The US had been a relentless aggressor since then. We attacked anyone and anything. In fact we got quite a reputation in the world as an unpredictable war machine which does not really know what it is doing and has to be somehow manipulated. And we loved to be manipulated all – right. NONE of the Foreign Wars so far had been to the benefit of an average American. NONE. Some people name WWII as the one which dragged the US from Depression. But it was not the war itself but rather the luck of Russia taking on its own the main German war machine that made it possible. The US piggie- backed big time and took advantage. Our Veterans got the GI bill. That was the benefit all right. I doubt if anyone here realizes that the price for that was 27 million Russians. Not much honor there if you ask me.
Someone might say that the failure of the leadership cannot tarnish the heroism of the individual soldier. Of course that’s true. But then what would be the better way to honor that individual soldier than the obvious recognition of the Hell of War and the strife for Peace. Peace is the ultimate goal of war, right? No war is justified if we do not want Peace in the end. What Peace did we strife for when we started the Vietnam carnage? What Peace did we want in Panama? What Peace did we want in Iraq? What Peace do we want in the ‘war on terror’. What Peace is Pax Americana? Do we really want it?
I come from the country where war was a part of legacy of every generation. ‘I was only once in the hand-to –hand combat and thousands of times in the dream afterwards’-wrote Julia Drunina, the medical officer in the WWII ( she was 19 then) and a Russian poet. She committed suicide after the Soviet Union was dismantled. As a devoted Communist she could not bear the new regime. Whose honor was preserved here and whose was violated? What lessons can we learn from that? Do we learn from the foreign soldiers anyway? Maybe we should. They commit suicide when their world collapses. What is their world? Did we ask?
Veterans come home. We say they served their country with honor. In the 1920s those honorable men were sent to the Key West during the Hurricane Season. Ernest Hemingway wrote ‘Who Killed the Veterans in Florida’ after he saw floating corpses in the marches. Then we became smarter: we created a VA administration and all those cemeteries to honor. That did not help those veterans and their families in New Orleans when Katrina hit. Again there were floating corpses in the marches but this time the movie by Spike Lee was not very much appreciated. We are at war with terror after all and the sacrifice is honorable.
Damn that honor, folks. Show me the money! Show me the army which is not used for the private purposes. Show me the officers whose salaries are commensurate to the current level of living. Show me privates whose ammunition is up- to- date. Show me the way the Pentagon guys get promotions, look me in the eyes and say that war is not the source of their career. Show me how the Hollywood folks profit from violence. Don’t lie.
Don’t lie to them and to thyself. This Army is the army of volunteers. They enlist and then they face the the simple issue that they are screwed. The society uses them as mercenaries to kill people on the foreign soil so that the big guys here have their regular supply of blood and gold, small guys have their violent entertainment and Toys R US can sell GI Joes. It is all fixed. They die and we cry. Everyone gets what he deserves. I heard those words were on the gates on Auschwitz. Or Buchenwald.
When Johnny comes marching home he should better look around. If he decides that his crappy town with no good water, dingy streets, no health insurance and dead- end jobs is the reason he went to war to blow his head off then maybe he should go back to war so nicely provided by the President. Then he is an armed corpse. But if he gets into black rage maybe he should go the that Arlington Cemetery and gives that undead pervert Cheney a piece of mind. And that would be honorable. So far the honor belongs to Cindy Sheehan.
Honor works both ways, folks. Honesty to each other is the primary foundation for it. Let’s start from the ‘ Honest work for Honest pay’. What work, is it honest? What pay, is it honest? That’s honor- in acknowledgment. Let’s talk. Just don’t lie.
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