Mr. Buckley, I am, like Jason, an ex-soldier. I verify that the man is telling it like it is. He should be believed.

And before we start, the way you write in italics is, as per the instructions on the posting page, to surround the italicized text with the proper formatting tags.

Your difficulty in your first post seemed to be about processing a very simple concept: In the course of an enlistment, it's not like a day job--it's 24/7.

At my own day job, I am also barred from making political, religious, or discriminatory statements in the workplace. I have no right to free speech; help help, I'm being oppressed! I also don't get a vote in the way the company's run unless I'm the guy running it. You allude in your second, more reasonable post to this concept as it applies to the workplace and how it's been fought over, suggesting that ought to be carried over into the military.

I could stand up at my company and say all kinds of ill-advised things and exercise my free speech. If my boss doesn't like that, he gets to fire me and hire someone else who's not an idiot. Have I at any time in that scenario "signed away" my "inalienable rights"?

No. But am I effectively prevented from exercising them, even as a perfectly free civilian? Yes. So too with soldiers. Only they, as mentioned, are effectively on the job 24/7, even in peacetime.

If you're in the military, you don't get fired. You get discharged or, depending on the specifics, you get punished in-house. Try getting a job for the rest of your life with a dishonorable discharge or a bad service record on your background check any time it's looked at. I'm honestly shocked that I would even have to explain this to somebody.

There's a chain of command, and you personally disliking where that chain ends is not a right you get to express in the military. Neither would that be a quality that we would want in a military. You don't call for a debate on the orders you've received; you carry them out.

This is why a call to debate the rights of soldiers to free speech is completely barking up the wrong tree. If I had to explain why this is necessary...well, again, that seems so obvious as to be needless to say. But if you give soldiers the right to dissent, then they will whether it's "legitimate" or not (by whose standard, on what facts, etc...at which point we are in endless, pointless debate; we're also, and here's the actual point, not accomplishing any military mission).

Find me one standing military in the world, or in any recorded history of the world to date, that allows or allowed this. Good luck with your search. You may not like the reasons this is done. But there are reasons and they function as intended.

This is also why Mr. Benjamin's article is important, and why it provides a needed service, because military members often can't speak out for themselves, very literally. In fact, comparatively speaking, they hardly ever can.

Is it ironic? That you have no rights and no freedom, but can defend it for those who do? Sure is. We career murderers (as some other posters here have as much as outright said that servicepeople are) called that "duty" and "sacrifice", understandably very abstract concepts to those who have never served. Did I miss my freedom of expression while I was on active duty, often wish it were otherwise? Sure did. Lots. But I also understood the need, the duty, and the mission first.

Those who have been in understand that the military doesn't get its own opinion. When called, it serves. When Clinton calls it to Bosnia and to Haiti, it goes. When Bush calls it to Iraq, it goes.

How this simple fact is eluding the more rabid extreme-left-wingers posting here is beyond me. You'd think that the military is some kind of evil Republican voting bloc with a mind of its own. It's not. It's made up of people, and those people are not the ones who get to say where it goes and what it does. They're people like you, warts and all. Kindly start treating them as such.