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I have friends, classmates and relatives who have died in service to our country. Now my son is in the same situation. For some reason, this year it has taken me a bit longer to get a handle on their sacrifice; the ghosts seem too close, their cries too insistent. I can see faces more clearly than I have for years, frozen in time in a way that only those of the war dead can imprint themselves on those who knew them. Perhaps part of it is also trying to get a grip on how Veteran’s Day has changed, not just in terms of having its official holiday changed, but in other ways.
The Ghostless Generation
As I ponder my son who is in his twenties taking these ghosts with him for the rest of his life as I have, it occurs to me that there is a generation between us who is not haunted the way we are. Essentially from the 1975 deaths of United States Embassy guards Corporal Charles McMahon & Lance Corporal Darwin L. Judge in Vietnam until the Gulf War in 1991 and arguably until the Iraq War in 2003, a generation of Americans grew up not having to deal with the ghosts. There were military actions during those years, what Peter Huchthausen terms America’s “splendid little wars”–Grenada, Lebanon, Panama–but they were relatively short and involved small numbers of troops compared to Vietnam and the current conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Curiously it is this generation without ghosts who is deciding much of the foreign and military policy of this nation today, which makes one wonder about the old truth that only old soldiers should have the right to send their sons to war for only they truly know what war is like.
There are too many in Congress now who do not know what it is like to attend a military funeral, to decorate a grave of someone you knew personally, to place your finger on a name on the Wall and like some emotional light switch have it turn on the tears when you did not even realize they were coming.
When I was young we lived on a VA station with national cemetery in our backyard. In high school I used to run through that cemetery training on its hills, passing thousands of identical white markers made more dramatic by the democratic sameness, some of them dating back to the Civil War, their faces worn by time and the weather so the names were just barely readable. On the other side of our house was the psyc building, its yard surrounded by a high fence. There lived those with wounded souls. Sometimes in the summer when the windows were open you could hear one of them cry out in the middle of the night. He had truly seen a ghost.
But now those in Congress have lived their lives without growing up with such memories. When you are not haunted by ghosts it is much easier to dismiss them as not real and to live in a less complex world where the dead lie comfortably somewhere else other than in your own mind.
The Era of the Undeclared War
But even my generation has had it easy, for this nation has not fought a declared war within the memory of most living people. The so-called Greatest Generation will soon be gone and with them the memory of what it was like to fight a war the President and Congress all agreed had to be fought and put their own lives on the line by officially declaring war.
We have forgotten the meaning of that action, for by declaring war Congress and the President each took personal responsibility for the lives they were about to commit to combat, each took personal responsibility for the telegrams that would go to homes across the country, each took responsibility for each and every one of those crosses I ran by and, yes, for those who still cried out in the night.
We seem to live in a time when our people, our soldiers still have the nerve to go off to war, knowing that some of them will not come back. We live in time when families still watch sons–and now daughters–put on their uniforms and receive their orders to ship out to places where only duty and loyalty would command you to go.
Yet the politicians seem to have lost that nerve. We are now in the longest war in American history–Iraq–and yet neither President nor Congress has officially declared war. The way policy seems to be moving it is doubtful that we will ever have the nerve to declare war again.
But the difference between a declared and an undeclared war is more than semantic. As we saw with Vietnam and as we have seen with Iraq, undeclared wars become ambiguous political footballs where it is too easy to play the armchair general or even evade all responsibility. So now tactics, deployment policies, troop numbers are argued in Congress and the press in ways they were not when war was declared.
Sometime during the Gulf War and even more during Iraq, the military itself became aware of this changed state of affairs so that now generals also go to the press to plead the case for more troops or a change in tactics. At the same time it has become common to question the strategic judgment of generals.
Of course in the Civil War Lincoln openly questioned his own generals as did the press and in turn they questioned his leadership. One of his generals even ran against him. But somehow the current debate over General McChrystal having to ask for more troops seems unseemly. Commanders have always wanted more troops and more resources going back to George Washington, but there is a difference between doing this in a declared war and an undeclared one.
In an undeclared one, the answer all revolves around politics where in a declared one it revolves around the will to win. By that I mean Congress ultimately will decide whether General McChrystal gets his troops.
Who Fights Our Wars
If we have a generation who has never fought in a war making decisions about wars, we also have a generation fighting those wars whose status is far different than it was during the era of the declared war. In the era of the declared war, it was assumed everyone would sacrifice. Although money and connections could sometimes enable people to avoid combat, the general assumption was that no one was immune.
Today our wars are fought by professional soldiers. This nation has always worshiped the concept of the “citizen soldier,” the civilian who takes up arms because the nation is under threat and when the threat is over returns to their job. That concept helped to give Veterans Day a portion of its meaning. This is not to say that we have not looked to professionals for leadership whether Pershing or Eisenhower. West Point, Annapolis and the Air Force Academy are there for a reason.
However, if we continue to move in the direction of wars being fought only by professional soldiers it profoundly changes the relationship of the military to our society. A line is drawn between military and civilian, the two cultures become more isolated from one another and isolation breeds misunderstanding.
It will be many years before we know how much damage was done to increase this separation by President Bush’s use of the National Guard. Once a largely community-based, civilian organization–the weekend warriors they used to be called–the Guard now is fighting major wars, undeclared wars, not providing flood control. It is one thing for the President to use the regular military this way, as they were in Grenada or Lebanon, but to use the National Guard as Bush did was to profoundly alter our society.
The reason I say it will take years to assess the impact is because there seems little question that where joining the National Guard once meant there was little chance you would see combat, now it means you probably will–and multiple times, for the other thing that has changed from the era of the declared war is that with a shortage of troops that means the same troops see multiple deployments. There are soldiers who have seen combat in Iraq and Afghanistan longer than any other group of troops in our history.
So on this Veterans Day, their sacrifice seems particularly meaningful. They now fight so we don’t have to.
So We Don’t Have To
Veterans from the First and Second World Wars used to say they fought so the next generation did not have to fight. Now our soldiers fight so the rest of us don’t have to. It is not quite as blatant as the Civil War practice of buying a substitute, but those now in Iraq and Afghanistan are substitutes. Vietnam at least had the lottery. These new wars are a different kind of lottery.
Service in the military grows from the belief that we owe our country something. That is why the word service runs through the military vocabulary, from phrases like “were you in the service,” to “where did you serve” or “what unit did you serve in.” By all accounts that notion of service still prevails in today’s professional military.
But what has happened to it among the general population? The ghostless generation seems to have lost that idea of service. They do not believe they owe their country any years of their lives and certainly not that they may be called upon to make the ultimate sacrifice.
In my county park there is a monument to six World War Two winners of the Medal of Honor. All six were awarded the nation’s highest decoration for throwing themselves on live grenades to save the lives of their comrades. That such actions have continued in Iraq and Afghanistan shows that this spirit is not dead, which leaves me with some sense of optimism about our future.
But this Veterans Day those six also ask if the spirit of sacrifice may be waning among the general population and certainly among our leaders. I wonder if the era of the undeclared war and the professional military continues how the next generation will view Veterans Day. Will the ghosts haunt them as they do me? More pointedly, will they even believe in ghosts?
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