On Honoring the US Military

 

On Honoring the US Military

November 16, 20201

 

Last week in the United States of America we observed Veterans Day.[1] On November 11, 1918, at 11 am local time, the fighting in World War I ended. The United States has observed November 11 in one way or another ever since. We used to call it Armistice Day because the event that it commemorated was an armistice. After World War II we changed it to Veterans Day to honor all honorably discharged American veterans. Along with Memorial Day, which recognizes those who died in military service, it is a day when people in this country say all kinds of things not just to recognize veterans but to honor both them and the United States military in which they served. The phrase “Thank you for your service” has become the usual, platitudinous thing to say to anyone who identifies him or herself as being in or having ever been in the US military. On a day like Veterans Day you’d have to be living under a rock to avoid seeing and hearing it. In what I’m about to say here I want it understood that I do not dishonor individual people who have served in our military. My father was one of them, having served in the Navy during World War II. One of my nephews is one of them too, having served in the first US war with Iraq after Iraq invaded Kuwait. I’ll have more to say about them at the end of this piece. I write here not about individual people as much as I write about the military as an institution and how our politicians use it.

What is a nation’s military? It is an institution or set of institutions designed and intended to use violence to kill and maim other human beings and destroy their property. I once heard an American soldier on television admit as much. He said he job was to kill people and blow up their stuff. That indeed is what any military is about. I have heard it said that the purpose of military basic training is to turn peaceful civilians into killers. A nation’s military may do things other than killing other human beings and destroying property. We sometimes see military people rescuing victims of floods or otherwise helping people in need of emergency assistance. The United States Marine Corps Reserve runs a charity at Christmas time every year called Toys for Tots that provides Christmas gifts to children whose parents cannot afford to buy those gifts. All of that is perfectly fine and good. It is not however why a nation creates and maintains its military. A nation, any nation including mine, creates a military so that it will have an effective means of killing and maiming people and destroying property.

Those in power in any nation, including mine, need the people of the nation not just to tolerate but to support and honor the nation’s military. Those powers do, after all, believe that they need an organized killing force that they can use as they will. They need their people to support and honor an institution the express purpose of which is to kill and destroy. They believe that they need large numbers of people who will kill and destroy when commanded to do so. They believe that they need large numbers of ordinary, peaceful people who will become killers and destroyers when their nation tells them to.

It ought not be easy to convince large numbers of people to become killers. So the powers that be create a mythology around military service that functions to connect people with the military and gets them to support and honor it. They dress soldiers, seamen, and airmen up in spiffy uniforms that many people find attractive. They introduce a lot of pomp and circumstance into military life and often display it to the public. They get us calling every person in the military a hero whether a person has done anything heroic or not. They pitch military service not as an opportunity to kill and destroy but as an opportunity for technical and leadership training a member of the military can use when out of the military.

And, most of all in this country at least, they convince the people that military service is “honorable.” But just what does honorable mean? According to online dictionaries it means high respect or great esteem. It can have slightly different meanings in certain contexts, but high respect and great esteem covers what it means when we apply it to the military. When we say military service is honorable we mean that it is worthy of high respect and great esteem. Now, please understand. It’s not that I don’t respect the people in our military. Yet I have to ask: Is violence ever honorable? Is an institution the primary purpose of which is to kill people and destroy property ever honorable? Is an institution that trains people to launch untold numbers of nuclear warheads at another nation when ordered to do so honorable? I know this puts me in a tragically small minority of the American people, but no. No, it isn’t. What could possibly be worthy of respect or esteem about destroying life on this planet, something our military is fully capable of doing and would do if some president ordered them to do it and gave them the proper code? My answer: Nothing. Nothing at all. Neither is killing and maiming other human beings on a smaller scale honorable. The difference is just one of degree not one of morality. So no, I’m not buying the myth that service in the American military is honorable.

But I can hear you saying that service in the American military is honorable because our military “defends our freedom.” Whether or not killing in defense of our freedom is moral is an issue I’ll skip for now, although from a Christian perspective that really is an issue. The question I raise here is: Does the American military really defend our freedom? My answer is it might if it had to, but for the part that is not what it does. Let’s look briefly at American history as it relates to the military defending our freedom from the beginnings to today. What became the US military began as patriot forces fighting the British in the American War of Independence. Those forces weren’t defending our freedom, they were fighting to establish it. Perhaps in the War of 1812, a war the causes of which are so vague that I’ve never understood them, the US military was defending our freedom against the British. That was however well over two hundred years ago and is hardly relevant to our world today.[2]

What followed next were wars of imperialist expansion. The US government used the US military extensively against Native Americans. The Trail of Tears, in which the US military forced the relocation of the entire Cherokee nation from Florida to Oklahoma and in which a huge number of Native Americans died is an early example of the US military not fighting to defend our freedom but fighting to take freedom away from Native Americans. The Mexican-American War of 1848 was again not at all about defending our freedom. Our country fought it for an imperialistic expansion of the United States at the expense of the sovereign nation of Mexico. The Civil War came to be about freedom for enslaved people, but it was never about defending the freedoms of the dominant white people in the northern states because that freedom was never at risk.

