I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling war weary.

It was bad enough before Barack Obama escalated the war in Afghanistan. We had already suffered so many years of battle in Iraq, in an unjustified war.

Already the administration is reneging on the president’s promise of pulling back by July 2011. Instead Secretary Gates and others are saying the push in Afghanistan will last at least another four years.

I’m not going, but my friend George MacMasters, approaching age 53, is. Instead of their original deployment date of next fall, he and his Massachusetts National Guard unit will probably be shipped off to Afghanistan much sooner. It was not enough for George to fight in Iraq; now he stands to risk everything in another dubious conflict.

The latest plans for Afghanistan have made me realize anew how pervasive America’s part in warfare has been throughout my lifetime. Either openly, or by indirection, we have been involved in a long series of armed struggles.

The first war that I knew was World War II. As a young teenager, I would read each day about this conflict, with its terrible losses of life on all sides.

The closest I came to hardship then was the rationing of food, fuel, and other necessities. I did not worry about military service, however. Soon after that war ended, my Watertown draft board declared me 4F, unfit for conscription by reason of a disability.

Only five years after the conclusion of WWII, the Korean War began. Six of my college classmates were killed in that now largely forgotten struggle. Their loss of life, when they were less than one-third my current age, still strikes me as tragic.

Of all our military engagements, the Cold War that ran from 1946 to 1999 was the most threatening, because the Soviet Union held nuclear bombs at hand, and so did we. As former UN Undersecretary-General Brian Urquhart has recently written, “It is a miracle that the world avoided a near terminal disaster.”

My inconsequential involvement in that standoff between the two superpowers meant spotting aircraft in the night skies from the rooftop of Andrew Carnegie’s former mansion in Lenox, Massachusetts. On seeing a suspicious plane, my colleagues and I would telephone its presence to a military checkpoint.

Till recently, the Vietnam War, lasting from 1961 till 1975, held the record of being our longest active war. During this period I joined millions of other Americans in opposing U.S. involvement.

In recent years, America has gone on to Desert Storm, a quick war that ran a few weeks in early 1991. That fast and decisive campaign, engineered by the first George Bush, featured the rout of Saddam Hussein’s forces and the liberation of Kuwait from Iraqi control.

More recently still, at the initiative of George W. Bush, our forces invaded Iraq, starting an immoral war that still drags on. Thanks to the absence of a draft, organized opposition to it in this country has been only sporadic, but its unpopularity has been clear.

That takes us to the eight-year-long struggle in Afghanistan.

I am recalling the major wars our country has waged during my lifetime in order to call attention to the increasing  militarization under which my age peers and I have lived. This explains why the prospect of seemingly endless war in Afghanistan bothers so many of us.

But there is even more to say about our militarization. As historian Gary Wills has pointed out, we have more military bases around the world than even the president knows about.

Writing recently in the New York Review of Books, Wills says: “Now a new president quickly becomes aware of the vast empire that is largely invisible to the citizenry. The United States maintains an estimated one thousand military bases in other countries. I say ‘estimated’ because the exact number, location, and size of the bases are either partly or entirely cloaked in secrecy, among other things to protect nuclear installations.”

I never expected to have such respect for the political judgment of Dwight Eisenhower, a president whom I voted against twice. But, like others, I have come to value his statements about national priorities.

Among other valuable things he said was this: “I hate war, as only a soldier who has lived it can, as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.”

On another occasion, he added: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those are cold and not clothed.”

This is a great warrior sounding like a prophet of biblical times. Would that Ike had not been ignored just as they were.

In later life I feel disturbed by the pattern of almost perpetual warfare in which our country is involved. In addition I deeply regret the expenditure of lives and money, along with the militarization that so marks our national life.