On the
Hell of War
Memorial
Day, May 30, 2022
On this day
dedicated to the memory of Americans who have died in military action I can’t
stop asking myself: How did war ever get to be an acceptable human activity?
After all, what is war? It is an occurrence in which men with power but little
or no personal risk send men with no power but who assume horrendous risk out
to kill people just like them whom they don’t know and against whom they have
nothing personal, and the people they are trying to kill are trying to kill
them. General Sherman said, “War is hell.” We all know that saying, and we know
at some level that Sherman was right. He had, after all, seen and participated
in it at its most horrific. Yet we keep engaging in war over and over and over
again. War never stops. There are always wars going on around the world, though
we never hear of most of them. They too are hell. They too are instances in
which men of power send men with no power off to kill and maim and to be killed
and maimed. Sometimes a leader with power and/or charisma will convince their
young men that in a particular case killing and maiming are good, honorable,
noble, and even sacred things. But war is never that. It’s hell. Hell on earth.
Hell that some people inflict on other people who are trying to inflict hell on
them.
War is hell, and
we work so hard at covering up that truth so we don’t have to deal with it. We dress
war up, that is, we cover it up, we hide from ourselves what it really is. We
put soldiers, sailors, and airmen in snazzy uniforms that convey strength and
even nobility. We give them shiny medals for certain military actions. We call
them the best of our people. We say they are defending our freedom when they
actually are doing nothing of the sort. We say, “Thank you for your service”
every time we learn that someone is or has been in the military. We call them
all heroes though only a tiny fraction of them ever actually do anything
heroic. When they are killed in war we drape American flags over their coffins
so we don’t even see the coffin much less the dead body inside it. Military
people salute the coffins as they pass by. Sometimes even the president does
that. We bury many of them in a national cemetery at Arlington, Virginia, and
we call that cemetery the most hallowed ground in our country. We give their surviving
mothers gold-colored stars as if a star colored gold could make up for the loss
of a beloved son. We have three holidays a year commemorating the military, one
for those who are currently in the military, one for those who those who used
to be in the military, and the one we mark today for those who died in military
service. We surround the hell of war with all of these emblems and rituals in a
desperate attempt, sadly largely successful, to hide the reality of war from
ourselves.
Why? Why do we do
it? In all of those things we are, after all, celebrating the people of
institutions whose reason for being is to kill and to die when their country
demands it of them. A retired Marine officer once said to me, “The politicians
tells us who to kill, and we go kill them.” I once heard an American soldier on
TV say, “My job is to kill people and destroy their property.” And we call that
honorable. Why? I wish I had a better answer, but it all seems so mad to me
that I can’t come up with much of a one. I know that we have become used to our
country waging war. Since our country was founded there has rarely been a time
when we were not at war somewhere in the world. We have convinced ourselves
that the hell that is war can yield benefits for us that outweigh its hellishness.
Yet we still know at some level of our national psyche that there is nothing
noble or honorable about sending armed men off to kill other armed men—and sometimes
even to kill unarmed men, women, and children. At some level we all know that
war is hell even if we’ve never experienced it ourselves, as indeed I myself
have not.[1]
War is hell, but we
keep doing it. We and most people everywhere have done it so often that it has
become for us a normal, acceptable part of our lives. To make it that, however,
we have to gussy it up with flags, uniforms, medals, and parades. We have to
hide from ourselves the reality of war, how brutal, savage, and immoral it is.
We have to keep telling ourselves that war is necessary and honorable, for if
we didn’t keep telling ourselves that falsehood we might, Oh horrors!, stop
doing it. We might begin really to work with others to create a world in which
disputes that now lead to war are resolved peacefully not militarily. We might
begin to honor the people who really do serve us—teachers, doctors, nurses,
firefighters, and others. We’d say to them and to others who truly do constructive
work among us, “Thank you for your service.” We might actually begin to build a
world of justice and peace rather than the world of war we have now.
But no. We can’t
do that. It’s too radical. It won’t work. To be peaceful is to be weak, and God
forbid that we should ever be weak. War works after all, doesn’t it? We built
our country and have held it together through war. We defeated the God-awful
Nazis in a war (never mind that the Soviet Union played a much bigger role in
defeating the Nazis than we did). Our military might kept the Russians from
taking over the world, didn’t it? (Well no, that’s not why they didn’t do it,
but never mind). Military parades and paraphernalia stir our souls. We don’t
want to devalue them. We don’t want to live in a nation without them. So we say
to people like me, “Get out of here with your weak, pacifist, defeatist nonsense!
We want none of it!”
So we live with
the hell of war. We’re used to it. We create and participate in hell after hell.
Most of us don’t ever think about the matter much. To us war is just what
happens, and we do an awfully good job of hiding its horror from most of our
people. Because so few of us actually think about war but just accept it, we do
it again and again. We kill, and our people are killed. We deal with the fact
that we sent them to do that horrific thing by telling ourselves that it is
necessary and honorable. Well, it certainly isn’t honorable and how do we know
that it is necessary? We’ve never lived without it, so how do we know we can’t
live without it? The truth is, we can’t know we can live without it until we
make an honest, protracted effort to live without it. Sadly, I don’t expect
that to happen, but Lord how I wish it would!
[1]
Full disclosure. I was enrolled in Army ROTC when I was an undergraduate at the
University of Oregon in the mid-1960s. The first two years of ROTC didn’t
involve any commitment or obligation to go into the Army. Advanced ROTC, the third
and fourth years of the program did, but at that point you had to pass a
physical examination. I failed that examination and was classified 1Y not 1A. So
I have never served in any branch of the American military.
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