There followed a whole series of Indian wars. Once again these wars were not about defending American freedom. They were about depriving Native peoples of their land and their way of life for the benefit of the United States. We white Americans have made something of a hero of colonel George Custer, the commanding officer of American troops at the 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn in which he and all of his men were killed by combined forces of the Lakota Sioux, the Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho tribes. But Custer and his men weren’t defending American freedom They were trying to deprive those Native peoples of theirs. The Spanish-American War of 1898, the one that made Teddy Roosevelt a national hero, wasn’t at all about defending American freedom. It was about extending American imperial power in the Caribbean and the western Pacific at the expense of Spain.

When Americans claim that the US military is about defending our freedom they probably have in mind four major wars of the twentieth century—World War I, World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. Yet none of those wars was about defending American freedom. The need to defend our freedom of the seas against German submarines may have been part of the cause of the US involvement in World War I, but otherwise Germany and its allies, our enemies in that war, posed no threat to American freedom whatsoever. The American public were convinced that the Germans were villains, but really they were no worse than the other combatants in the pointless war. More importantly, they were no threat to the freedom of the American people whatsoever.

World War II is the war most Americans think of as “the good war,” not that there can ever be such a thing as a good war. The US entered that war in December, 1941, after the Japanese carried out a surprise attack on American military facilities at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. We fought a two front war against Japan in Asia and the western Pacific and against Germany and its allies in North Africa and Europe. We won of course, though the Soviets had more to do with defeating Nazi Germany than we did.[3] It is nonetheless legitimate to ask: Were American armed forces in World War II defending American freedom? They were perhaps fighting to defend American interests and to defeat some very bad actors in the world (though one of the worst actors in the world at the time, Joseph Stalin, was our ally), but that is not the same thing as defending American freedom. Neither Japan nor Germany had the capacity to invade and conquer the United States in North America. There was much at stake in World War II, but American freedom just wasn’t.

The next big conflict in which the US military fought was the Korean conflict of 1950 to 1953. The enemy there was first Communist North Korea, which began the conflict by invading South Korea. Later on Communist China entered the war in support of its North Korean ally. We fought that war for one reason only, to stop the spread of Communism in Asia. Now, the Communism of North Korea, China, and the Soviet Union (which backed North Korea in the war) in the early 1950s was a very bad thing indeed. There is no doubt about that, but did Communism threat American freedom because North Korea invaded South Korea? Hardly. We didn’t fight the war in Korea to defend American freedom. We fought it for purely ideological reasons. We didn’t, and don’t, like Marxist-Stalinist Communism, and there are many valid reasons for disliking and opposing it. Yet neither North Korea nor China was a threat to American freedom, and we didn’t fight that war because we thought they were.

Then came Vietnam. That American involvement in the civil war between South Vietnam on one side that the Vietcong from the south and Communist North Korea on the other was a mistake and a tragedy of immense proportions there simply is no doubt. Yet North Vietnam was no threat to American freedom whatsoever. We didn’t fight in Vietnam to defend American freedom. We fought because we wanted to stop the spread of communism in Asia, not in North America. We thought, wrongly and obviously so even at the time, that we had to fight North Vietnam and stop it from conquering South Vietnam and reuniting the country under a Communist regime. That Saigon, the capital city of South Vietnam, is now called Ho Chi Minh City tells you all you need to know about how that war came out. We lost, but in no way did we lose any freedom to North Vietnam. Whether we lost some of our freedom to the Nixon administration is a question I won’t go into here.

Next came September 11, 2001, and the horrific terrorist attack by the Islamist terrorist group al-Qaeda, that was partially successful, on symbols of America’s economic, military, and political power. The terrorists who crashed hijacked civilian airliners into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon just outside Washington, DC, were unable to crash another one into the US Capitol building only because of the courage of some passengers on that hijacked plane who overcame the terrorists and crashed the plane into the ground in Pennsylvania. There is no doubt that al-Qaeda and other Islamist terror groups would destroy American freedom if they could. The truth, however, is that they can’t. The US responded to 9-11 militarily by going into Afghanistan to attack al-Qaeda’s base there. (The terrorists of 9-11 were mostly Saudis not Afghanis, but our powers that be don’t want us to think about that truth too much.) We were after Osama bin Ladn, the leader of al-Qaeda and the chief planner of the 9-11 attacks.

Was the purpose of that invasion the defense of American freedom? The US attack on al-Qaeda in Afghanistan is perhaps as close as the US military has ever come to actually defending our freedom. Its purpose could be seen as defending our country against more terrorist attacks by al-Qaeda. In fact al-Qaeda has not carried out a terrorist attack on the US since 9-11. I grant that the military strike against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan was one instance in which the US military to some extent did fight to defend a limited kind of American freedom, freedom from terrorist attacks.

