepting a man who impresses all observers with promise of real value to the service in spite of being a fraction of an inch or a pound below or above the set rules and on the other hand encourage him to turn away those who technically conform to requirements and yet through a variety of petty defects give good ground for the belief that there is a radical lack or a serious latent weakness concealed somewhere. Doctors are human like other people. If a battle ensues between recruiting officer and examining surgeon over every rejection the young examiner is liable to grow timid and pass anything, while the older man will get his back up and staunchly stick to the letter of the law. Harmony comes of frankness and mutual esteem and of a common purpose to think only of the ultimate good of the service as a whole. The medical requirements are based, like so many wise navy regulations, on wide experience of service conditions and requirements and of the underlying factors of health and resistance to disease and are not designed to secure men who simply conform to an arbitrary standard of physical proportions.
Medical officers are sometimes indifferent to their responsibilities or ignorant and inexperienced but on the other hand fairness compels the admission that indirect pressure is sometimes brought to bear on the medical examiner to squeeze men through as a matter of good nature or through a false conception of what makes for the reputation of the recruiting station and the recruiting officer.
Assuming that recruiting officer and examiner have used their utmost endeavor to determine the mental, moral and physical fitness of a candidate there remains one important measure for the prevention of desertion. It should be resorted to in advance of swearing him in. In a few well-chosen words the recruiting officer should explain the character of the obligations involved in the oath about to be administered and the lasting and terrible consequences of desertion. To the qualified candidate the swearing in is a solemn moment; the whole ordeal of examination with its novelty and formality has made an impression; he is flooded with new ideas and feelings. He will perhaps never again come into the hands of an officer while in such an impressionable state.
What an opportunity such an occasion offers for driving home one or two vital truths. The prospective recruit may be too upset to grasp the full significance of the obligations he is assuming but he probably does get the idea that he must not be a coward, go over to the enemy or run away from danger. Not one in a thousand perhaps fully realizes at the moment that once sworn in nothing but perjury and the sacrifice of his citizenship can get him out of the service simply because he may wish to leave. This is the time to picture desertion in its true light so that the candidate may appreciate from his first moment of service how radical and complete is the surrender of his personal rights. Say to him, for example: "Before you take the oath of allegiance to the United States, I warn you that once you have made that pledge you are a part of the navy and to leave it except by discharge in a legal manner is desertion. In time of war desertion is punishable by death. In time of peace you cannot be shot for deserting but you become an outcast in society, you cease to be a citizen of your country, you lose all right to be employed in any capacity by the government—letter carrier, postmaster, clerk, congressman, judge, whatever the future might bring. You cannot have the trust and confidence of your friends—they will turn from you as if you were a leper and you become a cause of shame and disgrace to yourself, your family and your home community. In civil life if you do not like your job you can chuck it, walk oft, go on strike. If you enter the military service and are not content you have to stay unless through sickness or because you are unsuitable the government decides it does not want yon. There is no running away. To do that is to brand yourself as a criminal, to earn a penitentiary sentence at the hands of a court-martial. You might escape detection for a month or a year or many years but sooner or later the fact that you deserted from the navy will leak out and until that happens you will be made miserable by your guilty secret.
"If you have an enemy he learns about it and gives you away just as you are planning to marry or get a good job. If you succeed in life and run for public office your rival discovers it and brings it up against you and you slink off in disgrace.
"I have done my duty in explaining this to you in advance. If you have not the courage to stick it out through thick and thin go now."
(Here the recruiting officer pauses and gives the weakling a bona fide chance to depart. He may even say to his yeoman: "Open the door.")
"Before you take this oath you must understand that there is no getting out. Have you made up your mind? Very well."
If any depart he need not be chagrined. He has done the government a real service. Some of them will eventually enlist. Those who do not are a good riddance.
It is incredible that the government should not exact some such procedure as this, but still more incredible that a recruiting officer in this day and generation can assume the responsibility of enlisting men without having made clear to the raw youth, the simple countryman or the heedless lad of the city, the seriousness of the step he is taking.
The time of all times to make the candidate realize the gravity of desertion is before he is sworn in. Everything you say and do before that step he recognizes as a loyal, friendly counsel. It is advice from man to man. Once sworn in he hears you as an officer to a subordinate. Your warning is then in the nature of a threat. It is a routine military duty on your part and he soon receives admonition with a totally different mental attitude.
Leaving out of account for a moment the moral damage done to his shipmates and the discredit brought upon the service by every desertion, consider a single desertion in terms of cash to the government.
The cost of a single trained recruit equals the salaries of officers and men at training station plus cost of upkeep of entire station for given period of training, all divided by output of recruits for said period.
The cost of a single enlistment equals the salaries of officers and men at recruiting office plus rent of building, publicity expenses for given period divided by number of recruits obtained for that period plus transportation and subsistence until recruit begins training.
