Secretary of Defense William Cohen may well be right that the threat of the biological weapon anthrax is real and in the hands of nations that might use it against U.S. soldiers. But even Pentagon officials recently admitted that its plan to protect those soldiers with a vaccine is not working and that dwindling stocks of the vaccine would cause the number of vaccinations it administered to drop sharply. As one member of the Bangor-based 101st Air National Guard Refueling Wing said this week, “A lot of people are breathing a sigh of relief.”

The lack of confidence in the program is not based on numbers – a senior biological weapons expert from the Food and Drug Administration testified before Congress last week that of the 2 million doses of the vaccine given in the last decade, 1,404 caused any reported adverse reaction and only 73 of those were serious. And no case, according to the official, could be confidently linked to the vaccine. The doubt among soldiers – nearly 300 have so far refused to be vaccinated, countless others have been injected and simply hoped for the best – may be traced more to the vaccine’s sole source, Bioport Corp. of Lansing, Mich., which was forced to halt production of the vaccine after the FDA found numerous safety and procedural violations.

The financially troubled Bioport and the particular kind of vaccine it makes, which some doubt would be effective against airborne or multiple-strain germ warfare, are losers for the Pentagon. To continue with Bioport after so many difficulties is to invite further morale problems without adequately addressing the efficacy of its product.

Sen. John Warner, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, suggested recently that the Pentagon uy out the vaccine maker. It is an idea that probably already has occurred to Pentagon officials, but worth pursuing anyway. A major shift in the vaccination process is one way to regain the confidence of members of the armed services and their families. Short of buying out the company, the Pentagon might try to make the vaccination program attractive enough to another company to take it on. Certainly, finding a second supplier would be a lot faster than the Pentagon trying to get a program of its own going.

Whichever course Secretary Cohen eventually chooses, he will have a hard time regaining the confidence of service members unless he severs ties to the company the Pentagon currently supports.

A new book to make

an old soldier cry

Of one thing I am sure after reading Stephanie Gutmann’s eye-opening book, “The Kinder, Gentler Military,” published earlier this year by Scribner at 25 bucks a pop: My old politically incorrect Army drill sergeant would be out on his keister in a New York minute, court-martialed to a farethewell, were he to somehow be reincarnated as a modern day basic training instructor. The military brass, who, in Gutmann’s words, “have handed over their soldiers to social planners in love with an unworkable vision of a politically correct utopia,” would see to that.

While the platoon was on its Mandatory Daily March To Nowhere Just For The Hell Of It, the no-nonsense Sgt. Jankowski, fresh from combat in Korea, would shout the command: “Everyone except Jardine… Change Step…HOO!” The maneuver completed, he’d add, by way of justification for his order, “I can’t see you, Jardine. But I know (bleeping) well you were out of step!”And, Jardine, of course, had been until everyone else shuffle-stepped to get aligned with this saddest of sad-sack’s more laid-back version of the pace.

I get the impression from Gutmann’s book that in today’s touchy-feely army, Sgt. Jankowski would no sooner get such inspiring words out of his mouth than he’d be written up by the company commander for hurting feelings above and beyond the call of duty and hauled off to the stockade to await his pending dishonorable discharge.

If ever there were a book to make an old GI cry in his beer, this would be it. Gutmann’s premise is that the county’s leadership in the past decade has – seemingly at the behest of the feminist movement – become so obsessed with “gender-norming” the military to make it “a force that looks like America,” in the words of Bill Clinton, that it has screwed up things royally.

Gender-norming, or adding more women to the military mix, was not necessarily a bad idea. But the implementation of the concept in this last bastion of maleness has left a lot to be desired, and the result has been a double standard you wouldn’t believe. “Old army” stalwarts who squawk too strenuously at the unfairness of it all can quickly find themselves in the unemployment line. Good bye, career. So long, pension.

“In the chase for women and to cajole them along once they managed to bag a few, the obsequious services (less so the Marines) allowed double standards to influence everything from recruiting, to basic training graduation, to moral conduct, to promotion qualifications. Women were allowed to come into basic training at dramatically lower fitness levels and then to climb lower walls, throw shorter distances, and carry lighter packs when they got there,” Gutmann writes. Her book abounds with horror stories about the resulting negative effect on troop morale and the much-ballyhooed “unit cohesion.” She predicts disaster should women be allowed in combat jobs, a part of the feminist agenda that, so far, has been thwarted by the generals.

In this huge social experiment designed to feminize the military without turning it into something that is not the military, it is important that the folks in charge remain wedded to the idea that sex differences are just a societal construct, erasable with a few strong lectures and a bit of sensitivity training, Gutmann suggests. “Achieving a force that recruits, assigns, and promotes in a ‘gender-neutral’ way means believing that (after the requisite amount of sensitivity training, of course) men and women can eat, sleep, tent, march and haul loads together like a merry band of brothers without the fireworks and histrionics that have characterized sexual … er, gender…relations throughout human history,” she writes. One should not bet the farm that this particular tide can be turned.

It is telling that the Marine Corps – the only branch of the service to maintain separate, and tough, boot camp training for men and women and the only branch to have stood its ground in the politically correct nineties – is the one service that has not had recruiting problems.

And speaking of tougher standards…Watching from the sidelines as grizzled old World War II vets proudly marched across the Bangor-Brewer Bridge in the Independence Day parade, it was difficult to imagine that these men could have accomplished so much on the battlefield without training that included, as Gutmann puts it, “The hard, mean, standards that sometimes end up being +not fully inclusive,’ the kind that occasionally give a young person a temporary loss of self-esteem.”

If the goal is to produce a fighting force whose first priority is military readiness, better a temporary loss of self-esteem than a permanent double standard.

NEWS Kent Ward lives in Winterport. His e-mail address is olddawg@bangornews.infi.net.

Bush,

Gore differ

By Marie Cocco

They’re both for fatherhood.

Now there’s a compelling reason to leave for work early, squeeze yourself through traffic bottlenecks and stand in line at a school cafeteria waiting to vote.

Al Gore and George W. Bush have succeeded in making the run-up to the big political conventions a snore. The country is asleep, telling pollsters it’s not paying attention to the presidential campaign. Less than half the public thinks it “really matters” who is elected president anyway.

“The campaign is doing the opposite of what a presidential campaign is supposed to do,” said Andrew Kohut, pollster for the Pew Center for the People and the Press. “It’s making the candidates look more alike instead of more different.”

According to the latest Pew poll, only half the public thinks Gore and Bush have differing positions on the issues. About a third believe they are similar, and the rest just don’t know what to think.

Now, folks, I hate to interrupt a good nap as much as anyone.