You'll Never Get Rich

by Dennis Green

You’re in the Army now

You’re not behind a plow.

You’ll never get rich,

You son-of-a-bitch,

You’re in the Army now!

All through my twenties, until I was almost 35, I kept asking, along with the rest of America, “Why are we in Vietnam?” For most of my life, in fact, born a little over a year before Pearl Harbor, America has been at war. With Germany and Japan, with North Korea and China, invasions of Cuba and Central American countries, the war against the people of Vietnam, in Bosnia, in the Gulf War, and now, still, after eight long years, in Afghanistan and Iraq. Why?

Why is half of our national budget dedicated to “Defense?” Why do people complain when we spend money on health care, or education, or broadband, but not a peep about the trillions spent on war? Are we that violent a people?

I was watching Night of the Living Dead (1968) the other day, and about halfway through the movie remembered that the undercurrent in the zombie film is the threat of all those alien, foreign, communist hordes coming to take away our freedom, to suck out the very life blood of liberty. The Cold War, in 1968, was still going strong, and the ghosts of Joe McCarthy and Loyalty Oaths still hung over the land.

All that propaganda. There were even movies that portrayed Russian soldiers occupying American cities. “The Russians are coming!” filled the airwaves, even mainstream broadcast news. Meanwhile, our primary means of fighting that Cold War was to stockpile atomic warheads, thousands of them, at a cost of trillions of dollars that couldn’t be spent on anything else.

Today, in Afghanistan and Iraq, young Americans are dying to protect poppy fields. We are committing the same rank stupidity that brought the Soviet Union down. And for what? So that Afghanis don’t come and occupy American cities? So that Islamic terrorists don’t get past all our security measures and crash more airliners into buildings?

Those Americans in uniform who are risking their honor and their lives, who will come back, many of them, damaged for life, or in body bags, are not getting rich. But somebody is. Somebody always is. If the manufacturers of weapons of mass destruction, like Boeing and McDonald Douglas — troop carriers and Humvees, RPGs and sniper rifles, gas masks and night vision goggles, drones and land mines — were not getting rich, we would not be perpetually at war.

The superficial patriot will talk about honor, and notifying the family members of their dead sons and daughters, without ever asking why. Why did more than 56,000 Americans die in Vietnam? So that the Masters of War could get rich. Why have more than 4,000 Americans died in Iraq? Mission accomplished.

So long as the American people sit on their hands, those hands will be covered in the blood of all those who died in vain.

©2010 Dennis Green