A Brief Note on the Cost of War

Consider the fact that the population of our country was around 2 million two hundred years ago. Yet, we had statesmen, men with intimate knowledge and brilliant ideas regarding how the country should be governed. Forget their religion. Forget their politics. Forget their sexual mores. I’m talking about taking a new country into a world full of enemies, educating the population on democratic responsibilities by living as examples. They worked in congress without pay, considering public service a sacred duty. The risked their lives to serve others.

Here is a brief historical account of the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independance: Five signers were captured by the British as traitors and tortured before they died. Twelve had their homes ransacked and burned. Two lost their sons serving in the Revolutionary Army; another had two sons captured. Nine of the 56 fought and died from wounds or hardships of the Revolutionary War. They signed and they pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.

What kind of men were they? Twenty-four were lawyers and jurists. Eleven were merchants, nine were farmers and large plantation owners; men of means, well educated, but they signed the Declaration of Independence knowing full well that the penalty would be death if they were captured. Carter Braxton of Virginia, a wealthy planter and trader, saw his ships swept from the seas by the British Navy. He sold his home and properties to pay his debts, and died in rags. Thomas McKeam was so hounded by the British that he was forced to move his family almost constantly. He served in the Congress without pay, and his family was kept in hiding. His possessions were taken from him, and poverty was his reward. Vandals or soldiers looted the properties of Dillery, Hall, Clymer, Walton, Gwinnett, Heyward, Ruttledge, and Middleton. At the battle of Yorktown, Thomas Nelson, Jr., noted that the British General Cornwallis had taken over the Nelson home for his headquarters. He quietly urged General George Washington to open fire. The home was destroyed, and Nelson died bankrupt. Francis Lewis had his home and properties destroyed. The enemy jailed his wife, and she died within a few months. John Hart was driven from his wife’s bedside as she was dying. Their 13 children fled for their lives. His fields and his gristmill were laid to waste. For more than a year he lived in forests and caves, returning home to find his wife dead and his children vanished. 

Those who escaped death during the war went on to build a nation, men like Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, Franklin etc. Name me one statesman in our congress today their equal. And we have 330 million not 2 million people to pick from. This society has come to honor and cultivate politics before public service, self-interest before responsibility, and self-indulgence before reason. We can know this simply by looking at the people we’ve elected and those we allow to speak for us. Rick Barber, an idiot running for the U.S. Congress had a political ad in which he stated that our founding fathers went to war so we could have representation WITHOUT taxation. Really? Without the ability to build roads, schools, hospitals or run the government. I’m sure he doesn’t mean what he says because that means he wouldn’t be paid. I’m sure he’s just a con man like Louie Gohmert, Josh Hawley, and Ted Cruz, or an idiot like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Bobert, and Tommy Tuberville. Maybe he’s also self-serving, like Joe Manchin who continues to side with Republicans and block voting rights or infrastructure bills and aid Big Pharma to the detriment of his own constituents. The list could go on for pages, but the point is clear. We are getting the representation we deserve because we have cultivated not just a me-first attitude, but a me-only attitude regarding government. We have forgotten JFK’s inaugral statement – “Ask not what your country can do for you, but rather what you can do for your country.” Hell, we have a whole group of people (Republicans) who by the admission of their platform want control of the country by the wealthy elite, but at the same time want all the service government provides for free or with lower tax rates than ordinary working people pay. 

One of the most cynical of reasons for this devolution into the mess we are still trying to call democracy, at least in my mind, is our acceptance of war as way of life. It has become the driving force in our economy and allowed the rise of a military-industrial complex so powerful and so controlling of everything else in society that we often follow our corporate and government leaders into wars without question, especially when they use the acts and attitudes of our founding fathers as propaganda. However, we have failed to understand or consider the cost of these ventures when they begin, or the reasons why. As I’ve already pointed out, our founding fathers were well aware of the costs of war and what sacrifices as leaders they were called upon to make. Most of us have been shielded from that knowledge for the past fifty years, and most of us have never faced the dangers early Americans did from conducting a war.

I belong to a group that claims to expose the “true” cost of war by recording statistics on bookmarkers and mailing those small pieces of paper to possible contributors. That’s a good thing, I suppose, noting the millions turned into corpses at random and reminding us some humans have killed for pleasure, greed, religion, and racial hatred, calling it duty or honor or patriotism through most of our history. But dogs don’t breed cats. So, I don’t see how nameless numbers give birth to remorse or peace.

A famous French writer in the 19th century named de Maupassant once said that humans have two choices. We can be happy or we can have knowledge, but to maintain both is not possible. The more we learn, especially about human nature, the less blissful our sojourn among our fellow beasts becomes. Why? Because we are able to see both good and evil qualities that reside in us all and, if we are blessed with any semblance of conscience, at some point the evil becomes inexcusable. It will not disappear from our minds simply by chanting any one of many clichéd mantras such as “god is on our side” or “mission accomplished.” Blind credulity will no longer suffice once we are aware of our own unlimited capacity for cruelty. Knowledge of reality always overshadows wishful thinking. This is especially true of soldiers and civilians overwhelmed by war.

The true cost of war is measured by the intimate knowledge of those who survive blood and fire, lifting seared flesh and unattached limbs from the broken rubble of homes and schools, digging graves for mothers and babies still warm in the womb. The true cost of war is quantified not by death or money alone but through the misery of its living participants after the fact—the emotional turmoil, the survivor’s guilt, the grief, the nightmares, the pathological dysfunction of homeless veterans, the missing arms and legs, the vacant souls. The families of veterans often end up broken as well, expecting their returned hero to be the same man or woman who left them for war.

