June 08, 2007 02:52 AM UTC

Memorial Day

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• by: RavenDawg

I never knew my Uncle Tom. He was killed outside Bastogne in WWII before I was born.  His death devastated my father’s family and reverberated down to me with this lesson:  Sometimes you have to go to war to defend yourself, but at a terrible cost.

Then came Viet Nam, and I learned two more lessons about war:  That individuals in the government will lie in order to further their own personal or political agendas; and that even our own troops are capable of inhuman brutality in war, with its own accompanying cost.  Venturing into war is to enter the darkness that lies inside us all.  As the writer Doug Peacock said, “[In war] There remains the unavoidable price to be paid for discovering that all things are indeed permitted.” (Walking It Off: A Veteran’s Chronicle of War and Wilderness.)

The current war in Iraq shows the consequences of all these bitter truths—the loss, the lies, the brutality.  The final lesson I draw is that going to war has to be the course of absolute last resort, entered into with terrible purpose and full knowledge of the price.  Once the dogs of war are set loose, there is no avoiding the costs–for winners as well as losers.  My main hope from the debacle of Iraq is that the American people learn this truth and are warier the next time a gang of murderous gamblers tries to seduce our country into a war for their own purposes.