Conscientious

I Object!

When I was young, I studied military history. Tuchman. Catton. McCullough. Keegan. Toland. And on and on. I thought I knew what war was all about. March of Folly by Tuchman was an outlier, a rare focus on the stupidity of it all. Wars were horrible in the abstract, but romantic in my teenage mind. I cried when I read One Gallant Rush by Peter Burchard.

In the Vietnam era, I didn’t walk out when my high school class did. I went to college and joined the ROTC. I was in a military fraternity. I led a national championship drill team. Military Science was my favorite subject while my contemporaries were out protesting the war.

I had this fantasy. I would be a great combat leader. I would train the men under my command so well that they wouldn’t be killed. I would lead from the front, and sacrifice myself before I would let a private take a bullet. Reading about battle didn’t disabuse me of this fantasy. Training for battle didn’t disabuse me of this fantasy.

I graduated from what was then called “advanced camp.” (I don’t know what they call it now. Military jargon is like mucus. It is fluid, slimy, and it evolves quickly from generation to generation.) I was at the top of my class. My leadership score, rated by Green Beret combat veterans, was number one in my platoon.

I drank the Kool-Aid. I was gung ho to the max. I admired people like “Vinegar” Joe Stillwell. I was ready to “go where I’m sent.”

On graduation day from advanced camp, we were rewarded with a “firepower demonstration.” Basically, it was a show of military might. We sat in bleachers looking down the length of a firing range, three miles long by maybe a mile wide.

An announcer read a script over loud speakers about “defense in depth.” He asked us to imagine that we were on the front line of a battle and “the enemy” (unnamed, but we knew it was supposed to be the Soviets) was advancing on our position.

“At three miles, the F-15s fly in low over the enemy and rain down hellfire,” he said. Just then, the jets entered stage right, and dropped napalm in a great silent conflagration. The sound, a great roiling whoosh, reached us a couple of seconds later.

“Whoever makes it through that will have to face our “improved conventional munitions.” (We now call those cluster bombs.) The 105mm howitzers boom out and in the middle distance we can see... nothing for a second. Then an explosion, maybe a hundred feet or so over the field, and then little puffs of dust kick up, pop, pop, pop, over an area the size of a football field. “Shrapnel storm!” The announcer was exultant.

“The determined enemy...” Yada, yada, yada. It goes on through a Vulcan anti-aircraft battery, firing direct, 88mm mortars, 50 caliber machine guns, claymore mines. Finally, the platoon in the slit trench in front of us opens up with their M-16s. White, man-shaped targets downrange are shredded.

As this went on and on, I realized that something was flipping in my chest. I had a thought that changed everything. I couldn’t shake it. I felt ill. I thought, the enemy has exactly the same munitions, call them whatever you want, but essentially the same. And in that moment, my fantasy shattered. I saw my platoon out there on the field, assaulting an enemy position. In my mind, I led my men into that storm of lead and steel and I knew that nothing I could do would keep them from being killed, from being turned into hamburger.

I shook the feeling off and cheered with the rest when the show was over, but something started to eat at me. Over the months that followed I fell into what would today be called “clinical depression.” I had days when I couldn’t get out of bed. My thoughts circled around and around, not latching on to any anchor, or understanding what was happening to me.

But back then depression wasn’t a thing. My parents just thought I was lazy. But when a life fantasy shatters and you begin to break and you can’t explain what’s going on in your head and you feel like crying all the time and it’s all you can do to get up and use the toilet, how can you not believe what your mother says? How can you not layer that shame on top of your destruction?

I dropped out of school and never got my commission as an officer. Normally, dropping out of school would have necessitated joining the enlisted ranks. I was ready for that. I wouldn’t have to take responsibility for thirty or forty other teenagers. Just be a grunt. Luckily, the war was over and the military didn’t need nine million men under arms anymore. They called it the RIF, “reduction in force.”

I got an honorable discharge, but I didn’t feel honorable.

It took many years and therapy for me to figure out that the process that started that day, painful as it was, would open me to a better life. I had a career in IT engineering. I have a beautiful wife and boy-girl twins who turn twenty next month. I’m working on two novels--one will come out next year.

I am at peace.

I still read history. In the last fifty years, I have expanded my reading widely. Science. Math. Political Economy. Philosophy. Poetry. Classical Literature. I finally read Smedley Butler, the old bastard who was the most decorated American Marine, who wrote War is a Racket in 1924. It’s a short book, but it put a cap on what I know about war.

“I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism,” Butler wrote.

I was right to be sickened by that firepower demonstration, that wretched, sinful abomination, that vainglorious rehearsal for slaughtering teenagers.

The men who start wars are always the same. The men and women who suffer from them are always the same.

War never changes.

Today, I hear that they are raising the draft age to forty-three. I hear we’re going to invade Iran (for reasons that make no sense). I hear we might get a draft for the first time since I was in uniform.

My twins, my babies (I still think of them as my babies) were raised by the Wiccan Rede, “Harm none, and do what thou wilt.” Harm none is non-negotiable.

The thugs and warmongers are not getting my babies.