Boots on the ground. Usually boys to men, that’s who is required to wage the wars. Boys and men are who they need mostly to fight, kill, maim, kidnap, torture and destroy. In turn they can be killed, maimed, kidnapped, tortured and destroyed as well. They may be required to do these things even if they return home, though they never return the same. They are required to make the wars happen, to keep them going on. One million needed, and later on a million more. Hundreds of thousands of civilians killed, maimed, kidnapped, tortured and destroyed. Then afterwards society will cry, “Lest we Forget.” But it seems we always seem to forget all of that, each and every time.
The government needs them all, from Audie Murphy to William Calley, in the end it doesn’t matter. Just more boots on the ground, sailors in navy ships, pilots flying fighter jets and drones high above. War, endless war. KIA, MIA or secretly fighting for the CIA. The lies told made it all possible, the myths invented rob the truth of any pain, the next war will be righteous until it’s not. Then peace must come with honor, so claim those who know no honor. An honorable end, but the 1812 overture is triumph for some, retreat for others. There never was honor, just surviving, killing or dying.
They measure the wars in dollars, billions and trillions now. Those who fuel the wars but don’t fight tend to profit from it all too well. Those who go seldom do. Those who live over there suffer, so that foreigners may visit their homes with carnage and death. It’s called Foreign Policy. The soldiers are told they may find valor, glory, or honor. To kick in a door, tear a man from his family only to wake up every night in the years after worried it will happen in their own home. Checkpoints, outposts, hurry up and wait, call in air support, the Warthogs may kill you just as it does them.
Which leads us to friend and foe, blue on green. Unreliable men and boy soldiers, not-motivated, corrupt and underpaid. They won’t even fight their war for themselves. Michael Caine and Sean Connery tried to do it, for them it was just a movie. “Hard to trust those who all look the same,” it goes both ways. Are they traitors by betraying their allied occupier or is it betrayal in serving with them? How do they know, how do you?
Back home, homeless men all wear army jackets, unit insignia stains their skin and somewhere beneath the rags are ribbons of valor. Mottoes that once sounded cool now mumble with drool from their lips. Vagrants like John Rambo, not welcome in any town. Trained to fight and die but not much else. Movies will be made, heroes stories told. Never as it was, the closer they think they get the more they applaud themselves for making art. Human lives are not art. Was that the point? To be a plot? Or to lose the plot when you realize the war had no point at all.
The sickness is not just in the mind, it kills the body, from Agent Orange and Depleted Uranium, to burn pits and Gulf War Syndrome. The always self-assured scientists and experts, eager to exploit their degrees, happily poison our planet. The battlefield an agar jar, where humans and nature are prodded and die. More weapons of war, like cluster bombs and bomblets that never die, they linger, linger and linger. Bombs dropped years before, blowing to pieces those yet born. Mines hidden and buried, an Easter Egg left by Uncle Sam. Mutations and deformations inside the sperm so that Daddy may see in his child his own pain. Compensation is thrown around or ignored, but it’s just money. To them it’s numbers on a screen, just as human lives are as well. For the suffering it’s all that remains, pain to stain from grandparent to newly born.
War has been called organized murder. It’s where serial killers become legends. It’s where crime is permitted or prosecuted depending on by who, when and where, if it should ever be known. Cover ups like dirt over the corpses. National security is always at stake but really they mean the governmental ruling class’ reputation. It’s an election year, and all the presidents men must be heroes. Not baby killers, that’s for the former president to be known or the other side. A war crime is a bad thing we are told, though what exactly is that? Some things are called legitimate, collateral and ‘clean.’ While others are frowned upon, on the margins, best not mentioned or criminal. War allowed it all to happen, for it is mass murder in just the right context. A million bombs dropped on jungles or cities, to kill one thousand babies, or driving a bayonet into a child’s chest.
A stranger may become a brother. You may know him better than your lover who you abandoned to go fight the government’s war. Then he may die, or disappear. When you return to the normality that will never be normal again, that brother meanders back to being a stranger or locked in your spirit for life. There’s a bond of fear, isolation, pain and perhaps shame. War does that too. War ruins families but also finds new ones. The common spilling of blood can become more binding than the blood flowing in your own veins.
A Red Badge of Courage can just as easily be a yellow stripe down your spine. Heroes die, but the good ones lie. They even write books. Others shy away, afraid of what they did. Brave in the moment, when they were needed but the courage is not quite there when a wife needs them to put the bottle down. So a loner they may become a cabbie like a Taxi Driver, angry and lost or maybe to shoot up ones home town of Chattahoochee. Valor can be stolen, usually by those who want more wars. They claim the sniper really missed or they answered their nation’s call, even if they did would it justify it all?
Explosions and what one did or witnessed will re-wire the brain. Trauma from the blows, like a prize fighter’s skull combined with the moral injury makes a killer, the victim. Though oftentimes one is not quite a victim, only among them. PTSD, Shell Shock and moral injury, all wounds that stab deep inside, unseen, hidden by those who can’t see the eyes lost as they stare for one thousand yards. Sleep is elusive and when it comes, Gene Hackman’s Colonel Rhodes says you learn to make peace with the ghosts. But even momentary peace is ripped into little pieces of flesh and names.
Returned warriors march home, or carry their bags without a parade. The caskets draped in tear soaked flags hidden out of sight, the public moved on and sufficiently distracted. Whether they wanted the war or not tend to lose interest after a few seasons. They move on to the next one just as easily as they forget the old. The nations visited, become etched in stone, another place to be remembered, like a rapist with his victims tattooed as a rose on his arm. A memory of past glories where blood met tears.
Men go abroad, fight a war and leave their sweetheart back home. The family comes second to when the government wants them to go fight and die. In the end, when it’s over, if that day ever comes, the family are left with the pieces of what remains. That sweetheart if they stayed, has to love what returned if much came home at all. The government wanted it all from you, and they took it all.
I was only nineteen. Though for the rest of their years, they may still be back there, always a veteran. “Thank you for your service,” strangers stand, applaud and shake their hands. Even when shame may wrap their hearts in barbed wire, each beat a stab of remorse, panging with extreme regret. Not even the pistol’s kiss would be enough. No lovers embrace, or child’s touch can right what is profoundly wrong. It was never right to fight and kill. Yet, the boys and men were told it was the right thing to do.
Those who stayed home get their four feathers, demonized as cowards. Those who went are soon forgotten. Vietnam better known for it’s soundtrack, Iraq had no WMD’s and the Taliban won anyhow. Dien Bien Phu fell, Galipoli was a disaster and Khe Sanh became just another song. The Great War was never great and the Good War was not so good after all. They never needed to be fought, even one of those prominent and sanctified leaders in both called the good one, an unnecessary war.
Magical dates are worshiped to celebrate the pain, November 11th, April 25th or August 6th. Symbolic ceremonial days that were borne from war, September 11th included. Necrotic reminders each year of what humans are capable of doing. Whether a folly or triumph, many died. That moment was never enough to insure against the next one, or the one after that. Constantly, there are more wars, more enemies, and endless killing. This is the infinite loop of foreign policies and death.
Over there, it’s felt too. Not just by their killers, but by those who survived. All of them feel it, the civilians too. Once the invaders return home, the war is over it lingers on with the poisoned land, mangled bodies and broken minds. The black dogs running down souls is not spoken about for the civilians, the unmarked graves that bloom flowers of sorrow get no honor guards or folded flags. They are relegated to another one of history’s props. Like statistics to be thrown around casually above intimate life and miserable death by those who were not there or never smelt the flames of pain. But that’s just war.
They will need more boots on the ground. Just like before, this war is different. It may really end them all or end us all.
