Being all that you can be

Military culture just got a little weirder in my head (New Yorker):

For years, the military has offered its recruits free tuition, specialized training, and a host of other benefits to compensate for the tremendous sacrifices they are called upon to make. Lately, many of them have been taking advantage of another perk: free cosmetic surgery.

“Anyone wearing a uniform is eligible,” Dr. Bob Lyons, the chief of plastic surgery at Brooke Army Medical Center, said recently, in his office in San Antonio. It is true: personnel in all four branches of the military and members of their immediate families can get face-lifts, nose jobs, breast enlargements, liposuction, or any other kind of elective cosmetic alteration, at taxpayer expense. (For breast enlargements, patients must supply their own implants.)

I heard about this tonight standing in the kitchen w/ a couple guys who have been in the military.

Sounds like there are a lot of boob enlargements and liposuction jobs going on:

According to the Army, between 2000 and 2003 its doctors performed four hundred and ninety-six breast enlargements and a thousand three hundred and sixty-one liposuction surgeries on soldiers and their dependents. In the first three months of 2004, it performed sixty breast enhancements and two hundred and thirty-one liposuctions.

Of course, these surgeries benefit the surgeons:

“The benefit of offering elective cosmetic surgery to soldiers is more for the surgeon than for the patient,” Lyons said. “If there’s a happy soldier or sailor at the end of that operation, that’s an added benefit, but that’s not the reason we do it. We do it to maintain our skills”—skills that are critical, he added, when it comes to doing reconstructive surgery on soldiers who have been wounded.

I’m a little miffed by the idea that doing a lot of boob jobs would keep your surgical skills sharp for working on soldiers with battlefield wounds, but what do I know.

I have not had a boob job or been injured in combat.

The closest I’ve come to combat is paintball. And the worst I got hurt from that was crawling around in baby stinging nettle.

Next time I see an unusually full-bosomed woman in uniform, I might just have to chuckle a little and try not to stare longer than I normally would try not to stare.