The way that some people talk, it’s easy to forget that today is not Veteran’s Day. It is Memorial Day, which is a day in which we would go put flowers on the graves of our loved ones who died in war if we had any loved ones who died in war. But, collectively, fewer and fewer of us have any family or close acquaintances who have served in the military, let alone any who have lost their lives in the line of duty.
That’s a good thing. But it comes with a cost. It’s a lot easier to support things like George and Dick’s Excellent Adventure in Iraq if you know up front that no one you know well is going to get killed or injured.
My oldest brother was born in Stuttgart in 1956 because my father had been drafted and was serving as a staffer for some officer over there. He talked about his experience so little that a few years ago I asked him about it just so I would have some idea what he did in the army. My dad isn’t what you would think of as military material, which is no insult coming from me. But he’s a veteran like virtually every man of his generation. We didn’t have this same kind of red/blue cultural divide in that generation because men who serve together quickly learn to recognize each other’s basic decency even if they come from places as different as Brooklyn and Wichita. The draft was a pain in the ass, but it made this a more united, manageable country.
It also created immediate political accountability for anyone who decided to employ our military in direct foreign fighting. Without the draft, this country could have fought in Vietnam indefinitely without much noticeable protest. But Vietnam is where the trust was broken and the whole system was torn up and replaced by a volunteer army. Now war has an expanded lobbying sector supporting the revenues of the private sector, and it has no countervailing lobby of would-be soldiers and their concerned parents.
Today, men like William Kristol and John McCain can maintain a surface respectability while taking to the airwaves on a near daily basis to suggest that we commit our volunteer army to a new military project abroad.
They can do this because most people don’t see this rhetoric as the equivalent of sending a death threat to their children.
So, on this Memorial Day, let’s stop to honor those who have fallen in battle serving our country. But let’s also pause to recognize the evil people who consider our soldiers as no more consequential than plastic Risk markers. Remember those who were killed, but also those who got them killed, and those who would get our present generation of soldiers killed without batting an eye.
This latter group is all around us, working daily to add to the graves we must decorate on Memorial Day, usually in the service of something they only thought up over their morning coffee.
On Memorial Day, call out the warmongers. And remember that we’re a stronger country when we don’t allow ourselves to be so easily divided and manipulated into war.
I definitely am thinking about it. Think about how they are craving a massive war in Iran with its massive army, big mountains and do or die soldiers. I remember the reaction to normalizing relations with Cuba: the fact that there would be no liberating war with an aging Castro was their greatest disappointment. Their inviting Netanayahu? to speak.
There is a toxic relationship between rapturists and neocons that demands a cleansing war: a war that would be so disastrous that it would bring about the end of the world on one hand-and the triumph of Israel on the other. What’s a few thousand or million grieving parents compared to that?
War is terrible whether you win or lose and you’d think the great thinkers across the globe would figure that out. But they can’t.
I’m fifty-seven, so I was a teenager when the war in Vietnam was happening. I bought a metal POW bracelet as a show of support. I never found out if my soldier was rescued.
My husband’s dad was in the Army in WWII, his stepdad was in the Navy during that war. My dad was a Marine in Korea, my uncle and aunt got married in 1970 on Memorial Day and he shipped out to Vietnam right after that, in the Army. My friend served in the Army as a helicopter pilot in Desert Storm.
The Second World War was a shared war. Families saved metal, nylons, had home gardens, collected scrap, made huge contributions and sacrifices for the war effort. People rationed food and fuel and saw to it that soldiers were respected and cared for when they came home. Being at war was a national effort.
It’s not like that now. A volunteer army doesn’t require the general public to be as heavily invested. We fund the war machines, but we ignore the soldiers who come home badly damaged, both physically and emotionally. We read about the wars in the deserts and the mines and bombs but it’s just a blurb on the news, if it even makes the news at all.
We are disengaged from the wars we are forced into. The old warhorses and the young ones alike have no qualms about sending our men and women into deadly combat. They’re numbers or pawns, doing our dirty work.
Our sons and daughters deserve better.
At least the soldiers aren’t blamed for the war as the Vietnam veterans, mostly draftees, were.
finally found the writer I mentioned some months back, the vet/ anthropologist who wrote about the myths created around vietnam vets. His name is August Carbonella;
his book now seems to be out of print [can’t even find reference to it] but here’s links to some of his publications – all fascinating. the book I mentioned was about the anti war movement among vietnam vets (which he is) and how the myth of vets being spat on was created after the war
here’s something recent though:
Blood and Fire: towards and Anthropology of Labor
http://www.focaalblog.com/2014/10/10/august-carbonella-sharryn-kasmir/
and Rethinking America: the Imperial Homeland
https://paradigm.presswarehouse.com/books/BookDetail.aspx?productID=151509
An awful lot of veterans have told me those “myths”. Am I to believe that that these men that I know and worked with for years, are all liars? My own brother-in-law told me of coming home and being spurned by the VFW.
take a look at what he has to say, he’s a vet, I have a chapter of his book from before publication, it’s in manuscript form (as I said we appeared on a program together);
being spurned by the VFW is one thing, and I don’t argue with that at all. from what I heard it was decades before the Vietnam vets marched in the parades. the chapter I have from his book talks about the anti war movement among vets that was later mythologized away. I believe he disputes that the anti war protesters stateside spit on vets, in fact the vets against the war was the a major part of the antiwar movement, but VFW is another matter.
Yes,
remember those that lied us into not one, but two wars. and the human toll.
I’m late to this thread but wanted to express my appreciation for BooMan’s excellent post.