COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Military Service: General
Everybody's Business
We Were Soldiers Once, and Broke
Tyler Hicks, The New York Times
July 17, 2005
Combat soldiers in Iraq receive little in monetary rewards, but have
made it possible for people on Wall Street and in corporate America to
work in peace.
Finance guys take risks that would terrify most of us. They carry
immense burdens of fear and retribution on their shoulders. It is a
wonder to me that the managers of hedge funds and the people who trade
derivatives can even sleep at night. I know I wouldn't be able to catch
one wink.
Still, when I read the daily news I am often struck by something that
has nothing to do with the finance classes I took at Columbia or Yale,
but in a way has everything to do with them.
Maybe I can summarize the dissonance in this little example: In the
financial section of the newspaper or the business magazine, there is
an article about a man, Philip J. Purcell, who has just left a huge
financial services company after his performance was deemed subpar, and
he's taking home a $113.7 million severance package.
Then there's an article about the fellow who is replacing him, and
about how he was offered something like $25 million a year. A fellow on
the job just three months, whose main quality was apparently loyalty to
the subpar-performing manager, is getting $32 million.
And in a publication called Trader magazine, there's an article about
the top hedge fund and commodities fund managers, and they are getting
$250 million to $500 million a year each, personally.
And I think to my little self: "Wow, that's a ton of money. But I guess
they do something very useful, helping to allocate capital and to make
money for the shareholders and for the people who invest with them."
Then I turn from the financial news to the general news section of the
paper, or to the barrage of e-mail messages I get from people in the
Army and Navy and Marines and Air Force, and I read about men and women
who are taking fire from insurgents in Iraq and being blown up by
homemade bombs that the Pentagon refers to as improvised explosive
devices. The people being blown up are maybe corporals, and they get
$1,900 a month, including combat pay.
Or I read a letter from a buddy of a member of the Navy Seals who was
killed recently in Afghanistan when his helicopter went down, and he
was getting maybe $1,950 a month, fighting the Taliban and fighting Al
Qaeda (which killed 3,000 innocent men, women and children on American
soil on Sept. 11, 2001). That means the guy at the hedge fund is
getting as much as, say, 10,000 of these corporals per annum.
What keeps going through my mind is that there is a big, yet always
unstated, connection between these two groups of men and women - on one
hand, the megastars of Wall Street and corporate boardrooms, with their
vast paychecks, yachts and horse farms in the Hamptons, and, on the
other, the grunts in body armor chasing down terrorists half a world
away in 130-degree heat.
The link is that the men and women of Wall Street and of corporate
America do their very important work - and it is vital work, indeed -
inside a box of security and safety created by the courage of the men
and women who wear battle dress uniforms and ride down the highway of
death in Iraq in armored personnel carriers handling machine guns.
The men and women in the Armani suits, who get the huge paychecks - and
who, again, do work I sincerely appreciate and admire - could not exist
for long if they were not being shielded by the men and women in
uniforms and boots.
And I do not mean only the military. I am also talking about the police
officers, the firefighters and other first responders; the Department
of Homeland Security folks; the airport security people; and the people
in the C.I.A., the F.B.I. and the National Security Agency. All of them
offer their time and their lives and their families' sanity to protect
the country.
That means, among other things, protecting the free markets in finance
- and in ideas, religions and human feelings. There would be no finance
section of the newspaper without the protection of those whose job is
to protect and to serve.
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