The Book of War

“War does not determine who is right, only who is left.” - Bertrand Russell

I keep thinking there are no more tactics left to the fascists defiling the reputation of the U.S., but every day there is another absurdity, and each one seems impossible to be real. The parade by the U.S. military to celebrate the dictatorship of Trump is of a kind that defies, not just who we are as Americans, but the very notion of what it is to care about history and humanity. We have caused wars, fought bad guys, ended invasions, launched attacks, served ourselves, and sometimes even helped others with our weapons, used our military for imperialist purposes, but we have never, as a culture, celebrated war. We lament its need for existence or its misuse for power and how it has taken away our sons and daughters before their lives have yet been lived, but the men and women who serve under the colors of the U.S. flag have never publicly strutted their arms and might and thumped their chests with pride because they know what it is like to live under the sound of gunfire and explosions. They know death.

Because Trump Always Chickens Out (TACO), there is still a chance this Stalin-esque parade will not destroy our reputation as a democratic republic, if it isn’t already in the crapper. There is no reason for the demonstration beyond the mad king’s desire to show people he controls power, and, of course, his ego will be salved by the idea that he can command this much humanity and materiel, and make it do his bidding, even if it is nothing more than an expensive show. The cost of the fatuous exercise will be in the tens of millions; the numbers presently being estimated are $40-$50 million dollars. There will be many people watching who have living memory of jack-booted and uniformed thugs in their neat lines in the streets of Berlin, kicking their heels in front of Panzer tanks and turning their fierce gazes in honor at one of history’s other dictators. On the day of the U.S. military parade in Washington, America becomes no different than Post Weimar Germany.

We are, perhaps, worse. Instead of trying to care for this country’s citizenry, Washington is attempting to eliminate the social contract that helps those struggling. The spray-tanned budget that has moved through the U.S. House dramatically reduces the SNAP food program for the poor and robs children from low-income families, who number in the millions, of Medicaid health care. As politicians capriciously make these slashes to life-saving programs to pay for tax cuts to billionaires, they have increased the Pentagon’s budget to a trillion dollars for the first time. Children can suffer and even die because we must manufacture bombs and planes and great ships to deliver death in the name of freedom. Who are these people we have sent to Washington who can find sleep at night and live with unbothered consciences for what they are doing? Did they really come from our midst?

Maybe this is who we are, and have always been. Is there a generation since the Civil War that has come of age without living under the darkness of a conflict in this country? My generation’s battle was Vietnam and the children of my generation got to fight and die in Iraq and Afghanistan. There was no justification or rationale for those conflicts. There were no WMD in Iraq and Saddam Hussein was not funding terrorism like our “allies” in Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden might have been hiding out in Afghanistan but we did not bother sending troops there until he was long gone to caves in Pakistan. We were busily gathering up the oil resources in Iraq, making them safe for multi-national oil companies. The great lie of Vietnam, too, was that we were stopping Communism there before it landed here but we stopped nothing other than the lives of about two million Vietnamese and almost 60,000 young Americans.

I have spent far too much of my time reading books about war and trying to understand the character of my country, and human beings in general, though I have learned little. Understanding seems impossible. We don’t just fight our own battles, we facilitate killing for others. Israel seems to have an endless free bank account with the U.S. Congress and White House and we continue to send billions in bombs and fighter planes and tanks that are then used to execute a genocide in Gaza. There is no other word to describe Israel’s assault on the Palestinians. Food and water is withheld and children perish from thirst, starvation, and horrific wounds, which are justified by “intel” that says Hamas is hiding soldiers at hospitals. There is no justifying what Hamas did to Israel 20 months ago but there is also no justification for Israel’s disproportionate response. Hamas has lost some soldiers but mostly Gaza has lost women and children by the tens of thousands.

