Vetran's Day

Here is a good article in Newsweek about Veteran's day:
The Wages of War
Old soldiers know the human price of battle. What history teaches us about how vets truly think.


By Jonathan Darman
Newsweek
Nov. 14, 2005 issue - Italy, late May 1944. The Allied Army advanced on Rome and suffered a brutal counterattack. Hunkered down near the beaches of Anzio, a 23-year-old Army private from Oak Ridge, Tenn., sent a despondent letter home. "Take a combination of fear, anger, hunger, thirst, exhaustion, loneliness, homesickness," Paul Curtis wrote to a younger brother who wanted to know about war, "and you might approach the feelings a fellow has." Nothing can ease his depression, not even the prospect that the war might end. He is certain that war will "rise again." After all, he writes, "peace will be settled by men who have never known combat and ... hold no dread of another war for they don't know."

Old soldiers have always led America. They've shown us how to love our country, revere our military and honor our war dead. More softly, they've warned of the dangers of wishing for war. "It is well that war is so terrible," said Robert E. Lee, or else "we should grow too fond of it," and soldiers have echoed him from Antietam to Iraq. Now, as we celebrate another Veterans Day, we welcome home a new generation of soldiers. If history is a guide, only a few of these new veterans will join antiwar movements; most will proudly support their country in any future entanglements it may face. But many of those returning from Afghanistan and Iraq will doubtless join a tradition of brave veterans who quietly hate war. They can teach us why war is never romantic, but may sometimes be worth fighting all the same.

Fighting soldiers fall quickly out of love with war. Living in cramped quarters, stripped of their individuality, they find their youthful dreams of glorious war alien and strange. "I once had a dim notion about the 'romance of a soldier's life'," wrote a Union soldier after the first Battle of Manassas. "I have bravely got over it since." In World War II, "anybody who was involved with killing and being killed was disillusioned from the start," says the war historian Paul Fussell. "You can't go through that kind of combat without becoming disillusioned."

Some veterans voice their feelings clearly. Gen. William T. Sherman's admonition that "war is hell" is often remembered for its irony (Sherman was the cruelest prosecutor of the Civil War in the South). Forgotten is Sherman's audience, a graduating class of military cadets. Seeing hunger for war rising among his listeners, Sherman offered simple advice: "Suppress it." Adults can be equally susceptible to romantic notions of wars. "The intellectual community is apt to say we have to 'do something'," Gen. Colin Powell wrote in 1995. "But in the end, it is the armed forces that bring back the body bags and have to explain why to parents." Some even give up all illusions of noble service. "Never mind about the glory of a uniform," a Korean War veteran wrote to a friend considering enlistment. "There are too many dead & maimed glorious & honour bound boys."

Other old soldiers are always hungry for a fight. Theodore Roosevelt was in love with war when he stormed San Juan Heights and never lost his romantic sense of combat. Even at the death of his son Quentin in World War I, Roosevelt was triumphant: the boy had "had his crowded hour." ("My other boys are just as daring," Roosevelt bragged when responding to a letter of condolence. "If the war lasts, they will all be killed unless they are so crippled as to be sent home.") As a young lieutenant colonel in World War I, George S. Patton came under heavy fire in the St-Mihiel offensive. Remembering his grandfather, a fallen Confederate general, he concluded it was his noble destiny to be "another Patton" who died on the field of war. (He lived and went on to command campaigns on two continents in World War II.)

Other military families are less eager for combat; still, if it's war, their sons will fight. Some think it dangerous to dwell on war's horrors. Man's "destiny is battle," said the thrice-wounded Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. "If it is our business to fight, the book for the army is a war-song, not a hospital-sketch."

Veterans who speak openly of war's evil, though, say honesty can help us in future fights. History may be on their side. Combat had no romance after World War I; a generation had been lost for nothing but the dreams of dead kings. But when darkness fell again in Europe, the weary West stood up to fight in World War II. "We are all conscientious objectors," said the English writer Rupert Croft-Cooke, "and all in the war."

It is the privilege of the old soldier, then, to speak realistically of war, and idealistically of peace. Another privilege: speaking for those who did not live to speak for themselves. At the end of his letter home, Paul Curtis, the downtrodden Army private, ventured that "all new men" shared his hatred for combat. He wondered if old men felt differently and if someday he would feel differently, too. We cannot know. Three days after writing his letter, Curtis was struck down in combat, just south of Rome.

© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.

May we never forget what they did for us. Hopefully one day terrorism will be wiped off the face of the planet.

John Engrav