My father killed some guys.
But it’s OK, because they were the enemy. Right?
My dad was a US Marine who fought in the Korean War. He had no idea how many North Korean and Chinese soldiers he killed in combat. The exact number was hard to count in the mud and snow. He shot multiple men and threw grenades that maimed or obliterated an unknown number. In hand-to-hand combat at the Frozen Chosin, he choked a soldier to death with his bare hands.
After the war, my father returned home partially deaf from the explosion of motor rounds and with a scar across his stomach from shrapnel. He spent the rest of his life as an abusive, alcoholic wreck with undiagnosed PTSD. He got divorced three times, went bankrupt, and died in prison.
So much for the military hero.
In contrast, my cousin who fought in Afghanistan and Iraq is a stable family man who will soon retire from the US Army. One of my good friends was a US Army officer in Iraq, and I know a couple of other veterans, which is odd for someone who never served and is a progressive.
So I have to make clear that I am not criticizing veterans, unlike a certain repulsively smug president. But I’m going to go ahead and criticize our country’s bizarre fetishization of the armed forces.
You see, America has the biggest military in the world, by quite a bit in fact. How a nation spends its money tells you a lot about its priorities. And we clearly value aircraft carriers and bunker busters more than, say, well-fed children and basic health care.
When a country has more weapons than any other nation on Earth, it will look for any excuse to use those armaments. That’s one reason we bombed Iraq — because we could and those munitions were just sitting there. There were other reasons, of course, all of them vague or idiotic. But the point is that just like more guns don’t make a household safer, more missiles don’t make a country more secure.
You might object that we need a massive military because freedom isn’t free. Let me ask you something: When you insist that soldiers are fighting for our freedom, what the hell are you talking about?
This idea has literally never been true in my lifetime. I was an infant when Vietnam ended, but I can tell you that 58,000 Americans didn’t die to preserve our freedom.
Whether the US military was invading Granada, Panama, Iraq, Somalia, or some other far-flung nation, it had nothing to do with our freedom. An argument can be made for Afghanistan, but even that ended in debacle.
No, the last time US troops fought for freedom was World War II. It’s been a long stretch of military misadventure since then.
When conservative commentors bemoan the cowardice or lack of patriotism among young people who don’t enlist, these chicken hawks ignore the fact that millennials grew up watching American troops get killed and injured in wars that began as flag-waving festivities but eventually turned into ghastly, unpopular disasters. Young people don’t want to die in botched wars that accomplish nothing. And who can blame them?
But we have to justify our military might, so now we have the president of the United States gleefully blowing up fishermen on boats.
We also have a human caricature of macho obliviousness shouting about testosterone and trying to eradicate “wokeness” in the military (but right-wing extremism is ok). This guy also proclaims himself the Secretary of War, because Republicans love violence so much. These chest-thumpers live for war, as long as they are not the ones in harm’s way.
Meanwhile, the actual enlisted people suffer, but not nearly enough for a narcissistic chief executive who dismisses sacrifice as something for the little people.
And yet we keep bringing out the color guards at baseball games and insisting that anyone who ever served in the armed forces is a hero and singing weird songs about war, because we are obsessed with the military and making it bigger and stronger and more aggressive.
That is not the mindset of a warrior. It is the mindset of a scared populace.
