Paragraphs after the Wars (1)
When something dark and terrible and bloody happens - when a Lee Harvey Oswald or a Charles Manson or a Jeffrey Dahmer gets loose among us - we tend to call the deed and the doer "evil," shake our heads and say we don't understand, or analyze it under that heading, asking ourselves earnestly, Where does this evil come from, this way of being that is so foreign to us?
Sure, there are evil people in the world, people who need to kill in order to satisfy something in themselves. But the body count accomplished by such people is paltry compared to that stacked up by organized armies of nations whose leaders, citizens, and soldiers thought they were doing good. And these people - that is, you and I and our parents and children and brothers and sisters and relatives and neighbors - think we are doing good, not in the three-quarter-hearted way a person holds an opinion about a politician or a style of dress or music, but with that deep spiritual conviction that is required in order for young men to stand up, fix bayonets, and walk into the firing.
Going to war is sometimes a necessity, for defenders. More often it is a choice, which we contort to make look like a necessity, as in the Tonkin Gulf “incident,” which was falsely made to look like it had been necessary, and which needlessly cost 4 million human lives, give or take.
We men - we warriors - can and must make some other choice. If we are to do that, two things are required of us.
The first is that we must see our own natures and motives for what they are. This book is my attempt to do that, for myself. Others may or may not recognize parts of themselves, of their personal experiences, in my stories.
The second is that we must tell true stories, without embellishment or self-censorship, so that boys and young men, and their parents, may know how terrible war is before they sign up for one, how little it has to do with the reasons governments give for going to war, or with the reasons we warriors give ourselves.
Evil isn't what we have to fear. It isn’t “terrorism,” or “communism,” or “al Queda,” or Osama bin Laden, or some other conveniently assigned evil. Our definition of what is good is what we should fear, especially including our deepest religious and political beliefs.
These are the ones we are willing to fight over, the ones which inspire us the to send our sons - and now, some of our daughters--to war over. They are the ones which cause us to be willing to trade the lives of kids barely out of high school for a piece of red, white, and blue cloth folded into a tidy triangle.
Those deep beliefs constitute the human mechanism which we use to slaughter our young. Doing this, we create committed and powerful enemies around the world, eager to do battle with a new generation of our youth.
This set of deeply held beliefs about what is good-especially religion and patriotism-is what we should study until it breaks open to the light.
END
