The author does not step into the story to correct the idea that over a million dead people in Iraq aren't actually "people," but it is a way of thinking that many participants in war work to become aware of and overcome. Sanchez, in fact, spent many years telling himself that at least he had not personally killed people because he had shot at the front of trenches so that the "enemies" wouldn't stick their heads and guns above them. When his life became less busy, he began to think about what he had actually done decades before:
"When I didn't have all these other things I had to think about, they came back to me and then I found out. God, the psychiatrist told me that I killed between fifty and 100 Germans. But I didn't shoot to kill. I shoot to keep the guys down from shooting back. My job was to shoot right in front of the trench so dust and rocks and everything was right over-head so the Germans [are] not gonna stick out their heads to shoot back. That was my job, to keep them down, and keep 'em from fighting back. That was my mentality. I wasn't killing anybody. And that's what I was saying all these years. But the goddamn Iraq War reminded me what a dirty SOB I was."
The stories get harder, not easier, from there. The story of the war on Korea includes a U.S. veteran apologizing in-person to a woman who was the only survivor in her village of a massacre.
Don't blame the veterans, we're often told. But this is a cartoonish morality in which blaming someone bars you from also blaming someone else (such as top government and military officials and weapons makers). The fact is that many veterans blame themselves and would no matter what the rest of us did; and many move toward recovery by facing their guilt and working to balance it with work for peace and justice.
Messner explains his perspective with an account of a conversation with his grandfather, a World War I veteran:
"On the morning of Veterans Day in 1980, Gramps sat with his breakfast--a cup of watery coffee, a piece of burnt toast slathered with marmalade, and a single slice of cool liverwurst. A twenty-eight-year-old graduate student, I'd recently moved in with my grandparents in their Oakland, California, home. I tried to cut through Gramps's cranky mood by wishing him a happy Veterans Day. Huge Mistake. 'Veterans Day!' he barked at me with the gravelly voice of a lifelong smoker. 'It's not Veterans Day! It's Armistice Day. Those gawd . . . damned . . . politicians . . . changed it to Veterans Day. And they keep getting us into more wars.' My grandfather was hyperventilating now, his liverwurst forgotten. 'Buncha crooks! They don't fight the wars, ya know. Guys like me fight the wars. We called it the "War to End All Wars," and we believed it.' He closed the conversation with a harrumph: 'Veterans Day!'
"Armistice Day symbolized to Gramps not just the end of his war, but the end of all war, the dawning of a lasting peace. This was not an idle dream. In fact, a mass movement for peace had pressed the U.S. government, in 1928, to sign the Kellogg-Briand Pact, an international 'Treaty for the Renunciation of War,' sponsored by the United States and France and subsequently signed by most nations of the world. When President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the law changing the name of the holiday to Veterans Day, to include veterans of World War II, it was a slap in the face for my grandfather. Hope evaporated, replaced with the ugly reality that politicians would continue to find reasons to send American boys-- 'guys like me'--to fight and die in wars."
So they will until we stop them. Guys Like Me is a great tool for that cause -- and for the restoration of Armistice Day. One error I hope will be corrected is this statement: "Obama slowed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan." President Obama in reality tripled the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan and made it by every measure (death, destruction, troop count, dollars) his war more than a war of Bush or Trump or the two of them combined.
Veteran Gregory Ross read one of his poems at the 2016 Veterans For Peace Convention. It is quoted in Guys Like Me:
The Dead
do not require our silence to be honored
do not require our silence to be remembered.
do not accept our silence as remembrance, as honor.
do not expect our silence to end
the carnage of war
the child starved
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