Gonna Study War Some More

Out to Pastoral

by John Idol

HILLSBOROUGH, NC—(Weekly Hubris)—1/17/11—For much of its history, the United States has flexed its military muscle, by my count engaging in battle, at home and abroad, for well over seven decades, much of that time trying to wrest territory from native Americans, Seminoles, Cherokees, Choctaws, and other tribes.

Born in battle, our nation has taken up arms time and again, joining other nations as an ally, cranking up wars on its own, splitting itself into warring camps and fighting one of the bloodiest wars in human history. Since the year of my birth,1932, our blessing as peacemakers has been sparse, war-making consuming more than 33 years.

I count only active warfare, not the Cold War years. Of my 78 winters, I spent four years on active duty with the United States Air Force, my service coming during the Korean Conflict, a clash not yet settled after all this time, a stalemate even today creating saber-rattling.

Our war-making took many lives. Leaving out casualties resulting from the War for Independence (since we were not yet a nation), I find the total number of deaths to stand at 1,292,588, nearly half that number reached as Federal and Confederate forces slaughtered one another on our own soil.

Our taste for carnage sticks with us, even if we’ve transferred blood-letting to Iraq and Afghanistan. We have a knack for finding troops willing to fight ours, even as we boast of having the world’s greatest fighting force. The Romans had a neat platitude that explains why: “Sweet it is to die for one’s country.”

Mix in a large portion of jingoism and an ample heaping of religious fanaticism and hundred years’ wars could become faded records in some future history books.

Take a long look at how fast the nations of the world are depleting resources and polluting the atmosphere of our mutual spaceship, and war-making becomes senseless; suicidal, in fact.

We do, indeed, need to study war some more, to see it for what it really is, to use every ounce of our common humanity and good sense to find ways and means of preventing it. No more can we allow ourselves to be led to war by trumped up charges against a foreign nation. Henceforth, we must discover, beyond doubt, whether something pointed to as a cause for fighting is truly a threat to our national security.

We must resist every effort of egomaniacs to march us into battle. We must study war until we see how horribly juvenile it is, how destructive it is, how morally and philosophically crippling it is. We must study it until we learn to do better than slay one another.

Our studies should take us to the battlefield at Antietam, to Hiroshima and Yokohama, to Dachau, to the Russian front in dead of winter, to South Viet Nam where a scared lieutenant shot down villagers, to Dresden after the massive air raid attack, in short to places where man’s inhumanity to man appeared in its ugliest form. Image should be piled on image, fact heaped on fact, sound raised to a deafening roar, the stench of war released from nozzles placed nearby.

Our studies must enable us to see, hear, feel, smell war. Then, I think, we’d have no taste for it and agree with General William Sherman that “War is Hell!”

Instead of gleaning our knowledge of war from history books and classroom lectures, our studies would include film shot during battles, cinemas realistically dealing with battle, letters written on the battlefield, debriefings of soldiers engaged in hand-to-hand combat, laments of parents, wives, children upon learning of a beloved one’s death. Our museums dealing with war should not be so sanitized that death has lost all dominion. No, death should not be allowed to sneak away, to go gently into some good night.

Our studies should teach us that any bell tolling a soldier’s death is tolling our own as well, that any bugle blown at the burial of a soldier announces our demise. The chain of our humanity will not have it otherwise. That lesson learned, who could lobby for war?

To make war studies more complete, concrete, life-changing, our nation should institute universal military training for all able-bodied 19-year-olds, regardless of social, economic, ethnic, or religious status, placing them under hard-nosed drill instructors and locating them on Parris Island in the middle of summer, or some other spot equally uncomfortable.

A few trainees, proud of proving their man- or womanhood, will want to make their livelihood by continuing this regimen. Let them be dubbed Marines and organized into a corps to send into action when a disaster strikes.

They should have to crawl on their bellies under barbed wire while live ammunition whizzes over their heads. Living solely off the land for three or four days should be de rigueur, so rigidly enforced that all but few trainees would become head-sick, heart-sick, sinew-sick, bone-sick of military activities. And all nations besides our own should require such inhumane training, the reason being that short-term misery will most likely prevent long-term destruction and inhumanity. Only a few self-selecting men and women would have a stomach for war if its rigors were fully known and felt.

A chief benefit from such training would be seen in college classrooms and vocational centers around the globe. Youth introduced to the demands and discipline of the real world would likely be far better students, far more thoughtful citizens, far more apt to question the stances of politicians.

As ironic as it may seem, considering all the decades our nation has spent fighting (and losing) wars, settling down to a serious study of war may be the surest way of avoiding one. Such a study would surely lead us back to our Constitution, with the result that Congress would have to put its stamp on military action proposed by a jingoistic President. Its approval would come with means for funding and bring an end to such credit-card wars as we are now waging.

So, you see, I’m gung-ho for studying war. And I hope our country is gonna study war some more. If the study leads where I think it will, if it’s done with sincere earnestness, if it’s intelligent, planet-Earth hugging, and humane enough, we could sing together thankfully and joyfully these words from the old spiritual:

Ain’t gonna study war no mo, Ain’t gonna study war no mo, Ain’t gonna study war no mo.