Honor and Glory in War Are Myths
We must honor those who sacrificed without honoring those whose failures made those sacrifices inevitable
There is nothing good about war. The hype is B.S. War heroes live their lives between pretending to feel good about their service when required to do so by an ignorant public, incapable or unwilling to examine the realities of war, and the solitary agony of reliving one horror after another over and over again.
Returning soldiers too often never find satisfaction in life back home, so attuned to another kind of survival that they don’t fit here anymore — and they know it. These are the symptoms of a normal human being who has been thrust into an abnormal situation that’s as close to hell on earth as one can imagine. There is no medal, parade, or honorary membership that can do a damned thing to help these people. It’s all B.S.
I spent four years on active duty during the cold war. I served with men who had been in Viet Nam. They were very quiet most of the time. But they moved quickly. When a trainee was stupid enough to light firecrackers in the parking lot one day, about five of our drill sergeants dropped to the ground so fast it was like watching cartoon characters blur when they run off. They all got up, embarrassed, looking sheepishly around. Then when they caught each other’s eyes, they straightened back up to their usual confident posture. I wanted to cry, but I couldn’t because it would have made me seem weak.
When I returned to the states after serving in a small town in Germany, I went to college to study Human Services. My senior research project was on gender-based differences in preferred treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). I was shocked at how little was being done to study the effects of war.
Granted, this was a couple of decades ago, but nothing leads me to believe we’ve gotten much farther. If John Stewart has to go to D. C. and stand outside the halls of Congress to publicly embarrass Republicans who won’t vote to provide veterans the care they need to survive, then I’m going to bet nobody is doing enough to help war veterans recover from the psychological damage that was done to them. It simply isn’t possible to experience that kind of trauma and not get traumatized.
Our government (ALL governments) don’t want this to get out, though. If we take all the glamorization out of war and admit what it really does, it might not be so popular. People might protest and refuse to join or even go to Canada to avoid the draft as many did in the 60s during the Viet Nam war.
War is never the right answer — it is proof that we failed. It is what people who can’t solve problems do to get their way. It should not be tolerated, let alone glorified. Aggressors should be stopped in their tracks as quickly and effectively as possible — with a minimum amount of violence.
Nobody is expendable — not you, not me, and certainly not the citizens of other countries who Americans have so easily accepted as “collateral damage” as if their lives were worth less than our own.
I remember a poster from the 60’s that hung in our kitchen. It read, “What if they had a war and nobody came?” Why don’t we try that, for a change?
(If you haven’t seen it, the 2022 release of “All Quiet on the Western Front” is as close as most of us will ever come to seeing what war really is. If you can stomach it, I highly recommend it. )