Djelloul Marbrook

John McCain, who knows a thing or two about the Navy, thinks military recruits should be instructed in our foreign policy. But foreign policies fluctuate with our political EKG, while our national ideals, however soiled they may be by scare tactics, hold fast.

My most memorable experience in Navy boot camp in the early 1950s at Bainbridge, Maryland, was being shown the 1943 film The Ox-Bow Incident, starring Henry Fonda. Each and every one of us knew the United States Navy wanted us to know that a man may be unjustly accused and lynched and that it was up to each of us to stand, like Henry Fonda, against the terroristic atmosphere in which men may be wrongly accused and even executed.

We filed out of that building into the hot summer sunlight awed and silent. The United States Navy had told us we were embarked upon a great project of upholding the flinty ideals Henry Fonda had expressed in that famous wartime movie. Not for nothing was such a film made while we were fighting formidable enemies of our dearest beliefs. We got the message. Loud and clear.

I can’t imagine after all these years that instructing our recruits in foreign policy could be half as important as showing them such a film. I don’t know what the sailors and Marines with whom I served would have made of Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo. (I remember playing baseball at Gitmo.) But I choose to believe that those of us who saw The Ox-Bow Incident might have believed that the enlistees at Abu Ghraib had been given unlawful orders. Orders for which no commissioned officer has been prosecuted.—DM