Changing Attitudes Toward the Military

"Oh poor me! Who am going out to fight the enemy, I know hot whether I shall return again, to enjoy the embraces of my children and my wife! Oh, poor creature, whose life is not in his own hands, who has no power over his own body, but tries to do his duty for the welfare of his nation! O, thou Great Spirit above, take pity on my children and my wife! Grant that I may be successful in this attempt, that I may slay my enemy and bring home the trophies of war to my dear family and friends, that we may rejoice together, Oh, take pity on me." -- Julia M. Gilman, William Wells and Maonaquah: White Rose of the Miamis.

This fictional prayer, published in 1985, and supposedly recited by a Delaware warrior, reflects the mindset of the modern American soldier.

Many people confuse the concept of "warrior" and "soldier." The sporting world often uses the term warrior, partly in admiration of First Nations fighters. A warrior fights as part of a tribe; he's not paid. Soldiers - as reflected in the Latin base of the word - get a salary. They're paid. It's a job.

Somehow independent adults have been transformed into poor, sad, enforced creatures, who are dragged off to war against their will, while still looking forward to tearing up the enemy and celebrating that mutilation with their waiting families. Soldiers are referred to as "our children," as though they are no older or more experienced than high-school kids on a baseball field.This might make more sense if the soldiers were draftees, as they were in World War Two or Vietnam, but the soldiers today are volunteers. They go by choice. They expect - to quote a veteran of American conflicts since the Civil War - to "see the elephant." They are looking forward to experience, excitement, heroism, even glory.

In a vague way, based on World War Two films, they're expecting to be welcomed into the country they're invading by a grateful liberated population.
Based on a sports model, they expect to be able to make the goal line, to "win," and to get a celebration complete with Gatorade being poured over their heads. Any parade or celebration of a returning soldier has a background in sports celebrations.

But what do soldiers discover once they're in the combat zone? That the population wants the soldiers out of their countries, and do not appreciate the propping up a puppet government that, even if they voted for it, represented only those candidates approved by the invader. Many people in the population remember when the soldiers' government sent weapons that were used against them by the very dictators or fighters the invader now claims to be liberating them from.
The soldiers discover they are fragile and woundable, and that they can die. Their youthful sense of invulnerability is destroyed the first time a comrade's brains are scattered across the road, or their own kneecaps ripped out.

They discover that wars aren't games. Wars aren't winnable, at least not in the sense of their fathers' generation. They come home full of rage, confusion, a sense of deep self-pity, and wonder that they can't find good health care. They don't realize that the corporate-driven administration that sent them to war expected them to be material for a good investment. Soldiers are supposed to do their job and not get wounded. If they are, the numbers and the money expects the soldiers to die, not hang around begging for mental health care and new legs. Soldiers who survive distort the cash-flow.

Soldiers discover that nobody who doesn't want this war is going to join up. The people who are in the military as a career, or support the war, will join, but they'll just have to put up with being rotated into the conflict, because for all so many people claim to support them - how many of those people are actually joining up, or sending their own children? Certainly not the president. Why are his kids not in the war he's sent so many other to?

Soldiers demand that they be thanked or supported by the American people who sent them overseas to todays' wars. What they really don't realize is that most Americans didn't send them, or want them to go. Most Americans know that these wars are wars for oil and territory, not for freedom or security. No war that can put an American into jail for making the wrong phone call or the wrong statement is about freedom. Invasion and war only beget more invasion and war.

It's a peculiar paradox that the people least threatened by attack are those most for the war. Nobody's going to bomb soybean fields or fishing fleets; they're going to bomb cities. It's the cities, with their more educated populations, that know that war just leads to more war. The graffito, "BUSH IS A NAZI" is on the side of the Empire State Building, not on a laundromat in Salt Lake City. New York will be the one threatened - as it was before - by the propping up of bad governments for oil. Salt Lake City never will be (unless they start running cars on brine). The only people threatened in areas that support the war are the soldiers, who actually go. Is the whole drive to "support the troops" based in guilt by the people who support the war and let them go?

Maybe the soldiers need the war prayer. Somebody should take pity on them - it's certainly not going to be the people who sent them, over and over and over again.