Tattered Page

This is a reprint of my old Veteran’s Day writeup two years ago.  The blog apparently ate it, but when I was thinking about what to say today, this seemed more appropriate now than ever.

Veteran’s Day.

Many of us have grown up in an era with few- if any- family members that have worn a uniform.  This holiday must seem distant and oddly strange to them.  Who are we remembering? and why?  An unpopular war only makes the confusion worse. 

I’m asking that, no matter what you think of the war- and even if you don’t know any veteran- you take the time to recognize this day.

November 11th has a personal meaning for me: the sixteenth anniversary of my plane touching down in Saudi Arabia.

I find it hard to believe that those events are almost half my life away. While most memories have receded into that fogbank I call a mind, they’ll occasionally surge back, staggering me with a solid chunk of sensory overload- a realness that leaves the rest of my life feeling fake… monochromatic, in a way.

I was fresh out of training- Basic, Combat Engineering, and Airborne school all in a row.  All that programming doesn’t last long through the terrifying mix of adrenaline-induced exhileration and emotional numbness felt in the heat of action.

Those two strangely conflicting feelings- the thrill and the emptiness- will eat at you.  When you learn someone you called “friend” has died, and you feel nothing… that numbness haunts you.  When you’re consumed by the adrenaline rush and encounter masses of dead- enemy and civillian- and feel nothing… it haunts you.  When you kill…

You get the idea.

Even if you manage to carry yourself according to your conscience, memories of how you felt will follow you.  If you did do something shameful, or something you can’t talk about in civilized company… well… the haunting’s all the worse.

The numbness is a defense mechanism… or that’s what they tell you. They say it’s perfectly natural.  Shutting down the emotional baggage helps you survive… do what needs to be done.  That doesn’t make me feel any better.  Either I’ve been eyewitness to one of the greatest flaws in myself… or in all of humanity. 

If I knew it was just me I might sleep better.

…And I had it alot easier that the men & women returning home today.

I’ve seen people deal with that experience in many ways: denial, callousness, drugs, alcohol, mock bravado, even resignation to become the monster they once feared. Facing it openly and directly- living with it- takes support. 

Why do we do it?

Some of the people most capable at giving that support are the same people that can’t understand why we blindly accept the decision to go to war. Why don’t we just refuse to go? “You must like it,” they may think. Heck, we must look like bloodthirsty battle-starved monsters to you guys. 

Soldiers swear an oath to defend our constitution from enemies, foreign and domestic.  One of the biggest domestic threats to our democracy is our military acting against the civilian authority.  That’s why the military establishment firmly remains subordinate to the civilian authority.  If that civilian authority decides on a policy, generals may carry it out or resign.  They may challenge the tactic, but not the policy.  That’s a path best left untraveled.

Grunts down in the trenches… well, we can’t even resign. Psychological warfare is very real and very debilitating, and misinformation can come from anywhere.  Our senses and our command structure are the only reliable sources for operable information.  Everything else is suspect.   

Trust

We may laugh cynically at the policy, we may even debate it in our off-time, but when the bullets are flying, we must operate on trust.

• We trust that the guy next to us is going to do his job.
• We trust that we will have the resolve to get through the day.
• We trust that when our leadership risks our lives and asks us to do things that will result in sleepless nights for decades to come, they do it for the right reasons.

And finally,

• We trust that the people, the power behind the civilian authority, will scrutinize the decisions of our leaders and hold them accountable should our trust ever be misplaced.  We can’t do that without destroying what we’ve sworn to protect. 

We trust you to take care of us.

My trust never wavered in my fellow soldiers.  When I felt my own resolve wavering, their strength kept me going.  I’ve rarely ever trusted the leadership, I just understood the rationale for the orders… 

…but until recently, I’ve all but lost faith in that ultimate authority.  The people were following blindly when we needed to scrutinize the policy most.  It may have been the right policy, but we didn’t even bother to look.

 

The nation celebrated “mission accomplished” three years ago.  Our soldiers rotate in and out with nothing bigger than a family reunion on their return.  There are no victory parades.  No forests filled with yellow ribbons.  Too many opponents of the war don’t know how to behave around the people that fought it.  Too many supporters of the war find it easier not to face the real impact on real people.  Our returning soldiers, haunted by their own demons, are left with little community support when they need it the most. 

They need to know who they can trust.

There isn’t another “mission accomplished” in sight. 

There’s no single foreseeable event that we can gather behind.

Let’s Use Nov 11th.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 9th, 2006 at 5:30 pm and is filed under Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.