We invaded Afghanistan in October, 2001. Our military involvement in that country lasted until August 20. 2021, when President Biden ended American military presence there. That’s just short of twenty years. Our military engagement in Afghanistan was the longest war in American history. Did it have anything to do with American freedom after we’d driven al-Qaeda out of Afghanistan and into Pakistan? No, it certainly did not. There were and are Islamist terrorist groups in Afghanistan, but the earliest phase of our military involvement in Afghanistan proves that we can deal with any terrorist threat from that country without a prolonged military presence. We had our military in Afghanistan for so long not to defend American freedom but to shore up an Afghani government we liked against rebels we didn’t like. Doing that had nothing to do with defending American freedom.

Then, in March, 2003, under the neo-conservative government of President George W. Bush, the United States military invaded Iraq. Iraq has not recovered from that invasion yet, and that invasion had nothing to do with defending American freedom. President Bush and his advisors, in particular Vice President Dick Chaney. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, gave as the reason for invading Iraq the presence there of weapons of mass destruction. It turned out that there were no weapons of mass destruction there, but for purposes of this analysis let’s assume that there were. In that case would invading Iraq to destroy weapons of mass destruction constitute a defense of American freedom? No, it absolutely would not have been. Iraq’s dictator Saddam Hussein was a very bad actor in his country, yet he had no ability whatsoever to deploy such weapons against the United States. Perhaps he could have deployed them against Israel, but the defenders of the American military never say they support it because it defends Israel’s freedom. The US invasion of Iraq was an illegal war of aggression against a nation that was no threat to us at all. In my opinion that fact makes at least Bush, Chaney, Rumsfeld, and Rice war criminals. Their crime however had nothing to do with defending American freedom. When Americans honor the military because they think it defends American freedom they’re just wrong.

So is it appropriate for us to honor the US military? My answer is yes and no. It is perfectly appropriate for us to respect, care for, and even honor the men and women who serve or have served in the US military, though not so much because they are or have been in the military as for other reasons. They are or have been in the military for many different reasons. Some consider being in the military to be their patriotic duty. I disagree with the notion that being in the military is anyone’s patriotic duty, but it is not for me to judge those who think it is. Others may be in the military because they are part of a family in which making a career in the military is a family tradition. Others surely are or have been in the military only because joining seemed to them to be their only way out of an economic dead end. Many military people get valuable training and experience that can help them find civilian employment once out of the military for which they otherwise would not qualify. For others the military functions as a way out of difficult family or other relationships. Joining the military can get a person away from all kinds of unfortunate life circumstances. That I disapprove of some of these motives and find others to be most unfortunate, people joining the military for whatever reason is no reason for me to disapprove of them. After all, military women and men are as much children of God as civilians are. They are our neighbors who Jesus calls us to love as we love ourselves. So yes, honor the people who are or have been in the military, though for reasons other than that they are or have been in the military.

But honor the military itself? Not so much. The most apt unofficial name that I use for any military establishment, including ours, is “the killing machine.” That’s any military’s raison d’etre, ours as much as anyone else’s. I’ve seen a bumper sticker put out by the Church of the Brethren that says, “When Jesus said love your enemies, I think he probably meant don’t kill them.” Indeed, yet killing them is the only reason for a military to exist. Sure. We say that the purpose of the US military is something other than that. After World War II we changed the name of the War Department to the Department of Defense, defense sounding so much more acceptable than war. Yet even if the US military truly functioned to defend us, it would still defend us by having and being willing to use highly effective means of killing and maiming other human beings, children of God all. Bringing death and destruction to other men, women, and children is what the US military, with all of its technologically advanced weaponry, is all about. There is no way around that truth. When we honor our military as extravagantly as it has become our custom to do we don’t so much deny that truth as ignore it. Yet ignoring sin does not make it virtue. It is not my place as a Christian and a citizen of the United States to judge other people. It is my place as a Christian and a citizen of the United States to witness to and live by Christ’s teaching that violence is sin wherever and whenever it is used. That is why I do not and cannot honor the United States military,

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[1] I think it is important to disclose my personal relationship to the US military at the beginning of this piece. I have not served in the military. When I was an undergraduate at the University of Oregon in the mid-1960s, I participated in Army ROTC for the first two years of my time at the university. Those first two years do not constitute military service. To go into advanced ROTC for your next two years you had to pass a medical exam administered by Army medical personnel who came to Eugene from Fort Lewis in Washington state. That exam found me to be medically unqualified for military service because of my allergies. Those doctors also found a much more serious medical problem that I had that they did not tell me about, but that’s a story for another day. I have always assumed that if I had passed that medical exam I would have become an officer in the Army and almost certainly would have served in Vietnam. In those years I did not yet object to all violence on religious grounds the way I do now. It was my medical condition not my beliefs that got me out of military service.

[2] The War if 1812 has gotten a fair amount of mention in the press recently. In that war the British occupied and burned the Capitol building in Washington, DC. The next time hostile forces entered the Capitol was on January 6, 2021, when a seditious mob at least stirred up if not instigated by Donald Trump invaded the building in an attempt to overturn the results of a free and fair election that Trump lost.

[3] I have seen the total number of deaths in World War II set at 40 million. Of those 40 million 20 million were Soviet. D-Day wasn’t the turning point of the war in Europe, the Battle of Stalingrad was; and it had long been over by the time the Americans and others landed in Normandy.