PERSPECTIVE ON THE MILITARY : How About a Few Parades? : Do we still have it? Can we still make things that work? Do our people care enough to do a good job? Ask the Iraqis.

Remember when people called the Dallas Cowboys “America’s Team?� Well, America’s team now wears brown “cammies,� or flies airplanes or drives tanks. The pay isn’t all that great, but they’re out there for us, doing the job we need them to do.

And doing it damned well.

All those weapons--you know, American weapons, made by the country that can’t do anything right?--that you’ve heard so much about on “60 Minutes.� The M1 Abrams main battle tank--a dog, critics said, the turbine engine won’t work in the desert (originally made by Chrysler, would you believe?). The M2/M3 Bradley fighting vehicle that can’t swim very well (good thing it’s in a desert, eh?) and can’t cross ditches. The infrared-imaging Maverick air-to-surface missile that, critics said, was more likely to attack a telephone pole. The overly complex airplanes that cost too much and were always broken. So many critics, “defense experts� and self-styled reformers who think a Swiss Army knife is not user-friendly enough have made a career of trashing them. And on the very night before our people went in, they were still warning us that nothing would work.

I suppose they never asked the Iraqis how effective our weapons were. That is understandable--one doesn’t want to disturb a perfectly good theory with facts, right?

Imagine that you are a Soviet fighter pilot, and you’ve trained for 10 years to duke it out over Central Europe with the F-15 Eagle and the Patriot surface-to-air missile. You see that no country has ever killed the Eagle, air-to-air, and then you realize that you had actually thought about trying your luck in an airplane against a missile that kills other missiles! Pass the vodka, Boris. Oh, yeah, and now there’s this new beast that Lockheed makes called the F-117A--people don’t even know where it’s been until they hear the bang.

Do you suppose that all those anti-defense “experts� might actually have been a ploy, an elaborate CIA trick to lull our country’s enemies into a false sense of security?

But the worst thing of all was what they said about our kids--those young men and women who transform lifeless steel and computer chips into living, deadly force. People count more than machines, always have, always will. The American military, they loved to say, hasn’t done anything right since 1950 or so--the Inchon landings in Korea. Our soldiers are inept, drawn from the dregs of society, nearly illiterate, poorly trained, poorly motivated--careerists. You’ve heard all of this, right?

Only a week ago, people were worrying out loud about the body bags that would be coming home. Well, some will, and nothing can change that. But the “experts� warned us that we were facing “battle-hardened� Iraqi troops, the fourth-largest army in the world, and this was something we just ought not to do. After all, we barely dealt with Grenada, and really made a mess of Panama, right?

They were wrong--they’ve been wrong all along the way. There is no truer measure of any society than its armed forces. In uniform you will find the best and worst, the tools, the people, the ideas, all distilled in one place. Does America still have it? Ask the Iraqis. Can we still make things that work? Ask the Iraqis. Do our people care enough to do things right? Ask the Iraqis.

Pretty soon, of course, the “experts� will say that, well, this never was a real test of American power. The Iraqi army was grossly overrated (by them, but they won’t say that), and because of that we really can’t draw too many lessons from this. We were pretty lucky to have had such an easy time. They’ll dig up numbers to show how dumb and lucky we were, and that our weapons didn’t really work all that well. Already my local paper has run a lengthy story saying that about 15% of our smart bombs miss their targets. Gracious. After all, the “experts� must have something to talk about.

But that’s not really important, is it?

We did something right this time. The President had the good sense to let these people do their job, without Lyndon Johnson’s crushing oversight, without Jimmy Carter sitting by a radio and giving orders. We gave our people the tools, the training and the confidence, and let them do their jobs--and guess what? It’s working. Yes, America still does have it, when we have the good sense to use our people and our tools properly. Remarkable, isn’t it? One more thought to ponder--might Vietnam have worked out like this if we had made the same decisions in 1965 that George Bush made in 1991? We’ll never know, but think about it anyway.

Pretty soon they’ll be coming home, the regulars and the reservists. Not all of them, unfortunately, because it never has and probably never will work that way. Even so, they will come home with their heads up. Like their fathers and grandfather did 45 years ago, they went away to do something important. They will have stopped an evil force. They will have saved people from something. Certainly they will have liberated one country, and maybe Iraq will have a chance at something better now, because of what they did. Civilization is bought in blood. We’ve spilled some of ours, but we’ve gotten something for it. Maybe something important.

When they come home, it’s your job to remember who they are, and whom they worked for. Because of the many reservists who’ve gone to work for us, there will be a lot of towns with people coming back from a tough, dangerous assignment. And they’re coming home winners. We owe them.

How about a few parades? How about the collective thank you that was cruelly denied to the last class of American warriors? We give parades to baseball and football teams who win at games. These kids now finishing their job are America’s Team. They wear our colors. Can we do any less for them? The military has learned its lessons from Vietnam. What about the rest of us?