Taking Liberty for Granted

A couple of weeks ago I received a wall calendar from my insurance company, USAA. I’ve been doing business with them since I was a second lieutenant in training at Chanute Air Force Base in Rantoul, Illinois (“shoot me, don’t Chanute me”), and I like the calendars they send their clients. Decorating your office with pictures of fighter aircraft may not be your cup of tea, but I like it just fine. It reminds me of a part of my life I’m proud of (even if I’m glad I start my day not by a 7 a.m. flightline launch but with a genteel cup of joe in my bathrobe).

At least, I liked the calendar until this year, when I opened the calendar to its first month–December, 2005–and saw a picture of a deployed soldier in desert cammies, sitting in front of a tent reading a letter from home, with this caption:

“It is easy to take liberty for granted, when you have never had it taken from you.” — Dick Cheney, Vice President of the United States

Normally a quote from someone connected to the military would include the department, years of service, and highest rank. But Dick Cheney didn’t serve in the military. He had “other priorities”–things to do, people to see, unpleasantness to avoid–that made it terribly inconvenient to send his hiney into the military in service to his country, let alone serve in the bloody conflict we were entangled in back in the 1960s.

For August, 2006, the USAA calendar shows a combat helicopter with a quote from Norman Schwarzkpof: “It doesn’t take a hero to order men into battle. It takes a hero to be one of those men who goes into battle.” I doubt anyone within USAA strategically placed this quote in response to Cheney’s words. But it is ironic to compare the words of a real war hero with the empty word pudding of a man who would live to send young people into a battle he would never have chosen to have fought.