An officer and a gentleman: why the concept isn't as silly as it may seem.

• Author: Summers, Harry G., Jr.

Good military order and Discipline." The phrase itself has an old-fashioned Victorian ring to it. Not surprisingly it was greeted by mockery and derision when it was evoked by the military as the basis for what Democratic Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa called the military's "overly moralistic" crackdown on adultery in the ranks. "I'll tell you, the Pentagon is not in touch with reality in this so-called question of fraternization," said Republican Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott of Mississippi. "I mean, get real. You're still dealing with human beings."

On June 7, 1997, New York Times columnist Russell Baker spoke for many when he questioned the "sexual hysteria now racking the military." "What else was to be expected," he asked. "The military is not a Boy Scout Camporee. It is teaching young people to kill other young people, a work that does not prosper when men are expected to behave like gentlemen and women like ladies."

Baker could not be more wrong. It is precisely because the military is about killing people and destroying things that their leaders must have the strength of character inherent in a gentleman and gentlewoman. Otherwise, as Carl von Clausewitz, the great Prussian philosopher of war, warned some 165 years ago, "the mass will drag [them] down to the brutish world where danger is shirked and shame is unknown." What happens when leaders fail to act like "gentlemen" and "gentlewomen" is as near as today's headlines.

Col. Harry G. Summers Jr., a veteran of the Korean and Vietnam Wars, is a syndicated columnist for the Los Angeles Times and editor of Vietnam magazine.

Mob Rule

"European Inquiry Says Serbs' Forces Have Raped 20,000" read the headline of a January 8, 1993 New York Times story describing how Serb soldiers had raped -- and in many cases killed -- Muslim women "as part of a deliberate pattern of abuse aimed at driving them from their homes in Bosnia and Herzegovina." "Killing Spree Blamed on Troops in New Congo," announced the June 8, 1997 Washington Post, reporting that troops in the old Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) "have killed hundreds of people and torched scores of houses in attacks on villages."

Such breakdowns of decency are not limited to Serbian soldiers gleefully carrying out their leader's grotesque "ethnic cleansing" policy, nor to ill-trained and undisciplined African soldiers embarking on wild killing sprees. Western armies are also susceptible. "Belgian soldiers go on trial for torture," read the June 23, 1997 Washington Times, telling of how an elite Belgian Army unit in Somalia "roasted a child over an open fire." And the June 25, 1997 Baltimore Sun reported that...