On this Veterans Day, I was thinking this morning about how they have ceremonies for aging veterans each year. I wondered if there are any WWI vets still alive, so I looked it up. According to Wikipedia, there are 22 still alive, but of those, only a few actually saw combat. These guys are all 106 years old, more or less.
I read John Keegan's First World War this last year. It was a bear of a book that I had to force myself through. Not only is Keegan a fairly dry writer (don't get me wrong, he's an excellent researcher and the information is thorough, just numbingly so), but the subject of WWI is depressing as hell.
Short Summary: Europe spends 20 or 30 years expecting that there will be another war, and does nothing but plan for it. Some obscure and unimportant duke gets shot, and it turns out to be the trigger that sends a horrible cascade of events into motion. Enormous numbers of people smash into each other in great lines, and due to the efficiency of their modern weapons, are forced to dig in. They fight for almost 3 years in an almost static position, feeding millions of men into the action, to no effect. It reminds me of a great machine that is trying to keep a fire called war going, and human beings are the pieces of wood that it keeps feeding in to be wasted. And the war was a waste. Nothing was proved, nothing was gained. Even the victors were bled white and most of a whole generation of young men were destroyed. The war bled the countries' coffers dry and produced such an unhealthy environment that the worst pandemic to ever hit the world swept through in the months following the war and killed even more people that the war killed. Horrible things like chemical warfare were invented. As if the war wasn't bad enough, economic penalties for the losers were so harsh that a vicious hatred was stoked virtually guaranteeing the next war.
Even after all the evidence of the futility of attacking heavily entrenched positions, generals still ordered it and men still went forward into the teeth of the meat grinder. Can we even understand that thinking anymore?
It occurred to me today that those arrogant generals that kept ordering the fruitless attacks are all dead now and that maybe their way of thinking would die with them. Maybe when the last of them died, the urge to send men off to a fruitless, hopeless, meaningless death would find a final resting place in their cold lifeless corpses.
We already know it's not true. Each generation somehow forgets how horrible war is and starts a new series of wars. Maybe this is something that is hard wired into us, a genetic trait. Lord knows there's not much keeping our population in check. If humans were deer, there'd be an unlimited season on them. "Gotta thin the herd." Maybe war is the price we pay to avoid being hip deep in people. If so, it's damned inefficient.
After WWI came a series of little wars around the globe as people sought to push boundaries around and plant their flag in a piece of turf, or assert their domination over another group of people. Then the big countries went at it again. Hell, they didn't even wait a full generation between WWI and WWII. Some of the guys that fought in I were still there to fight in II. Dwight D. Eisenhower was a veteran of both, as well as Douglas McCarthy. Truman fought in the trenches in the first war and later gave the orders that finished off the next war.
Then there was Korea and Viet Nam as well as Gulf War I and the Iraq War. So we didn't learn anything about the costs and results of war. At any given time, there are dozens of wars going on in the world. The print and the network news don't even report most conflicts unless they get completely out of control. Would you like to venture how many ongoing conflicts there are right now? Wikipedia (see "Ongoing Conflicts") says there are 29. The death toll for these wars is mostly unknown, but it appears to be about three quarters of a million. The average conflict goes about 15 years back. Try typing "War Death Toll" into Wikipedia's search bar and gaze in amazement at the carnage from history. The Rwanda Burundi war didn't even make the list and I remember hearing that 1.5 million people were hacked to death with machetes in that war.
They called WWI the Great War and The War to end all Wars. I wonder if maybe the end of war, which would be great, is something of an oxymoron. They always say that those that fail to pay attention to history are doomed to repeat it. I don't think that's right. It's not that people aren't aware of what happened before, they just don't think it's the same thing when it's happening to them. Look at the Iraq War. Many of the people that worked the hardest to make the war happen came of age in the Viet Nam era. I remember when the Iraq War was going to start, there was this really small fringe of people that said that it was going to be another Viet Nam. I remember the reaction those statements got - mostly scorn. The average citizen thought that this was totally absurd. We would be in and out in no time. The problem with this war is that not many Americans think they are affected by it. I don't know anyone that died over there and only a very few that served. I don't know anyone that has lost a loved one over there. But I know that the world seems like a much more dangerous place because of all the resentment over our actions.
The problem with resentment is that it doesn't die with the people that harbor it. They pass it down to their children, and it gets nurtured and preserved. One of the premises in the Serbian Bosnian Croatian Kosovar conflicts was some massacre that happened hundreds of years ago. I'd never even heard of it. No one alive today was there, much less effected by it. Our continuous chain of wars and atrocities stretching back to antiquity is like some kind of twisted perversion we keep feeding and never try to break free of. It's the serial drug addiction of the human race.
All that gloomy sentiment said, I have to say that overall, life is pretty sweet. You get to see interesting things, have good friends, love your family, and cherish sweet days with beautiful weather and glorious scenes. You get to struggle against disease and hardship, grow and learn, strive and achieve, and see the world change and history take place around you. People are basically decent, if you get to know them. There are few people on Earth that no one loves, that someone can't understand or appreciate. Maybe some of them only have animals for friends, but most people have someone that wants to have them around. And sometimes we send people off to war to stop things from getting worse, to preserve our way of life. Not many soldiers that march off to war think that they are doing something worthless. But in the cauldron of war, watching all the suffering and loss around them, I'm sure they have one thought in their minds - "If I get through this, I'm gonna do something to make life worthwhile."
We need to find a way to teach that lesson without war.
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