Why All These Unnecessary Wars
The Price We Pay
There’s a good article today at the New York Times on coming to terms with America’s 20-year war in Afghanistan. The article is free to read. Here’s an except:
“Why do many American soldiers who fought in Afghanistan and later returned to their country commit suicide?” Mr. Gulab asked. “I have heard this many times. What is the reason?”
It was a question that haunts many of us. I tried to explain how we carried the crushing weight of our own shattered expectations: We had grown up on the nostalgia of World War II, then done something we were supposed to be proud of. Instead, what we got from our politicians and generals were evasions and lies. Our commanders could never articulate how our deployments, and all the violence we committed and the losses we suffered, made anyone safer in the United States.
We were left to figure everything out on our own while they landed lucrative jobs at defense companies and collected big fees on speaking circuits. For some people, it was too much to handle.
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Yes, that is the question, isn’t it? How are all these wars, whether in Vietnam in the 1960s or in Iran today, making anyone safer in the United States.
As I read the article, written by a Marine lance corporal who’d led a sniper team in Afghanistan, I thought of a few lines from a Bruce Springsteen song.
Oh, the price you pay, oh, the price you pay
Now you can't walk away from the price you pay.
My college roommate had “The River” double lp and I listened to it a lot in college. Hadn’t thought about that song in decades until I read that Marine’s story today.
Our children need a peaceful home to grow up in.
“Why do many American soldiers who fought in Afghanistan and later returned to their country commit suicide?”
I asked myself that question as well when the staggering numbers of those taking their own lives became somewhat widespread ten, twelve years ago or so? My surmise was that these were servicemen and women who believed that their “deployment” – I recoil at the routine use of that word – was indeed to defend our freedom (just how was anyone’s guess) and for peace and stability (in whatever spot on earth) because the bad guys (ill-defined “enemy combatants”) had to be defeated. So basically a lot of faith in what our political and military leaders were saying.
Once wherever they found themselves, these personnel encountered scenes that didn’t add up. Mostly a lot of people who just wanted to live their lives, care for their families, didn’t have any particular grudge against the United States, and yet they were looked upon with suspicion by U.S. forces suddenly intruding in their country, subject to searches, confiscations, disruptions in their hard scrabble daily lives, in some cases arrests and detainment god knows why or where. I remember one particular video clip, I think it was from Dumbya’s excellent adventure in Iraq, showing an American tank crew rather joyfully crushing an Iraqi’s car, which happened to be his means of income as a taxi driver.
And of course there were the unpredictable “asymmetrical” IED explosions killing and injuring U.S. ground forces from an invisible enemy, with a sense of retribution for their presence where they don’t belong, upending lives that heretofore was of no threat or consequence to them
I figured at some point all this started to work on the psyche of American forces there, that none of this was adding up, certainly not what they were led to believe about “defending our freedoms” and related nonsense. Basically after pointlessly upending the lives of the indigenous population, and seeing their fellow service members getting killed and maimed for no apparent reason, U.S. military personnel began asking, stating, “What the f*** is going on here?”
And they got no answers, no sensible ones anyway. Because there weren’t any. So they had to serve their full “deployment” nonetheless, and for many it was simply psychologically, spiritually too much. Too much death, too much maiming, too much destruction, all for too little, or more accurately all for nothing all except for what they’d been duped into believing, which was a pack of lives. Perhaps for some that translated into nihilism where there used to be identity and purpose; for others a sense of atonement for what they did, or were a part of; for still others a shame at being American.
This is all conjecture on my part, as I said, a “surmise,” but I think it’s plausible. And thus the toll in casualties from Iraq, and Afghanistan, and other “Central Command” venues, and now Iran keeps increasing. And this is the service for which these troops get thanked, to add insult to injury… and death.