Just a few random thoughts in the wake of this grim Memorial Day week, with many young people still staked out in harm’s way in Afghanistan and Iraq.

I’ll start with the way our public figures memorialize dead servicepeople. They employ verbal false limbs, as Orwell called them, that are almost as autonomic as that ubiquitous closing remark Reagan added to every succeeding president’s speech – “God bless you, and God bless the United States of America”. But embedded in these solemn pronouncements, mouthed in large part by people who have never heard a shot fired in anger, are implicit endorsements of some very bad policy. Politicians of both parties have a sickening tendency to hide the moral bankruptcy of their foreign adventures behind praise for the valor of those who carry them out. Conversely, any attack on the policy is treated by them as an attack on the troops.

Such obfuscation is more effective with today’s all-volunteer military, but back when the draft was running at full steam, it was a much harder sell. When you are literally forcing people to go to war, your praise tends to ring a bit hollow. Of course, our volunteer military is forced, technically speaking – they have no choice but to go, even if they merely joined up for the promise of college tuition. But unlike the 60s and prior, this is not a broadly-experienced phenomenon. Back then, masses of young people were threatened with deployment and particularly in the case of Vietnam, many were sent against their will. In that circumstance, there’s a strong incentive to examine the policy very closely. Many did, and didn’t like what they found.

When we praise our war dead, let’s think about what they were asked to do and why. When we thank them for “protecting our freedom,” let’s acknowledge the fact that not a single war this nation has fought since World War II was about protecting our freedom; that in fact none of them should have been fought in the first place. That’s no reflection on the troops – volunteers and draftees – sent to die in distant lands; that’s just reality. You can fight bravely, protect your buddies with great valor and distinction, and be worthy of every medal. But that doesn’t make the invasion and destruction of Indochina, or Iraq, right. And it didn’t keep us free. It just killed a bunch of us. And a larger bunch of them. And let us face it – today they are just fighting, as the Tidy Bowl man used to say, “so we don’t have to.”

So I say to all veterans, living and dead – thanks, and sorry… so sorry.

luv u,

jp