The Drums of War

Each new generation has to have its war. A war in which boys who hold fast to the illusion that they are a warriors and only need a war to prove it, march off into battle fields with eyes bright. They come back home at best jaded and disillusioned and at worst shattered, used, broken, and angry. They come back to a country that has yet to take care of the thousands of vets that were broken in past wars. They come back to words such, as “Thank you for your service” and 50% off meals at IHop on Veteran’s Day, but still have to fight the powers-that-be to make an appointment at the V.A when they’re feeling suicidal or when chronic acid reflux caused by the toxic Iraq waste fires burn their esophagus.

            “War, what is it good for (to borrow a phrase that dates back to my childhood)? The answer of course, is nothing. Diplomacy, level heads, and compromise should always be the natural order before war is ever even considered. War should not be fought impulsively amid dreams of grandeur by powerful men in their safe towers and $2000.00 suits who lust over having their names immortalized in history textbooks. War should be reserved for justice, and not revenge and not glory and damn sure not as a diversion.

            The United States is still trying to fly high on the after effects of World War II in which we were the heroes, the saviors of the world who helped demolish two nationalistic and authoritarian governments of Japan and Germany, but that glory is tainted and long burnt to ash by a disastrous war in Vietnam, the Iran Contra Affair, Iraq, Afghanistan, the United States coup in Pakistan, the War on Terror, and other overt and convert inferences in other countries’ autonomies. We have become what we profess to hate. We are war mongers and can’t, as one of my students used to say, “Get over ourselves.” We aren’t “all that” anymore. We are just one cog in a great machine, granted we are a powerful and wealthy cog, but a cog nonetheless in a world made smaller by the development of the internet and transportation. We are part of an interdependent modern world in which each country relies on others for their economics, trade, safety, sciences, and technologies. Yet we still flex our muscles and beat our chests and shout about how great we are while we bomb civilians, line the pockets of the industrial war complex, and turn our backs on the helpless in which just and necessary wars might be fought. In a little over seventy-years we have taken the good guy reputation that we earned on the battlefields of Europe and the waters and islands of the Pacific, and carelessly traded it in for greed, power and political gain. We’ve made fresh enemies the world over and created more and more terrorists with each bombing of a civilian village or assassination of a leader.

            We have tipped over into the pinnacle of lust for power and strength that toppled Rome and the Soviet Union. Rome was never able to recover, and Russia is currently trying to recover, to the determent of the United States, but that’s for another discussion.

            I believe we crossed a line with the assassination of Iran’s General Soleimani on Iraq soil, a nation who was an uneasy ally of ours in the Middle East. Notice I wrote “was” because I don’t think that’s the case any longer. I think we’ve made Iraq our sworn enemy again, as well as Iran, and there’s no going back. We went uninvited into a sovereign nation and assassinated a well known general from another country with whom we canceled a nuclear deal. What is the end game? I don’t think there is one. I think that history will prove that the assassination was the act of an unfettered and ill advised president whose impulsivity got the better of him.

            I remember my dad being deployed to Vietnam when I was a child. I remember how, at the end of his life, Vietnam haunted him. I sent my own son off twice to Iraq and my best friend’s son served multiple nightmare tours of duty in that country at the height of tensions. I comforted my then three-year-old granddaughter when her father was deployed to Afghanistan. I was an Air Force brat until I was nineteen and I thought everyone stood at attention for the National Anthem in movie theaters. When I was a child my friends and I would stop playing hide and seek to stand at attention in the evening as the colors were lowered on base. I bleed red, white and blue; I do not however bleed nationalistic blood because that is the color to degradation and failure.

            While we beat our drums of war and spread the falsehood of patriotism being dependent upon support of war, no matter if it’s an unjust or impulsive war, we are preparing to line up our young men, our not-of age-to-smoke-or-drink young men, and almost physically feed them into the war machine and spew them out at the other end as cannon fodder. The young don’t know any better. They don’t have the experience of living through this same scenario again and again and again. The drums and the pats on the back and the flags and the crispness of new uniforms will mar their vision. It is only when they are entering the last decades of their lives, and history has written the truth across the sands of time, that they will wonder why their government lied to them, and they will either bury that knowledge deep within, because to take it out and gaze upon it in the glaring light will cause confusion and pain, or they will be able to say, as my father did, later in life, “They lied to me.”

            Don’t confuse patriotism with nationalism. Don’t confuse truth with propaganda. Don’t confuse historical lessons with shiny rhetoric. Don’t confuse flag waving with morals. Don’t confuse military strength with common sense. Don’t send our children off to die in order appease a leader’s lust for an historical footnote.  

           Have we learned nothing at all?

(Photo credit: Department of the Air Force)