Veterans' Day always puts me in weird mood: how to appreciate the selfless service of the soldiers on the ground whilst standing firm to condemn the profiteering military/industrial/entertainment bigwigs that knowingly send these beautiful young people with limitless human potential into meatgrinder circumstances they know are unwinnable and unnecessary, such as Viet Nam and now Afghanistan, itself the graveyard of Empires large and small. Add to it that today's celebration falls upon the 11.11.11 date, with the Eleven always symbolic of our wishes and aspirations for that which we hold dearest and would like to see take place, and it gets very complex and begs for a nuanced analysis amid the traditional -- and often blanket -- statements of patriotic purpose.
Please continue with me below the Kurlicue-de-Kos.
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What makes you go abroad, fighting for strangers
when you could be safe at home, free from all dangers? |
I can emphatically agree with wars like WWII, where there's a defining purpose and a linear progression to the engagement wherein the progress towards victory and legitimate liberation can be measured. Land at Normandy, on to set Paris free, then town-to-town to beat back the forces of oncoming fascism and so forth. Where I draw the line is in places like Hamburger Hill in Viet Nam -- the subject of countless depictions in the movies and TV, including the tremendous "Viet Nam in HD" series currently running on the History Channel -- in which our brave fighters are essentially sacrificed upon an altar of war-for-war's-sake and wherein the victory, written in the blood of young people who bravely swore to sacrifice themselves to advance the often-abstract concept of "Freedom" -- is ceded back to the North Vietnamese forces within 18 days of the taking of the hill. That is to say, a battle within a campaign for which no real rational explanation -- other than the further enrichment of the people in the armaments industries Stateside -- can be made. We take the hill, many are killed on both sides, and then 2 weeks later it's just handed back to the Viet Cong so the whole ridiculous process can begin anew, with no plan for how to keep the territory our soldiers took and no linear progression drawn up to ensure that they are not being sent into harm's way for what amounts, in the bigger picture, to nothing but perpetual war for perpetual profit to the Lockheed-Martins and McDonnell-Douglases of the world.
I look at what we are doing in Afghanistan - essentially fighting a repressive force called the Taliban, of which a great percentage cannot even READ -- and I ask myself, what's the plan? Where does it end? What threat do these people, primitive as they are, really and truly pose to us? You could say they harbor terrorists, but then why not Pakistan too? That's where the uber-mythical "Al-Qaeda" is known to be anyway. Do we, as at Hamburger Hill and countless other locations in Viet Nam, fight carnage-strewn battles for mountain ranges and caves which themselves cannot, by their nature as remote and ruggedly unconquerable locations, be permanently secured and handed over to the native populations so that a more representative form of government can have a chance to take root? Is that even possible in places like Afghanistan, with rural populations built around ancient tribalism and where such a broad percentage of the people are essentially illiterate and uneducated?
When I go to the Raider game and see presentation after presentation of "support the troops" propaganda filtered into every available moment of the proceedings, it makes me think that if you truly support someone -- particularly a young person just beginning their life's journey to whomever they will become -- you don't support them by sending them into a circumstance you can rationally determine represents too much risk for too little, if any, reward and from which they may return home traumatized and permanently scarred by what they have seen and done if they are lucky enough to come home at all. You support those young people by taking the countless hundreds of billions of dollars and resources you are using to tilt at that windmill and put them through a guaranteed 8 years of college and you educate them -- in this, the wealthiest and most extraordinary nation ever to exist on the face of the Earth -- to become all they can be (that's the alleged slogan right?) as living, breathing human beings. At the football game I thought of Pat Tillman, and just how prepared the military higher-ups and the Dep't of Defense were to recast his demise from ridiculous friendly-fire mishap into some sort of John Wayne movie where he died in a blaze of glory "taking out the enemy," and how they insisted on that version of events until the facts proved them to be plainly and egregiously lying. That's not patriotism.... that's perfidiously-purposed propaganda -- and it has absolutely no place in a society that fancies itself as the guardian of Freedom in the world.
So on this Veterans' Day I am conflicted and keenly aware that to be truly patriotic we owe our soldiers that risk their lives on the field of battle a legitimate and often difficult analysis, on a case-by-case basis, of what constitutes a prescient and necessary war (if there even really is such a thing anymore, given that we are allegedly adults that should be able to resolve our conflicts cooperationally and not with barbaric and cycle-perpetuating violence) and what merely sends them into harm's way for little more than self-aggrandizement and the waste -- in these times of overriding scarcity and economic crisis -- of our precious resources and, worse, the all-the-more precious and irreplaceable human lives of our brave and limitlessly potentialled, beautiful young men and women in uniform.