The cost of desertion equals the cost of enlistment, plus cost of training, plus cost of trial and punishment (i.e., salaries of members of court, sentry, master at arms, clerical force, salaries of all reviewing authorities during the time devoted to the case, plus expenses of upkeep of penal institution to which the deserter is committed divided by number of inmates).
Compare all this with the cost involved in a two-minute talk to a group of candidates before they are sworn in, after say 20 minutes devoted to investigating the merits of each individual applicant.
The ideal recruiting officer is not he whose monthly and quarterly reports show the greatest number of men sworn in but rather he who has personally and painstakingly studied every candidate for at least a few moments and who would consider himself to be but an automaton and seriously neglectful of the full discharge of his duties if he merely swore in the men who have been passed by the doctor and arranged for their transportation to camp or training station.
A procession of human beings files through the recruiting office. They are not mere "cannon fodder" but plastic material for the navy to make into better citizens through its school of discipline and experience. The recruiting office is like the entrance examination at college. Those who are not certainly capable of profiting by the opportunity offered are not wanted and the recruiting officer should not pass a candidate about whom he has not attempted to make a thoughtful forecast based on the medical report and his own rapid summing up of the applicant before him.
Even if there were no obligation in the matter what a field this duty affords for a study of human physiognomy and human character. The systematic study of recruits, the daily habit of trying by scrutiny, judicious inquiries and a verbal probing of their minds and hearts will develop enormously your capacity to read and estimate and handle men throughout your career and will save your recruiting office from becoming the resort of the bum, the vagrant, the embryonic or fully developed crook and the defective just as the medical examination protects it from men on crutches or those wearing glass eyes.
The Medical Officer and Desertion
The medical officer should fully realize his comprehensive responsibility for the health and comfort of the men. Merely to deploy skill in the treatment of acute cases of illness is not to discharge one's full duty. He has a larger province than this and better medical attention does not mean devoting more care to his patients but a full consideration and proper handling of many border-line cases; the detection of the feeble in mind or body; discriminating separation of the sick from the well; the impartial investigation of suspected malingerers and reporting them with full proof to the proper authority; the request for survey and discharge of men who daily demonstrate in minor details of behavior their incapacity to adapt themselves to military life. Again, men who from some abnormality of temperament, development or physical condition are unable to discharge the duties of their ratings in a satisfactory manner should be considered with a view to discharge from the service because punishment is sooner or later meted out to them for failure and, even if the failure was only due in part to a disability they cannot help, there results a sense of having been unjustly treated which constantly leads to desertion.
It is important to see that men have the capacity of mind and body necessary for the duties of their rating. There is a special type of physique for the coal passer; there is a standard of capacity and endurance for the trying duties of the engine room. Without going outside of his legitimate province, without being a busybody, without meddlesome interference but with patience, tact and judgment the medical officer can do much to help bring about a proper adjustment of man to job, and adjustment of this kind is indispensable for harmonious production.
The conscientious and capable medical officer must at an early stage of his career get away from the idea that his function is only lo treat the sick. It is his duty to concern himself with everything that bears upon the health and comfort of the personnel—food, clothing, ventilation, the relief of deadening ennui, the elimination of anything that may indirectly lower resistance and tone. When he sees an individual whose shoes are too small for comfort or worn out; a man whose clothing does not give him adequate protection; one whose personal habits are prejudicial to himself or others; whose sleeping quarters are damp; who works by insufficient illumination, he should make the circumstances the subject of representations to proper authority.
It is not enough, however, to make verbal or written recommendations and if they receive little or no attention to feel that the blame has been lifted from his shoulders. The zeal, the intelligence, the industry, the reliability of the man who makes a recommendation has a great deal to do with the action it obtains. Some men can get things done and others cannot. The medical officer who constantly fails to receive the needed cooperation and backing should not shrug his shoulders and drop the matter accusing his superiors of indifference and neglect but should subject his own conduct to very close scrutiny. Has he been indifferent, careless, neglectful, perfunctory in the past and have his representations received only such consideration as his reputation deserved? The medical officer who talks little and does much; who is occupied heart and soul with the welfare of the men; who triumphs over the temptation to spare himself trouble and who with genuine interest combines respectful demeanor with tact and perseverance will accomplish much.
The medical officer's ability to mingle informally with the men; his intimate contact with them at the bedside; the numerous examinations he is called on to make; the frequent occasions when he attends their families all give him opportunities for getting the viewpoint and sentiment of the crew individually and collectively. To know and understand them is to be able to help them and to become also a valuable adjunct to the authorities in maintaining discipline and morale and in preventing desertion. His influence is indirect but not the less powerful for that. The judicious advice, the sympathy, the encouragement that a doctor can impart by a friendly smile or a word in season can be an enormous help to good government on board ship if he is alive to his opportunities and anxious to live up to them.