The War

I had not planned to write this tonight but it just sort of flowed out. Since many of you may have been watching PBS this past week, I thought I would send it out fresh from the pen/keyboard.

“Discretion shall preserve thee, understanding shall keep thee: to deliver thee from the way of the evil man.” –Pro. 2:11

You may have been captivated as I was by the week long series by Ken Burns on PBS entitled simply, “The War.” Much of it was familiar territory to me from a historical point of view. But the personal vignettes and eye-witness accounts were riveting. Tonight was the end point. I was affected by each segment but now at the end I sit quietly mulling over the utter gravity of it all. It did not end with a punch but rather as a long, tedious tale; much like a gripping novel would. It was a story where I identified with the characters through thick and thin, but now the tale finds a quiet finish where there are no winners, simply survivors. To see these young warriors come home from scenes that rival anything out of Tolkein’s tortured, middle-earth imagination and watch them step back into the routine, the normal, the trivial pursuits of everyday life, brings an agonizing hush to the heart. For those who had seen the most ragged edge of war, it had to be hard to relate to the silly and banal concerns of normal living. And who could know their stories? Who could understand the horrors they had witnessed or perpetrated upon an intransigent foe? Or should anyone even want to know?

The answer in part has to be a resounding, “Yes!” No, the gory details of battlefield life and death need not be played and replayed to satisfy our voyeuristic curiosities. Don’t misunderstand; the history of pain written across countless cemeteries and broken family trees is important less anyone get a misguided and romantic view of war. But I would rather focus on the ideas and convictions that so gripped the enemy that they were just as willing to die for an evil cause as we were for a just one. This did not garner much of Mr. Burns penetrating attention, but the unmistakable portrait of the enemy was there. You did not have to look far.

Many G.I.’s went to war not really thinking or realizing just what was at stake. No American could imagine the horrors of the death camps discovered only late in the war in 1945. It was only when we entered the foul nests of the enemy’s dens that we saw the ghastly results of an idea taken to its logical conclusion. And to witness the unquestioning discipline of the Japanese whose culture had bred a race of the most formidable soldiers the modern world had ever seen was frightening even at a distance of some 60 years. Their capacity for cruelty knew few bounds. Wherever they went, they treated their victims with utmost contempt. A real warrior would have rather died fighting than to surrender. Therefore, by simple and logical extension, these who somehow survived and found themselves captive were less than human beings, objects not of pity but of derision. Then there were the kamikaze pilots who turned their planes into human bombs. An American sailor told how a pilot would strap on the head scarf of suicide for the emperor sincerely believing that he would earn an automatic place in heaven. Then, after a slight pause, he added with a firm sense of conviction, “Of course, he was wrong.”

In that simple phrase, so much is summed up. Ideas are important. The right ones can evoke selfless humanitarianism that spreads comfort to the sick, food to the hungry, and justice to the oppressed. The wrong ones can enslave whole peoples, spread death and destruction at unimaginable levels, and create a mindset in which the unthinkable becomes thinkable, even commonplace. Not all cultures are created equal. What happened in Nazi Germany and militaristic Japan was no accident, no political aberration, or the work of a mad few. These plagues upon man were carefully engineered over generations, injected into the very young, and willingly spread among every level of society. They were wrong. They were evil. And they were deadly. I only pray we may be alert to the viruses of the soul at loose in our society.