by Dennis Green
A group of mothers of a squad of young men serving in Iraq gets together for the first time. Only one of the men is still alive, and he is brain-damaged and severely compromised. One of the mothers says, “My other boy escaped the war uninjured and came back alive. But the person he was when he went off to fight never did come back. In a sense, that boy also died.”
And I realize that there are no survivors of war. And I’m not even sure any longer that any of us survive our stateside combat situations. With every major loss, or setback, illness or injury, a piece of us dies too. And yet, I can still sense the presence, inside me, of my old self, who has never really changed at all. It’s the same self as the one I could feel inside me when I was five years old. “Me TOO!” he shouts, and jumps up and down with joy.
But war must be the most horrible experience of all. The closest I’ve ever come is resisting the National Guard during war protests in Isla Vista following the murders of those four students at Kent State. (“Four dead in Ohio!” as CSNY sang…) And even in those campus and street protests there were moments of sheer terror.
And I realize a lot of the clothing I’ve bought in the last five years has a certain military flair about it — shirts and jackets with epaulets, camo patterns, (both dramatic camo or faint and subtle versions, in jungle green and desert gray or brown…), snaps and belts and zippers. I also sometimes tuck my pants cuffs into the tops of my boots, which themselves have a military look, the overall effect quite soldierly.
Commentators tell us that we’re completely oblivious to the ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. I think that’s bull, that in reality we are depressingly, if unconsciously, aware of it all the time. That awareness, the pain of that awareness, has crept into our fashions, where cultural awareness lurks but reigns supreme, at least for a dandy like me.
Even those many graphic skulls are an echo of the battlefield, not some worldwide plague. And war is NOT a worldwide plague. Some nations, like Cuba, are positively peaceful.
Citizens of a nation at war, let alone one seemingly at perpetual war, also suffer a terrible toll. Knowing that we pay taxes to support the war, that our neighbors’ children go off to fight there, maybe die or come back injured or changed utterly and not for the better, that innocent civilians in those far-off lands are dying too…does NOT enrich our karma, or our lives… unless, that is, we manufacture weapons of destruction.
It seems that for my nearly 70 years of life, America has been at war more of those years than we’ve been at peace. WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Bosnia, Gulf, Afghanistan, Iraq. My God in Heaven! We have a warlike nature.
So we are either a most belligerent people, or we really are the “Peacekeepers” we keep telling ourselves we are. Of course, on the wild wild Western frontier, the Colt .45 was called The Peace Maker too.
Genetics. I suspect that the more violent a nation’s history is, the more likely the violent and belligerent are to survive, and come to dominate the gene pool. “Everybody OUT of the pool!” It’s a wicked place to be.
If I go live on another planet, another dimension, I only hope I’m among a more peaceful breed of creatures. Bonobos perhaps.
©2010 Dennis Green
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