A few thoughts on WAR. . .

Why is it that people think War has rules? Ethics? Morals?   War is a brutal, uncaring, vengeful, dark endeavor in which the deepest, darkest, must terrifyingly fearful thoughts become palpable, tactual.

No longer barely perceptible at the fringes of the anima but out in the open where it is free to act out the cruel imaginings of that disconsolate place we all seek to hide behind layers of civility wrapped in the social mores of our time, our culture.

The main difference between these young men and woman of war today and those who came before them is that there is a camera or microphone behind every tree and rock.

War is not neat or tidy and there are things that happen that no one is very happy with, wants to remember or to recount.   To act surprised, or appalled at what you see on tape is not wrong but it is naive and not an indictment of our soldiers either.

The only polite or moral soldiers in history are the dead ones.  If you are not winning the fight, you are not cheating.   That is the problem with war today,  the liberal or faint of heart or weak minded want war to be nice and clean.  It is the opposite.  So when I see this,  I think, how stupid were these victims to expose themselves during a war.

A soldier's life depends on making good decisions and sometimes folks just don't give them that opportunity.   People die every day.  More Americans die because of drunk drivers than war casualties and more die over seas because of bad water, mosquitos or aids even starvation than war.

This is a non-issue to me as is water-boarding etc.

When war becomes so polite that we all just roll the dice, step into a room, take a pill and your gone, for a body count,  when we lose the ability to recognize the insanity of war by making it antiseptic, we will have lost our humanity.

War needs to be a messy, horrible, disturbing act.   That way we may think twice before engaging in it for any reason.


EDIT:

I really do not give a rip as to what anybody else thinks of us.  The last time France stabbed us in the back,  I sent pictures of Omaha Beach, and American graveyards to their president and diplomatic offices.

There are a lot of white crosses in Europe.  Many thousands,  My Uncle Al fought in the forests of Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge.  We have airlifted, sent hospital ships,  bailed them out and much much more.

We owe no one an apology.  Not now, not ever.

EDIT:

One last caveat,  It is now common knowledge that the diplomatic shenanigans during the Vietnam War actually aided and abetted the enemy and at the head of that class was Nixon and Henry Alfred Kissinger.  The war was dragged out and lost because it was not waged as an all out war.  

We did not lose Vietnam,  it was given in by bureaucrats bent on having a nice, polite war and a traitorous media and sick, treasonous betrayers like Hanoi Jane.