An insult to Americans who volunteer for the military?

I've called the Green Berets "the Peace Corps with guns" in jest, but Samuel Leff reacts strongly against this comparison.

The Green Berets as an Armed Peace Corps? By SAMUEL LEFF
A Hybrid That Won't Run

Criticizing the idea because it does not provide soldiers with sufficient training in anthropology and cultural awareness and so on is fine. The generalizations about personality types may have some validity (but it smacks of nerd criticizing alpha jocks).

To this longtime observer of American culture, the issue was as simple as an intelligent job interview. People who sign up and are trained for the military are not the same kind of people, with the same interests, sensitivities, and sensibilities as those who choose to be Peace Corps volunteers. On top of that, military volunteers go through an extreme ritual regime of sadomasochistic training designed to bond them to their "brothers" and turn them into gangs of lethal killers. The bottom anthropological line is that the "Green Berets as an armed Peace Corps" is a fantasy–a concoction that could only have passed muster through the mad rationalizations of the Bush/Rove propaganda machine. That it has been freshly wrapped in Obamarhetoric and transplanted to Afghanistan is a depressing sign that the military’s domination of American culture, as starkly exposed by Hastings in Rolling Stone, has not been affected by the 2008 change in personnel and party controlling the White House and Congress.

Talk about pulling the wool over the public’s eyes! The idea of Green Berets [or other soldiers] as an "armed Peace Corps" could be the most cynical manipulation of government policy since WMDs. Think Mayor Bloomberg gathering a bus load of New York City cops and ordering them to take over from the doctors at the Bellevue Hospital ER. On an animal level, we are talking about the difference between rattlesnakes and German Shepherds-- killers and friendly, all-purpose helpers. Since humans are more flexible than snakes, in the best of all possible worlds, perhaps one of ten Green Berets could be trained into the Peace Corps mentality, but even then, soldiers, who have chosen a warrior career path and gone through the extreme sadomasochism of basic training are highly unlikely candidates to morph into Peace Corps character, even after hearing lectures about Russia’s failure in Afghanistan after killing one million people. Cops rarely become doctors and doctors rarely become cops.

What does Mr. Leff know about basic training? Why not accuse Special Forces soldiers of lacking the personality to be fathers or teachers? Does he know anything about Special Forces medics? I think someone has been sitting in his leftist ivory tower instead of becoming acquainted with those serving in the military. The article seems to be a manifestation of a leftist's hostility towards the military, even if he couches it in terms of anthropology.

Are there soldiers who are still boys and "wild"? Yes. This is true of American men working all sorts of jobs, not just soldiers. It's a social problem, not one that is limited to the military, nor is it one that the military selects for. But the author's caricature goes beyond this. His bio at the end of the article reveals that he "is a Margaret Mead-trained anthropologist" and that "he is currently fine tuning his work about American culture: Old Boys Growing up Primitive in Modern America and collecting a series of essays that apply his unique anthropological perspective to underlying culture and personality issues of modern life." Excuse me if I'm not a little bit suspicious of his endeavor.

As for liberal fantasies about the Peace Corps...