I noticed something years ago about class descriptions on college campuses. If a course’s subject matter included the word “war,” it was much more popular with students. A seminar on “organizational theory” might find a few takers; a seminar on “military organization and war planning” would attract too many students for most classrooms to hold. I asked a professor about this once, and he grinned slyly, reminding me that young professors who teach popular classes have greater career prospects. The observation struck me as a bit perverse.
At a fundamental level, war fascinates people. They can’t get enough of it. Organized violence appeals to their death drive or need for adventure. Young students gather in the yard to protest violence on the other side of the world, but they also sign up for classes that offer an academic exploration of violence in its most disturbed forms.
For some students, I believe, “studying war” feels like “serious business.” Compared to someone getting a degree in the “gender-affirming artwork of transsexual cats,” they have a point. Still, a lot of young people seek out classes on war not because they wish to be good soldiers or wise citizens but because engaging with subjects that involve life and death allow armchair theorists to feel a bit of the “action.”
I have been in many rooms that included servicemembers pursuing classwork as part of their career advancement. There is a vast canyon of knowledge separating those who have read about war from those who have been in war. I’ve seen smart people deliver incredibly detailed remarks about what kind of strategies the U.S. military should pursue around the world. Their arguments are grounded in theory and filled with references to the most famous academics from the last hundred years. Then the people who have actually fired weapons in combat stand up and explain to those well-read students why they don’t know anything.
You can’t really know about logistics until you’ve tried to move tons of equipment over mountains, across deserts, or through mud. You can’t really understand breakdowns in communication until you’ve attempted to relay information while people are shooting at you. You can’t really assess the effectiveness of battlefield tactics based on the annotated footnotes of the college’s most popular “war” professor. When the people who have been there, done that get done chewing through the arguments of those who have been nowhere, done nothing, the silence in the room is deafening.
There is a huge difference between “playing soldier” and being one. There is a huge difference between those who see war as a “game” and those who know war means death.
These memories always jangle around in my head near Memorial Day. Why? Because those who died while serving in the Armed Forces are never around to debate the next war, while those who merely “studied war” tend to become only more opinionated with time. There’s an undeniable unfairness about that. Those who know most about the cost of war are forever silenced from teaching the next generation.
I must admit that when it comes to matters of war and taxes, I don’t think we give enough votes to those with actual “skin in the game.” It doesn’t seem right to me that those who pay nothing in property taxes and income taxes are often the most vocal in demanding how other people’s money is used. It doesn’t seem right to me that those unwilling to fight in wars (or send their children off to fight) are often the most vocal in demanding that we open up a new front. I say, “open up a new front,” because we Americans have been fighting wars — big and small — all over the world since WWII. There hasn’t been a single year when American boots weren’t on the ground somewhere. The entire globe is our battlefield.
War has been the status quo for so long that it has lost all meaning. Most Americans will be too busy vacationing during the three-day weekend to take a moment to contemplate just what we’re supposed to be memorializing. Whose memory are we meant to be preserving? Those who died while serving in the U.S. Armed Forces. The ones whose voices are now lost.
Many politicians in patriotic parts of the country will deliver speeches about all the Americans who “made the ultimate sacrifice” or “died so that we may be free.” But those are our words, not theirs. They are not around to tell us whether they think their sacrifice was worth it. They are not around to judge whether America is still free. Others will pretend to speak for them.
You know how Memorial Day really took hold? It didn’t come from the brains of government bureaucrats. It didn’t come from spontaneous outbursts of patriotism. It came from America’s mothers, daughters, sisters, and wives. It came from the hundreds of thousands of women across the North and South who lost their loved ones during the Civil War. It came from a sense of tremendous grief that utterly destroyed families. Violence and death soaked the land, and the women of America lost their men forever. It is they who decorated the tombstones of their husbands and sons. It is they who mourned the fallen. It is they who consecrated graves with their tears. It is they who shouldered the broken nation’s collective agony. Sadness, not patriotism, is the essence of Memorial Day.
Walt Whitman wrote a poem during the Civil War that was frequently read by survivors on what we now call “Memorial Day.” It is entitled, “Come Up from the Fields Father,” and tells the story of an Ohio farm family learning about their son and brother’s death. The eldest daughter has a letter from Pete and calls her mother and father to the porch, so that they can read what he has to say. They hurry together and quickly open the letter. Soon, however, they realize that it is not in his handwriting. Their eyes fall on certain words: gunshot wound, skirmish, hospital.
The mother’s face goes white as she collapses against the door. Her eyes fill with tears, as she knows her only son is dead. The poem describes the mother’s anguish: “By day her meals untouch’d, then at night fitfully sleeping, often waking, / In the midnight waking, weeping, longing with one deep longing, / O that she might withdraw unnoticed, silent from life escape and withdraw, / To follow, to seek, to be with her dear dead son.”
This melancholy poem became the intimate expression of several generations of nineteenth-century women in the decades following the war. It was arguably the most beloved poem of the era. Consider how much pain was endured by so many for such sorrowful stanzas to become their prayerful anthem.
Whitman’s words reflect a reality of war that is often hidden by those who rally nations to take up arms: carnage and heartbreak do not remain on the battlefield. They cross far distances, reach into the pastoral peace of farmlands otherwise teeming with life, and shatter families forever. Anyone who has lost a loved one to war knows that death takes first but torments forever.
As General Robert E. Lee observed, “It is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we should grow too fond of it.” If only Americans alive today spent as much time reading about the great confederate general as they do defacing and toppling his statues. Those who have waded into the blood, sweat, and tears of war know it best. It is not a thing to be desired or praised. It is not something to celebrate. It is a measure of last resort. It is a bringer of infinite sadness. It is why we mourn. We must remember that.
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