The evil in humans that allows them to start new wars isn’t born from those who have knowledge of its consequences or care much about those consequences. Wars are not started by soldiers, or even patriotic leaders anymore. They begin with politicians, most of whom have never made nor ever will make Guy de Maupassant’s choice between knowledge and happiness. These are the cowards who kill for the reasons I stated earlier, the ones that never get blood on their hands, the ones that never see the faces of the dead in their dreams. They maintain their profitable joy through the ignorance of citizens and their own arrogance. Consider the meaningless invasion of Iraq and the tens of thousands, American and Iraqi, that died because of it. Think of the twenty-year mess called Afghanistan we’re trying to extricate ourselves from right now. Think of the people we’re leaving behind. Remember that we had no choice but to abandon them if we ever wanted to leave at all. It’s the tragedy of betrayal, and it always happens regardless of who the president is or the time when it occurs. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a pacifist. I’m glad Osama bin Laden caught a bullet in the brain pan. He earned it. I would have done it myself, gladly. I’ve done worse things as a soldier. But I am a conscientious objector. I object through my sense of morality and ethical integrity to the reasons leaders in our country today use the military for personal agendas and to the misery those agendas cause.

I feel saddened that my father spent his youth fighting Hitler in Europe and Africa, but I understand the necessity of doing it.  On the other hand, when I look back on my own experiences as a Marine in Vietnam a different understanding emerges. America engaged in what historians now call “flexible” warfare, which simply means a modern policy of sending our young men and women into harm’s way with no long-term goals or with unattainable ones and with end results that only serve a very small section of our citizenry. In the public’s eyes, Vietnam was a war to stop the spread of Russian communism. Privately and politically, it was a war to control the strategic and economic resources of a small third world country for the benefit of Americans. Russian communism was never exported to Vietnam and what exists there today is an amalgamation of several political philosophies, including a type of totalitarian governmental capitalism supported by our government and corporations such as Microsoft, Walmart, Nike, Starbucks, McDonald’s, and other tech firms like INTEL and LG Group. Interestingly, you will now find Hilton Hotels in Hanoi as well. Yes, we helped rebuild Japan and much of Europe after WWII, but we didn’t start the war that destroyed those countries. Don’t take my word for what I’m writing here. Do your own research. I recently went back to Vietnam myself. These facts are available. It just takes some effort.

In the 21st century, flexible warfare has morphed into preemptive warfare, meaning our politicians give themselves the moral exigency to start these flexible and limited actions by establishing a just cause for them through propaganda beforehand. In other words, we need to be the aggressor against them before (substitute any country we desire to invade) they become the aggressor toward us. Remember the nonexistent “weapons of mass destruction?”This is especially true when our politicians own stock in military/industrial corporations (for example, Cheney and Halliburton) that can be offered no-bid contracts and given huge profits for killing, or when oil companies that donate millions to political campaigns (for example, the four Bush campaigns – senior and junior) need their reserves protected so their corporate stocks maintain high value.

We’re talking about the true cost of war. It’s more than the immediate dead, more than trillions of dollars of destruction, more than great Diasporas. Although, those things are incredibly important. The true cost also involves your neighbors, normal men and women trying to live productive lives, people struggling with the same difficult problems you are and one more—the memory of carnage and smoke and fire— that influences every waking minute of their lives.

Remember that the United States is involved in flexible wars right now as well covert military actions in many other places, and we won’t understand the “true” cost of these wars for at least a generation. Right now, the military is dealing with the highest suicide rate in its history and this doesn’t include the deaths from drug overdoses, motorcycle accidents, and other forms of risky behavior that recently discharged combat veterans carry out. We have no idea of the amount of death and destruction or its cost in the countries where we wage these wars. We may never understand that completely. I have lost friends and comrades who died forty years after the fact from Agent Orange exposure or other wounds incurred in Vietnam. Forty years from now, veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan will be dying of similar health problems.

Today, Congress whines and cries about debt reduction and getting our budget under control. They fight over what programs to dismantle and who must make the economic sacrifices. However, I hear no serious debate on cutting defense contracts, no arguments about eliminating weapons the military doesn’t want or even need because those weapons are built by some senator’s constituents.  In 2019, the militarized budget totaled $887.8 billion – amounting to 64.5 percent of discretionary spending.  There are no ongoing peace discussions with any hope of honest resolution. War is good business, and the cost of war is never borne by the politicians who authorize it or the corporations that profit from it.

The only way the true cost of war will ever get disclosed in its entirety is if the vast majority of citizens not struggling with that cost in some direct have to suffer to pay that cost, even if only economically. So far, this is not happening. Consequently, we go on paying the price through the sacrifice of a small segment of our population, most often the young and bright. Other countries pay the price in the loss of whole generations.

It’s easy to bear the wars when we have the luxury of choosing not to know or remember the dead and the wounded. It’s easy to bear war when we have enough to eat, cable TV, a cellphone, two cars, a nice home, and don’t live in constant fear of random violent death. But for veterans and the people they are forced to war upon, the dead never die and the living are often unable to get on with their lives. Please, take a minute to contemplate how much your gasoline is really costing.