Relatedly, on the trade-offs of the smoking abstinence movement, I'm just sayin'...
Posted on 08/11/2019 10:53:24 AM PDT by re_tail20
Mention of the American military-industrial complex conjures up images of massive weapons procurement programs and advanced technologies: supersonic bombers, strategic missiles, armor-plated tanks, nuclear submarines, and complex space systems. However, a key element of the military lifestyle for many years was not a weapon or even a machine, but one of the world’s most highly engineered consumer products: the manufactured cigarette.
U.S. soldiers used to smoke often in historical footage, so why don’t they anymore? Why are U.S. military officers now banned from smoking in uniform on some installations? Looking back at military smoking culture, stark distinctions separate the past and the present: Hardly anyone smokes in public on bases today. There are no cigarette billboards, no smoke breaks on the rifle range, no ash trays in the squadron bar, and no smoke-filled post-mission briefing rooms.
The demise of soldierly smoking during the 20th century is a story of power, politics, culture, and money. The nearly 90-year-long relationship reveals how difficult it can be to extricate the government from corporate collaboration once companies get entrenched in partnerships. And, of course, when an intensely passionate affair turns sour, the fists—and the lobbyists—come out.
But the love between the Army and the cigarette all started rather innocently on the World War I battlefield. After a year of war, the Army decided to give out cigarettes to enlisted men because they wanted to keep them calm during battle and free of boredom. The Army was aided, ironically, by the Y, which also handed out billions more manufactured cigarettes to soldiers. For its part, the Y wanted to keep men from liquor and sex workers. The vice of manufactured cigarette smoking was the happy compromise from which everyone got something.
Soon Y volunteers could be found in every corner of the frontlines providing “loosies”...
(Excerpt) Read more at zocalopublicsquare.org ...
Subtitle
A 1918 Policy Devised to Calm Soldiers’ Nerves Sparked a Bad Habit That Was Difficult to Stop .
Yep. I remember the old Vietnam or Korean War C-rats with a little 4 or 5 pack of cigarettes in every meal.
Semper Fi!
Smoking go way back before we were even a country and the US Military is not the nexus of it...
Silliness
Relatedly, on the trade-offs of the smoking abstinence movement, I'm just sayin'...
“U.S. soldiers used to smoke often in historical footage, so why don’t they anymore?”
Because they are not lying in a foxhole wondering if they will be alive come sunup? In that respect, given the rise of atheism in recent years, the old saying went “There are no atheists in foxholes”.
In Nam we’d get cartons and cartons of cigs dropped off in the field. We’d take what we wanted and bury the rest.
On the other hand, wouldn’t soldiers smoking give away their position to the enemy? I always wondered about that.
One of the first things I learned in the suevice went something like this,.
Take five!
You and you aren’t smoking, come with me.
Bingo. As someone who is doing some serious research of the American Indian Wars right now, I can guarantee that smoking wasn’t started by the “military industrial complex” during WWI.
Today's military is very fitness-oriented. Unhealthy vices such as smoking and drinking excessively are frowned upon, especially among leadership.
They taught me how to drink. I’m pretty good at it.
At night aim for the glow of the enemy's cigarette.
Yeh right....In Colonial Times....tobacco was used as currency.
My Grandfather started smoking when he was in the Army during WWII. He never stopped until he died of emphysema at the age of 77.
I like to watch old war movies. In the scenes where a soldier is wounded the first thing that his buddies and the medic do to help him is to fire up a cigarette and put it between his lips.
“Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em!” was what I heard in my time in.
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