Americans, always parochial, pay little attention to such conflicts until body bags come back here with our son and daughters. There is almost no news coverage anywhere of what is transpiring inside of Gaza because every intrepid journalist working to transmit photos, videos, and stories seems to get “accidentally” killed by Israeli soldiers who consistently mistake journalists and physicians for Hamas operatives. Israel, which does not acknowledge having a nuclear arsenal, is also threatening to attack nuclear facilities it claims are being developed by Iran. While the U.S. consistently supports Israel’s right to defend itself as a sovereign nation, Iran’s sovereignty must be disconcerting. What distinct differences exist, however, between the militaristic intentions of the Ayatollahs and Israel’s Netanyahu, who loves Trump’s idea of turning Gaza into a resort and relocating all the Palestinian people. Maybe an all-inclusive price will involve sunbathing with the ghosts of dead children.

I am presently reading the new biography of writer Tim O’Brien, Peace is a Shy Thing, and the story that emerges is how fighting in Vietnam nearly destroyed him even as it taught him resolve and dedication. His Vietnam novels, Going After Cacciato and The Things They Carried, detail American and human stupidity on the grand scale of combat. In one sharp explanation, O’Brien explains war with an honesty that no politician has ever mustered. Humans, and apparently, the American species, seem as drawn to warfare as they are horrified by it, and we never permanently put down our swords.

“War is hell,” O’Brien wrote, “But that's not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead.“

Michael Herr, whose book Dispatches, was a seminal work of first hand observation writes of a conversation in which war is defended as glamorous, and not sarcastically. Someone had said we might not have war if we would just take the glamour out of the killing and fighting, which prompted a shocked response.

“Take the glamour out of war! I mean, how the bloody hell can you do _that_? Go and take the glamour out of a Huey, go take the glamour out of a Sheridan...Can _you_ take the glamour out of a Cobra, or getting stoned at China Beach? It's like taking the glamour out of an M-79, taking the glamour out of Flynn." He pointed to a picture he'd taken, Flynn laughing maniacally ("We're winning," he'd said), triumphantly. "Nothing the matter with _that_ boy, is there? Would you let your daughter marry that man? Ohhhh, war is _good_ for you, you can't take the glamour out of that. It's like trying to take the glamour out of sex, trying to take the glamour out of the Rolling Stones."

None of the millions and millions of words written about war offer an adequate explanation. How a random assassination in a European nation led to a cascade of events that killed millions in World War I still lies beyond the comprehensible. I am a direct descendant of a man who survived the Battle of the Somme, the bloodiest in human history, and exist as a statistical anomaly. How did it happen that 801 men of my grandfather’s regiment went “over the top” and all but 68 of them were slaughtered by the Kaiser’s machine guns, and one of those who answered reveille the next day was the young man who would become father to my mother? Why aren’t humans able to recognize that they tend to excel at death and destruction and the ruination of life, and why can they simply not just stop it?

Leadership ought to inspire populations not just to be brave and defend and fight for what’s right, but to find ways to prevent those battles and cure their causes before the guns sound. Joe Galloway, author of We Were Soldiers Once, And Young, describes in his book how rhetoric reached the hearts and minds of his generation and sent them marching off to a meaningless war, which formed their character when it did not end their lives. Freedom was supposed to be their cause, but it ended up being nothing more than destruction.

“We were children of the 1950s and John Kennedy's young stalwarts of the early 1960s,” Galloway wrote. “He told the world that Americans would ‘pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship’ in the defense of freedom. We were the down payment on that costly contract, but the man who signed it was not there when we fulfilled his promise. John Kennedy waited for us on a hill in Arlington National Cemetery, and in time we came by the thousands to fill those slopes with our white marble markers and to ask on the murmur of the wind if that was truly the future he had envisioned for us.”

Americans don’t have the only culture on the planet struggling with values, but we seem unable to stop funding weapons and wars while we take food and hope and health from children. When Trump witnesses his embarrassing grand parade marching through the streets and the remnants of a formerly aspirational democracy, there will be no mystery about what’s happening. The casualties will continue to accumulate. And a once great nation will join the list of the fallen.