America’s generals: Medal-festooned rock stars

War may be hell, said Rajiv Chandrasekaran in The Washington Post, but when they’re stateside, America’s four-star generals live like pampered rock stars. That’s one of the startling revelations to emerge from the adultery scandal that toppled Gen. David Petraeus, who was once escorted by 28 police motorcycles as he travelled from Central Command HQ to a lavish party at socialite Jill Kelley’s Tampa mansion. He and other senior generals, we’re now learning, enjoyed “an array of perquisites befitting a billionaire,” including palatial homes, gourmet chefs, drivers, and aides to carry their bags, press their uniforms, and cut their lawns. When they travel, the generals each have a C-40 outfitted with beds—the military equivalent of a 737. Such pampering and adulation, some critics say, may have distorted the judgment of Petraeus and Afghanistan commander Gen. John Allen, now in trouble for exchanging thousands of flirtatious emails with Kelley. Thomas Ricks, author of a critical new book called The Generals, says that“being a four-star commander is like being a combination of Bill Gates and Jay-Z.”

The problem is that Americans have always put their generals on a pedestal, said Daniel Nasaw in BBC.co.uk.Ten generals have been elected president since the nation’s founding, despite the rather different skill sets involved in fighting wars and governing a nation. Generals used to be hard-bitten, bloodthirsty warriors, said Lucian Truscott in The New York Times. In recent decades, they’ve grown soft and pampered, with out-of-control egos. Petraeus, who failed to pacify Afghanistan and had middling results in Iraq, was typical of the breed—vain, preening, publicity-hungry figures who festoon their chests with dozens of medals and then celebrate their own faux greatness “on talk shows and photo spreads.” His affair, naturally, involved a woman who wrote such a fawning biography about him she can only be considered a groupie.

Generals may not be “perfect human beings,” said Fred Hiatt in The Washington Post,but they don’t deserve all this schadenfreude. Petraeus and Allen have both spent most of the last decade in chaotic war zones, and have “done hard, honorable duty for their country.” Does that excuse misbehavior, or “cushy lifestyles”? No. But let’s remember that these are people who have made sacrifices unimaginable to us. “When this is all over, I hope we get straight what rates an asterisk in their life stories, and what really counts.”

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