On the Fourth of July, four American soldiers, veterans of the war in Iraq, discussed their experiences. Appearing on public television, these young men offered a sober account of where things now stand.
“Two years into this war, this situation hasn’t improved,” said Specialist Patrick Resta.. Another, Sgt. Gregg Bumgardner, referring to the Iraqis, added: “They didn’t really want us there.”
Back home, when they meet civilians, the latter sometimes say: “Thank you for defending our country.” This sentiment has Bumgardner scratching his head in confusion because it can come from people opposed to the war.
These four men made a highly favorable impression on me. Their intelligence, obvious sincerity, and balanced realistic judgments suggest that the number of smart and capable non-commissioned officers in the American forces may be high.
That so many other soldiers like these have been killed or terribly wounded in body and/or soul continues to trouble me. I grieve when I see the names of the dead several times each week. My heart goes out to those families who have lost sons and daughters fighting in this war.
Equally afflicting is the fact that casualties are much greater among innocent Iraqis. It is one thing to die for a good cause; to fall victim to the lethal violence unleashed by modern weapons in a misbegotten war is something else.
An old friend, a native-born Iraqi Jesuit, provides a personal perspective on the agonizing warfare that continues to devastate his people and their land. Talking about it, he shakes his head in dismay at what is happening to his former countrymen, and to us.
Length of life provokes comparisons, I discover. Iraq drives me back in memory to Vietnam. Granted, these comparisons do not work exactly. You cannot easily apply the lessons of one complicated situation to another quite different one.
However, when it comes to war, what the comparisons do teach is the unexpected complications of armed conflict. You cannot count on things turning out as you expect: you are quite likely to be fooled, as the authors of the Iraqi invasion have been.
In my later life, I feel constant concern about what is happening to our country. Naiveté about the people of the world and ignorance of history, along with lack of interest in the subject, strike me as disabling handicaps for our nation. All too often our federal government adopts policies that embroil us in warfare, harming us as well as people of other countries. Anyone who has lived for more than a few decades knows that willful blindness can lead into dark and disastrous places.
War spawns the telling of lies, and our federal government has become accomplished at this activity. We are all suffering from repressive changes in our society that harm our national values without making us more safe. A constant barrage of propaganda is necessary to make us believe in the myths that are foisted on us for political advantage.
For my money, the journalist Chris Hedges has written more tellingly about contemporary war than anyone else. After covering warfare in at least ten different countries in the last three decades, he knows the subject at first hand.
In an interview published online by the Public Broadcasting System, Hedges speaks about the hidden costs of war: “I'm not a pacifist. Wars are always tragic, but probably inevitable; I would think they are inevitable . . . But I also understand what war can do, especially when you fall into the dark intoxication that war brings.
“That process of dehumanizing the other,” he continues, “that ecstatic euphoria in wartime, that use of patriotism as a form of self-glorification, that worshiping of the capacity to inflict violence — especially in a society that possesses a military as advanced as ours — all of those things I wanted to expose in the book, so that people would at least understand war for the poison that it is.”
Like Hedges, I am not a pacifist either. But, in my book, war can only be a last resort for the most pressing of reasons.
I will never forget the words of the British poet Wilfred Owen, killed in France one week before the armistice of 1918. Writing from the trenches, he bitterly quoted the Latin slogan “Dulce et Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori” (It is sweet and proper to die for one’s country). He called this saying “the old lie.”
These are the concerns of an aging columnist who increasingly worries about what is happening to our beloved country. When our government leads us into an unjustifiable war, it inflicts damage, boomerang-like, on ourselves as well as other people. I could wish for greater confidence that we will find our way out of this morass and reclaim the moral stature that we Americans have had at our best.
Richard Griffin