In The Things They Carried, a compelling condemnation of war every American should read, Vietnam veteran Tim O’Brien describes the physical and psychological burdens young American soldiers had to carry for 365 days and nights, through the rice paddies and hamlets of a foreign land 10,000 miles from home, haunted by the knowledge that sudden and violent death might be just one heartbeat away. . .
They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing-these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight. They carried shameful memories. They carried the common secret of cowardice . . . Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to.
Because refusing to kill other human beings would have been so embarrassing, 50,000 young Americans went off to boot camp and came back in body bags from the Ia Drang Valley, the Central Highlands, the streets of Hue, or a sandbagged bunker at Khe Sanh. The killing went on and on, because losing that shameful war was a consequence politicians in Washington wanted to avoid as long as possible. Sitting in their plush offices, they concluded that 50,000 slaughtered Americans and 2,000,000 slaughtered Vietnamese was a bargain basement price to pay for Peace With Honor.
America’s shameful occupation of Iraq is being prolonged by politicians in Washington with the same craven disregard for the sanctity of human life. Instead of Impeaching the criminals responsible for five years of war crimes, they deny the harsh realities staring them in the face, and tell America “uplifting” war stories about that “heroic battle against terrorism” they sent the sons and daughters of other people off to fight in a country where 40 percent of the world’s oil just happens to be, instead of in Afghanistan and Pakistan where all the terrorists are.
Tim O’Brien doesn’t tell uplifting war stories. There is nothing uplifting about human beings killing each other so politicians can parade around as patriots and war profiteers can get rich . . .
If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie.