Michelle Manhart, Air Force NCO Who Posed For Playboy, Removed From Active Duty And Discharged
It’s the right decision, as I pointed out in my previous post about the former Sgt. Manhart (it’s hard to keep the respect of the troops you’re in charge of if they see you as a Playboy Bunny), but there are other issues here worth discussing aside from whether or not she should have been discharged.
Namely, why more troops who want out of the military don’t do something like this.
This sort of behavior is a sure-fire ticket out of the military. While most troops don’t probably have the, ahem, prerequisites necessary for a pictorial spread in Playboy it wouldn’t be all that hard for them to start up a blog where they write posts and publish pictures of themselves that the military would find unbecoming. As James Joyner points out, you could call it the “Maxwell Klinger” discharge. Klinger was the character on M.A.S.H. who took to cross-dressing as a means to get out of the war zone.
That more troops don’t do that in this time of war is perhaps a testament to the integrity of the people who serve in the military and their devotion to that service. And perhaps an argument against the idea, posited by many on the left, that our troops are “tired” and “worn out” and “desperate” to get out of the military.
