The Question Of The Day

W.D. Ehrhart asked it last Friday in this Inquirer column.

What are we fighting for?
The rhetoric, the substance of patriotism

W.D. Ehrhart
earned the Purple Heart, the Navy Combat Action Ribbon, and two Presidential Unit Citations in Vietnam

When I was a boy, Memorial Day was my favorite holiday. Its arrival meant that school would soon be over for another year. It was also the day the local swimming pool opened for the summer. Best of all, it afforded me that only-once-a-year opportunity to decorate my bicycle with red, white and blue crepe paper and join the high school marching band and the trucks of the volunteer fire company in the big parade up Fifth Street to the town's war memorial.

And the crowning moment, the apex of it all, was when the American Legion color guard fired its 21-gun salute for America's fallen heroes. That sharp crack was the real thing. Not the adolescent "Bang! Bang!" of our imaginary guns, but the genuine ear-splitting thunder of rifles. My playmates and I always waited impatiently for the bugler to finish playing Taps so we could scramble after the empty brass casings we treasured as souvenirs.

It simply wasn't possible for a 10-year-old to comprehend what Memorial Day really meant. Only when I got to Vietnam as an 18-year-old Marine volunteer did I come to understand that real guns shatter people's skulls and scatter their brains like spilled pudding, or rip their insides to shreds and leave them screaming for their mothers. Only then did I realize that all the pageantry every year was designed to make people believe that it was somehow noble and heroic to send our children off to be maimed, mutilated and butchered, while attempting to inflict that sort of punishment upon others.

My grandfather's generation fought in the war to end all wars. My father's generation fought in the war to rid the world of fascism. My generation fought in Vietnam to - to what? What was it for that time? Nothing that mattered, we came to realize, but only after the damage had been done.

And the killing just goes on and on. Since my generation stopped dying in Vietnam, American soldiers have died in Cambodia, Iran, Lebanon, Grenada, El Salvador, Panama, Kuwait, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan, and now Iraq again.
I begin to suspect that the politicians and generals who tell us that we must sacrifice our children for the cause of peace are perhaps being just a bit disingenuous. I didn't see any politicians in the rice fields of Vietnam, and precious few generals died there.

Kenny Worman and Randy Moore died there, kids who used to ride their bikes in Perkasie's Memorial Day parade with me. Kids who had no quarrel with the people who killed them. Kids who died merely because powerful people who would never have to face death in battle told them it was their duty to die.

More recently, we were told repeatedly that we had to send our children into harm's way because Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction that posed a direct and immediate threat to the peace and security of our country. Four years later, 3,200 more young Americans are dead, and 30,000 have been wounded. We all know that we went to war for a lie; Mr. Bush asks us to be patient; Congress dithers over nonbinding resolutions; and there is no end in sight.

Have the dead and wounded of our latest war sacrificed for their country? I don't think so. Nor do I think my friends Kenny and Randy died for their country in Vietnam. They died for the fantasies and machinations of arrogant powerbrokers the American people repeatedly and mistakenly put our confidence in, generation after generation, too ignorant ourselves, or too spineless, to separate the rhetoric of patriotism from the substance of patriotism.

I don't go to Memorial Day parades anymore. It seems to me that if we really want to honor our fallen heroes, we might try a little harder to keep any more of them from falling. We might try to be a little less gullible when politicians and generals tell us the next war is necessary. We might take a moment to consider that the ones who start these wars for peace are seldom the ones who do the killing or the dying.

As his bio notes, W.D. Ehrhart teaches at the Haverford School in Pennsylvania.

And on days like this, I find myself recalling this column from E.L. Doctorow.

Update 5/30?07: I meant to link to this column from Paul Krugman earlier and highlight the end, as follows...

Here's the way it ought to be: When Rudy Giuliani says that Iran, which had nothing to do with 9/11, is part of a "movement" that "has already displayed more aggressive tendencies by coming here and killing us," he should be treated as a lunatic.

When Mitt Romney says that a coalition of "Shia and Sunni and Hezbollah and Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda" wants to "bring down the West," he should be ridiculed for his ignorance.

And when John McCain says that Osama, who isn't in Iraq, will "follow us home" if we leave, he should be laughed at.

But they aren't, at least not yet. And until belligerent, uninformed posturing starts being treated with the contempt it deserves, men who know nothing of the cost of war will keep sending other people's children to graves at Arlington.

Sad but true.