Some unromantic thoughts on this Memorial Day

Pictures that glorify war bother me. Of course we honor our war dead. That goes without saying except with the fringe who always see the enemy as good and the USA as all bad. (To them, though “Uncle Ho” was willing to sacrifice hundreds of thousands to have his image of Vietnam fulfilled, he was some sort of saint because he wore rubber soled sandals.) Wars happen. People, including far too many kids, die or are maimed. Some wars are more avoidable than others but none are good. At best they can be necessary even if that necessity is oil. Nor should we fall into the trap of seeing ourselves as good and enemy soldiers as bad guys. They may be wrong, and misled and they are certainly our enemy but no one willing to die for his beliefs is bad.

But thanks to Joe Stalin and some on our side like Curtis Lemay who considered atomic war winnable (Not without reason before the H-bomb) the promise of “some sunny day” “when the lights go on again all over the world” went unfulfilled after WW II. Later Mao had the same mentality. When he told Khrushchev that the USA was a paper tiger Niki replied “Yes, but with nuclear claws.”

I have no interest here in hashing over oil or war profiteering as a cause of war. (Which they are but most in the arms industry, while hardly peaceniks, really believe the high armaments budget to be vital. I met some in business. They’re just too surrounded by the forest to see the trees. On several occasions Ike put it far better than I could.)

All this said, most Americans today seem to consider Hiroshima either a good solution to the war with Japan or at least a tragic necessity and the understandable outcome of war hysteria, battlefield losses, Japanese atrocities, and the necessary propaganda to fight a war. (My brother once told me that he knew the war was nearing its conclusion when our propaganda began to depict the enemy as human.)

Now those (myself included) who have not seen war – and our government is in no hurry to accentuate it in the popular consciousness as it did during WW II – can be horrified by what our side does but, guys, it isn’t a game. (I’m thinking of gunny on the military channel.) The essence of war is hate and brutality. No one was horrified back then if a Japanese or German girl was raped. That had always been the way of war. She was an enemy who had likely heil Hitlered with the men during WW II. To her it was one more bad thing in a stew of horrid things that was happening to girls and children all around her. After the war ended eating was her priority # 1 and I recommend to those who have not heard it Marlene Dietrich’s song “Black Market.”:

The US did not pay as much attention to PTSD then as now except in the most obviously bad cases. The USA had its hands full with those who had physical injuries. It has only been in recent years that many veterans of WW II have felt that they could talk about their nightmares when, after all, they had lost true friends to death or mutilation in combat.

Just as most Americans at least accept the wisdom of bombing Hiroshima, they do not agree that Truman should have bombed Nagasaki. Many people think he was a great man. Personally I think he was a heartless and small minded SOB politician, a description that the bastard would have been proud of.

So, do we honor our fallen soldiers? Of course we do just as we honor firemen and medical personnel who daily risk and often lose their lives to help others. But getting all squishy over pretty cemetery scenes in Arlington does not reflect what they died for. They died not to wage war but to get the horror over with. I read somewhere recently that the way to end war is to make it boring, not to glorify it. One of the reasons that I hate Nixon is that he gutted the space program, probably the only thing in history that could have replaced war. It was idealistic, adventurous, and dangerous. It required commitment and encouraged children to study. Just as important, big industry could make huge profits in it so long as companies were not allowed to profit from both it and armaments. Would there still have been wars. Of course, but they would not have been considered the high point of personal or national endeavor and there might have been fewer.