We turned off the paved road that leads from the marine base near Twentynine Palms, California onto a sandy section of land, cutting from the base towards town. The driver pushed the accelerator towards the floorboard and the backend of the pickup truck fishtailed before catching a rivet in the slick sand, sending the truck and its involuntarily devoted passengers jumping between the dunes at over 70 mph.

"This is the song we listened to before going on raids," the driver shouted over the existing music. He turned it up. The driver, a marine corporal, veteran of two tours in Iraq (most recently in Ramadi), was set to be discharged from the Marine Corps today. He pushed "next." And I furtively grabbed the seat as 110 dB of Dope’s dubious hit "Die Motherfucker Die" quaked through the cab.

We’d just finished touring the base with our guide: seven-tons, howitzers, M1A1 Abrams tanks, a lake of sewage that smelled exactly like a lake of sewage, dorms advertising "9" days without an alcohol-related incident, a gym advertising a "bp" contest on May 7. We ran to the top of the Sand Monster, a ten-story hill that falls half a step for every step you take – deadly in bare feet and jeans, just exhausting. Boots, as well as officers, do it 20 times in an hour. We ran an obstacle course, reverse flips over bars, leaps for wood planks, over-under-over, scale a wall, climb a rope, failing to overcome a third of the obstacles. An officer on the base holds the record for running that fucking thing 48 times in a row.

Back on dry (paved) land, I was told by a woman in the back seat that I look like I’d just seen a ghost. If I had, he looked like a dead motherfucker.

With a number of hours to go before his retirement from the Marine Corps, our young corporal seems to be enjoying himself. He does a lot of the talking.

"How do you become a marine? You fuck up. If I could, I’d take a shit on the General’s lawn before I get outta here. My room is a disaster and I’m refusing to clean it before my fucking roommate gets back. Fuck Obama. Taking all of the military’s money away. Wasting time thinking about sending more troops to Afghanistan, while guys there are dying every day. Doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing."

"That’s cause he’s never been In It," the same woman, his mother, says from the back seat. This is met with nods from the others in the cab of the pickup truck. I don’t nod. They notice. "He doesn’t agree because he’s never been In It either."

It’s a curious requirement, this whole In It thing. Understandable from the alcoholic’s perspective; if you’re overcoming a (bio)psychological disease, you want to deal with someone who intimately understands that disease. But not even forgivable from an erudite perspective: if you’re in a fencing match you want the help of someone who has studied fencing, not someone who has carried foils and masks his whole life.

I don’t nod because I don’t want to commit a sin of inaccuracy, but neither do I want add the insult of dissention.

Yes, in 2009, Obama proposed to cut the Pentagon’s supplemental budget in 2010 – and, yes, this is what paid for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (and so on), but the key word here is "supplemental." Without having access to the accounting records, I feel as though it’s safe to assume that various unnecessary programs were cramming their way onto the supplemental elevator in the hope of getting a free ride. Obama’s decision was, more likely than not, intended to force the Pentagon to leave some of those freeloaders at lobby level.

The problem with Obama taking money from the supplemental budget in 2010, is that new planes, tanks, weapons won’t be built, which adds to the substantial gaggle of unemployed Americans – a point that was raised a year ago by the likes of Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.), who argued that the Obama plan to cut the government’s F-22 program would drastically affect the welfare of his state – even though Air Force officials (and the Bush Administration) agreed that the F-22 program was antiquated.

I’m spending too much time on this. Point is that cuts to military spending were and will be done smartly. As Dan Gerstein wrote last year for Forbes, "For the record, Obama's 2010 budget increased overall spending by 4% – without including the operational funding for Iraq and Afghanistan." (You can see these numbers on this chart. Jump to page 126 for recent years and upcoming estimates.) Increases will be considered smartly as well: Earlier this year, Michelle Obama announced a three percent increase in funding for military families in 2011, the money going to programs including housing, child-care, and spousal-education support.

(If you want an opinion on Obama’s dithering over troops in Afghanistan, go here.)

It sounds like a great deal of liberal bullshit. Stop wasting money on weapons so we can waste money on food stamps. Maybe it is. While I wholly respect (nearly) every troop sent to fight for the United States abroad (the parentheses are reserved for those who would rape Iraqi civilians, for example), I don’t buy the idea that you have to have been "in it" to understand "it." You don’t have to be ex-military to lead a country any more than you have to be an ex-farmer to run a restaurant.