War

I am not the idealist of my youth anymore, I understand that war at times is necessary. When a person or group of people attack you, you are a fool if you do not fight back to defend yourself. That being said, I am not naive, war is horrible.

The worst part of war is that we send children. It is not the children that can not get along with world leaders, a nineteen-year-old is on the threshold of life and cares little of the quarrels of old senators who have lived their life and have nothing to lose in an armed conflict. It is old men and women who start the wars, so it seems only fair to have old men fight the wars they started. But no, they need able bodied men and women to fight the wars they create and so they look to that group of excited young people just beginning life, those are the people they send to war.  What we get back, if the young person survives is a mangled psyche and wounded warrior and that sparkle of excitement for life is lost forever from their eyes.

War is never beautiful.  It is a bloody dirty business. People lose limbs, eyes, or are burned beyond recognition. That is if they survive. Oh, of course not all soldiers fight, some soldiers will even tell you so. Though I'm not so sure they did not fight, it is just too horror filled to bring to the conscious mind all they have witnessed. It is just too hard to explain to those of us who live in blissful ignorance of the heavy toll weighing on their very soul.

Once I met a man wearing shorts with scars of extensive burns on his legs. I asked the fellow, "May I just ask you, what happened to your legs?" This young fellow maybe my age probably younger answers, "An IED blew up the vehicle I was driving and I am burned over 90% of my body." I fought back tears, and thanked him for his service, hardly adequate words for what this man had gone through. Young healthy flesh is mangled by the destructiveness of the human animal.
As humans, we are capable of such beautiful things like Michelangelo's David, The Mona Lisa, or Beethoven's Ode to Joy, It seems obscene to think that the same race of people who produce such beauty and brilliance is also capable of the carnage of war. But we are capable of war.  I remember my mother saying with great emphasis when I was still a girl, "But why did the Vietnam vets kill the children?" As an adult, I am sure it was survival, a small child may have bombs or ammunition.  You did not know who the enemy was from moment to moment. Humans were put at the basic level of survival of kill or be killed. Those of use who have never fought in warfare can not honestly understand what it is like in the circumstances of war.  Would you even know what you would do if it was you in the jungles of Vietnam during that war? I really do not know what I would have done and I do not judge the fellows who were forced to make those decisions.

Finally, at the end of the day, I can not make heads or tails of warfare. I want to salute the pretty uniforms and listen to the drum beats of a marching army.  There is a grimness to this colorful display to rally our troops. We rally our troops because we need them pumped for the occasion of the battlefield and the carnage to come.  I feel silent before the carnage.  I remember Oprah Winfrey walking through Auschwitz with Eli Wiesel and how Eli Wiesel spoke of how after visiting Auschwitz he is always silent for days.  With wars, I feel like this, silent before the war. It is as if to speak is irreverence to the ones who died. It is also the silence of knowing that those who survived, live with its memory.