I'm guessing "oops" doesn't quite cover it this time...

[Colleen Thomas]

So much Ares-worshipping. Some people decide, golly a war, how jolly much fun. Like the fucking idiot Europeans on the dawn of World War I. There seems to be people that just like war. The cause, casualties, ramnifications, or opposing troop strength don't matter. All that matters to them is that Our Boys are Victorious. There are buzzwords attributed to the mess of tangled limbs. Glory is the pregnant woman with an eyepatch and a missing leg. Honor is the beautiful and chaste 16-year old girl who had the misfortune to be pretty in an occupied area with people who have been shot at one too many times by people of her color. Courage is a 6 year old boy trying to carry his dead mother or baby sister out of the town before the falling naplam catches up with him. Freedom are the lovers blown up by a misguided bomb before their first copulation. War is Hell but some just don't fucking get it. Still after so much fucking evidence they cling to the idea that war is a fucking game where everyone hops in the pickup and grabs a beer afterwards. War isn't football. It affects people and none more heavily than those caught in the middle.

Ask the Kurds about the glory of war or the residents of Bosnia-Herzegovina (sp) or the Cambodians.

That's not to say it isn't ever neccessary. But it'd be nice if a certain type of personality wasn't so fucking eager for a war, any war.

Maybe if we had fought more wars on our own soil we wouldn't be so 50/50 over Empire Building. Maybe if we knew the taste that the civilians get in the horror of falling bombs wondering when one would go "off-course" or that some enemy soldier decided a family member "didn't look right" or worse "looked too right". Maybe then. Cause now with only soldier's accounts retelling again and again how "war is hell", the people who need to get the message aren't. And that's a tragedy. One that breeds war and suffering and pain and atrocity.

We can't blame shit like this on the soldiers though the men in power will of course do so. This shit happens in war. Atrocities and dead civilians and shattered lives. It's why war is not to be entered like a damn game. There aren't fucking flowers. There's only pain and a grim waiting for peace, any peace, no matter how small.

There is a glory to war Luc. Flags waving, parades down mainstreet, medals for valor. There is a reverence that goes to the combat veteran, a reverence that even small children can feel who have no conception of why it is there nor of what was endured to earn it.

War is an endeavor of the young. There is a reason war is glorified, if it weren't, no one would show up for one. The brutishness, inhumanity, physical and psycological damage it inflicts is always marginalized. It's been that way since men first decided they could do better by taking what other tribes possesed rather than improving upon what they had.

"War is hell, and it is a good thing, least we grow too fond of it."
~R.E. Lee

"It is the soldier, above all others who desires peace." ~D. McArthur

Words of wisdom from perhaps two of the most honored, respected and capable men ever to practice the art of war. Yet you rarely, if ever hear those quotes.

War is no game, but yet, in this country at least, it has been made a very popular subject of games. Checkers, Chess, Straego, Risk, symbolic games of strategy, where war is implied. Walk into the walmart and try to pick up a computer game or Ps2 game. How many involve war, in a larger or lesser degree? A whole generation, raised on So com, Diablo, Doom, Calll to Duty, etc.etc., the list is nearly infinte.

Is it really so surprising to you that kids rasied on war, the computergame, look to the battlefields with entusiasm? War hasn't changed much since the invention of the Machine gun. You can send in the tanks, you can rain death from planes, but in the final jeapardy of any war, it's the combat infantryman on the ground, sent in to take and hold territory. And when he meets his counterpart, it devloves quickly from pretty colored dots on a map to kill or be killed, down and dirty, nasty, brutal struggles for life.

The packageing of war has changed though. Did you ever consider the Army's new slogan? Be all you can be has been replaced by An army of one. Think about that. An army of One. How many computer gmaes make you just that? Surely the appeal has been modified to fit the generation of button smashers who grew up on army men and Patton vs. Rommel. Think about it, the Marine Corps ad campaigns, even the navys, they all are aimed at kids who are now young men and women, but the appeals look like they are right off the back of the latest video game.

War will always be with us, as long as human nature stays the same. I would like to say it is merely the packageing that has changed, but that isn't really true. Young men have flocked to the banners for ever, and generals plan on short quick victories.

Do you really think a war fought on our own soil would change that? Ever been to San Antonio? Pearl harbor? Gettysberg? Vicksberg? Hallowed ground. Places imbibed with a reverence that is palpable. A war on our own soil would simply give us more shrines, more hallowed ground, and more legend.

The call to glory will never cease. Young men (and Women) will ever answer. If history has shown us anything, it's that people respond to the horns of war far better than they ever have to a call for justice, equality or humanitarian causes.

The problem is not that those in power now see war as a game. The problem is that they view it in the same vein as a stock ipo, or the end of year corporate ledger. Pros & cons are weighed to the final iota. CPA's judgeing a beauty contest. The tone deaf judgeing a talent competition. Bussinessmen, insulated from the horror and human suffering, counting only the profits gained, wheter they be monetary, prestige or simply real estate. Dead soldiers in one colum, dead civilians in another, ordance used in dollar amounts in a third, probably profit of assets taken and held in the fourth.

We have argued here over Civilian control of the military. I would submit to you, the civilains who control it should be required to be combat veterans. I think only a man who has seen the horrors first hand, lived the fear and witnessed the shrieking savagery has any kind of conception of what is worth going to war over and what isn't.

Perhaps the most horrible legacy of Vietnam is the silencing of veterans. Voices, that carry the weight of respect, that might be raised against entering a war are stilled. Men who know better cannot protest as their greatest fear has become seeing their fellows villifed by the public. So they remain silent, raising their voices only to support the troops, while the toy soldiers in Washington make the decisions that cost the lives of men.

Support for war isn't 50/50 Luc. It's a lot more than that. Since at least Regan, if not before, a quick, successful little war has been a political panacea. To you and many here, the tragedy in Iraq is in the dead, dying and destruction. To the bean counters, it's not in any of those, it's in the fact that the bottom line has been getting progresively worse since victory was declared. Pips on a talley sheet. Each one representing a live lost, a person forever silenced, but there is no difference in the pips. To the bean counters it is only the number of pips, not the potential or suffering that matters.

You call them Ares worshipers. I disagree. The men who are running things now don't worship any god. They worship the all mighty dollar and they cannot view war as anything other than a finanacial opportunity. One great big IPO.

-Colly