Peace has no heroes by Matt Giwer, © 2002 [October]
I have watched peace movements from my college days when Vietnam was getting into full swing. To join the antiwar movement in those days you had to join groups lead by people pushing Mao's Little Red Book. If you wanted to be against war you had to support Chinese communism. I often wonder if most of the organizers were not CIA and FBI agents working to discredit the antiwar movement. There was a modest movement against the first Gulf War. It did not get off of the ground. The US position was on sound grounds of nullifying the invasion of Kuwait. Today there is an unorganized movement against the war against Iraq. Worse than Vietnam, there are no justifications for this war other than those used by Germany in 1939 and by Japan at Pearl Harbor. I do not care who likes that observation as it is a fact. For those who favor the war without worrying about the justification the feeling appears to be "we can do it, we want to do it, therefore we will do it." That too is Germany in 1939 -- A Triumph of Will. Why should people be against this war? We are all adults here. War means killing people. And it means being killed by people. Killing is not a nice thing no matter whether on the giving end or the receiving end. It means you take away all a man ever had and everything he is ever going to have. That is never a good thing if there is any choice. I believe I am not unusual in this feeling. I do not want to kill people even if there is no risk of being killed. If our government is correct and Hussein is forcing Iraqis to fight then we will be killing people who are innocent. If Iraqis are normal people they will fight to defend Iraq against foreign invaders regardless of who is running the country. Normal people will fight to defend their country. Either way we are killing people who are blameless. With more than half a century of life behind me and as a father I do not encourage any young man to dream of fighting a war. Victory in war is nothing more than which side has the least dead. It has nothing to do with who is right or wrong. God is not on anyone's side. The chaplain tells you otherwise only to help your morale so you won't think about what you are doing. Avoiding war is not cowardice but wisdom. It is a wisdom untried youth is not expected to have. Combat brings wisdom to those who learn. The wise consider war a last resort. The fool does what he can to start a war. Life is all we have. Children are all we can give to the future. A telegram, a body bag, a folded flag is nothing but dead. Glory is for the brief moment Taps is played and quickly forgotten. What rots in the ground is a loss to all mankind. Those he put in the ground before he died have nothing but a different plot of earth to hold them. In this war Iraqis and Americans will share a common grief. Children should not die before their parents yet they will. They will die doing what we, their parents, have told them is the right thing to do -- if we tell them it is the right thing to do. This is a plea to parents to share the wisdom of our age and experience with our children. This is a plea to end the silence and speak the simple truths we have learned over the years. This is a plea to share with all children not just in furtive phone calls and letters with our own children. The people calling for this war have no experience in war. Only a few were even in the National Guard. The people against this war have all had combat experience. That should be telling in itself. As members of the generation to whom they look for guidance, whether they admit it or not, we have a responsibility to them. We have a responsibility to them as our only hope of our personal future and the future of our country. Do we want to encourage our children to become the vanguard of an America which the world will fear for generations to come? Is this the world we sacrificed so much for in the Cold War? Did we give so much to save the world from Communism just to make the world safe for American domination? Were you not like myself who believed a Cold War victory would mean retreat from the world and living in peace? Did we do what we did to eliminate competition from a clique of Americans whose goal is ruling the world? I did not! Did you?
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