Honoring The Fallen

By Steve Hynd

I have to admit that, as a European - a Scotsman - in a foreign land I don't really get America's Veterans Day. Reading blogposts and tweets by American writers today, I've seen countless expressions of support for those who serve because they "defend our freedom". I managed to upset at least three aquaintances because I tweeted that, whatever the national trope may say, even American soldiers don't actually defend "our freedom" - they serve the national interest as decided by politicians of the time. They can be honored for doing so, they can even be honored for serving because they believe they are defending our freedom, but at the end of the end it all boils down to Clausewitz: "war is the continuation of politics by other means."

Don't get me wrong. I have the utmost admiration for those who put their lives on the military line for their nation - especially in an all-volunteer army. Many may have joined for reasons more to do with escaping dead-end towns or furthering their own prospects in life than a desire to "defend our freedom", but most seem to end up believing they are doing just that. But there are few now who believe that Korea or Vietnam were about actually defending freedom, or the 2003 invasion of Iraq. There are many who believe that the continuation of the long war in Afghanistan isn't about defending our freedom either - and more than a few of those wear a uniform.

Veteran's Day is known in Europe as Remembrance Day. On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, the guns fell silent. Almost all the veterans of World War One are dead now, the last European veterans passed away this year and there's only one known survivor of the fighting left in the U.S. Maybe with their passing we're all forgetting that the Great War was a fight billed at the time as one to "defend our freedom" that turned out simply to be a monumental waste of the "Lost Generation", 16 million lives gone because leaders wanted to play power politics.

Today, please, honor those who fell for a "continuation of politics by other means" and those who still put their lives on the line for that too-often ignoble purpose, but leave off the jingoism.

Dulce Et Decorum Est (Wilfred Owen)

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! -- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under I green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, --
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Update: Matt Yglesias gets it.

Update 2: Thanks to David Sirota for tweeting this link to One City, a Buddhist blog. Greg Zwahlen quotes Kurt Vonnegut:

When I was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one and another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.

Update 3: More good sense from John Quiggin, who deliveres a timely reminder of the evil that mediocre men can do, and from Stephen M Walt, who writes that the best way to honor those who serve is to "make sure they aren't asked to fight and die to no good purpose."