Oh My God, We Can't Have Our Soldiers Exposed to Anything Dangerous!

Doesn't the Dept. of Defense have a few things better to occupy itself with? m/r 

WWII "K" Rations: Watch out for the processed canned
cheese and that fruit bar too.

How Hard Should It Be for a Soldier to Get a Smoke? | National Review Online

By Charles C. W. Cooke 10-10-14

The Defense Department wants to ban tobacco sales on bases and ships. 

When our boys light up,” the Bull Durham Tobacco Company assured customers in 1941, “the Huns will light out.” And so, four years and tens of millions of cigarettes later, they did.

This image, of enervated soldiers finding consolation and inspiration in tobacco, has a long and storied history. From the mud and steel at Argonne and Belleau Wood through to the rubble-strewn streets of Fallujah, the most iconic photographs of war have invariably featured cigarettes. During World War I, the British government noticed that “almost every letter from the front contains a request for ‘something to smoke.’” In Korea, Camel sought to establish itself as the brand of choice for the discerning infantryman. And, even within the last decade, the tabloids have designated American forces as butt-kicking “Marlboro men.” As American soldier Colby Buzzell explained to the Daily Beast in 2009, for many soldiers, “cigarettes and war are inseparable.” “Unlike what you see in the recruiting commercials,” Buzzell recalled, “most of wartime is spent doing nothing except waiting to be told by someone what to do,” and, if you can find any tobacco, whiling away the hours with a “smoke and joke.”

The tradition, however, is under attack. In the 1980s, President Reagan’s defense secretary ordered the military to arrange “an intense anti-smoking campaign . . . at all levels of all Services.” Under President Clinton, servicemen were barred from smoking in government-owned facilities. And now, if the powers that be get their way, Buzzell’s “inseparable” partners may become even further estranged. “In an effort to curb high smoking rates,” Politico’s Jeremy Herb recorded on Monday, “Congress and the Defense Department are mulling over a potential ban on selling tobacco products — cigarettes, cigars and chewing tobacco — on military bases and ships.” The idea’s progenitor, Chuck Hagel, is not messing around. A department-wide review is already under way and, should the Department of Defense decide to go through with the alteration, the fight could flare up as early as “the lame-duck congressional session.”

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