For Those of Us Not Encouraged to Reason Why

                                                                                   

The Age of Innocence, Moctezuma's Warriors

by Daniel Cano                                        

The First World War, boys, it came and it went
The reason for fightin' I never did get
But I learned to accept it, accept it with pride
For you don't count the dead when God's on your side

 The Second World War/ came to an end

We forgave the Germans, and then we were friends
Though they murdered six million, in the ovens they fried
The Germans now too have God on their side

(Bob Dylan “With God on Our Side”)

“We submit to pragmatists, profiteers, and the paranoiacs who insist that war is part of our humanity, our identity.”

Viet Thanh Nguyen, Vietnamese American professor and novelist, University of Southern Cal

“War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope.”

Gen. Smedley Butler, USMC, recipient of two Congressional Medals of Honor

 

     As a veteran who saw enough death to last me a lifetime, I often think about these quotations, pointing out society’s contradictions, paradoxes, and justifications for war. I’m also intrigued by Tennyson’s words in his epic poem Charge of the Light Brigade, “Theirs is not to reason why/theirs is but to do and die.”

     Maybe that’s why governments encourage teenagers to enlist in the military. They’re malleable, easy to manipulate and control. They don’t know enough to ask intelligent questions, yet, about politics or war, and even if they did, the reasons societies go to war is usually wrapped up in patriotic soundbites, “For Liberty and Freedom,” “For God and Country,” “So we don’t have to fight on our soil,” “They’re communists,” “They’re fascists,” or something, like, “Khrushchev, Fidel, Ho Chi Minh, Saddam, Putin, Noriega, and Kaddafi are all evil, or insane.”

     I remember a few years after 9-11. I was teaching at a community college and things were heating up in the Middle East. Bush and Cheney threatened their national security people to find Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. When neither international inspectors, nor their own national security teams could find such weapons, Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld did their best to hide the truth. They went a step further. They put their errand boy, a respected general, Colin Powell on television to show the American public, and the world, grainy photos of Iraqi trucks carrying huge tubes and claiming those were the so-called “smoking guns,” obviously to be used for, none other, than WMD’s. People bought it, didn't question it, or didn't even care.

     “Shock and Awe” followed, and it mesmerized Americans and proved that nobody should mess with us. USA! USA! USA!

     I’d walk across the campus quad and see Army and Marine recruiters set up recruitment tables right next to college and university recruiters who were there to provide information about higher education to students. By that time, I’d researched the Vietnam War, and many wars, friend and foe, and I realized most wars could have been avoided, except many politicians failed to heed the calls.  Other interests were in play.

     I saw it as a duty to convince my students, Latinos and African Americans, to stay in school, transfer, and earn their degrees before making life-changing decisions. By this time, the country had transitioned to an all-volunteer military, so students had a choice. They weren’t breaking any laws by rejecting a draft, as in my war. I wanted them to make informed decisions.

     So, it angered me when I saw that, unlike university recruiters who would sit at a table and wait for students to come to them and request information, the military recruiters, often young, “strac,” African American and Latinos decked out in sharp class-A uniforms, were much more aggressive.

     If a student came up to them to inquire, the military recruiter wouldn’t just provide information, but like used-car salesmen, pressured the kids, with a sweet pot of gold, to sign up right there. If no students came to them, the military recruiters would walk out among the students, targeting Latino and African-America more than the Anglo and Asian students, as if stalking them.

     Sometimes I’d listen, and I’d hear the military recruiters promising these kids the sky, world travel, job training in the highest paid professions, Officer Candidate School, free education after the military, not a word about war or the Middle East. A couple of times, I approached the military recruiters, identifying myself as a vet. I’d tell them, “You know, we’re trying to get these kids just to finish college. What you’re promising is false. You're painting a rosy picture. Why don’t you tell them if you don’t meet your recruitment quota, you’ll lose your cushiony job and probably get sent to Afghanistan or Iraq?”

     I’d say it tongue-in-cheek, like we both knew the scam. They wouldn’t admit it, but they understood and say something like, “Look, Professor, we’re just doing our job,” which I understood, but how many students would buy their sales’ pitch and find out it, too late, it was all a lie?

     Some students who knew I was a veteran would come up to me and tell me they were considering enlisting. I’d tell the recruiters needed to make a quota each month and much of what they were being promised wouldn’t come true. More than likely, they’d find themselves in a Humvee patrolling the streets of Iraq.

     I remember one student, a smart Chicano, high grades, and a bright academic future. He fell for the military line, especially about getting his education paid for once he got out, and how it would help his parents. I told him whatever professional training they promised him, if he didn’t pass all their tests and the training, his contract with Uncle Sam would be void. The military could do whatever it wanted with him, probably the infantry, fighting a war most Americans didn’t really care about. What good would it do his parents if he was dead? I didn’t hold back.

     I could see his eyes were blank. He already saw himself in a uniform and everybody proud of him. He said if he died in combat that was just a part of being in the military. That’s when I knew I’d lost him.

     I made it a habit in my classes to talk to both male and female students about military recruiters, their promises, and tactics. They were as bad as the credit card companies getting them to take out cards, loans, and no way to pay back the banks. They’d end up in debt, possibly having to drop out of school.

     I attended administration meetings and supported plans to ban military recruiters from campus. On Fox News, Bill O’ Reilly called teachers like me traitors for discouraging college student to join the military. Funny, I didn’t’ see Jeb Bush’s or Mitt Romneys gaggle of sons rushing to join the military. The Bush administration threatened to withhold government subsidies from any institution of higher education who did not admit recruiters on to their campuses. Then, little by little, the media began publishing stories coming out of the Middle East. How the military had created false stories about Jessica Lynch and football star turned Army ranger, Pat Tillman, turning them into heroes, all lies.

     Nobody knew what to believe, and whether anyone other than Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda was responsible for 9-11. Most Americans had no idea about Sunnis, Shiites, Wahabi, or the myriad of other Muslim factions. They didn’t know the difference between the Northern Alliance, provincial war lords, or communist Muslims, all taking a cut of the money the U.S was pouring into the region.

     Like Vietnam, wars in the Middle East had been fought by war lords, oil corporations, real estate and construction conglomerates, religions, and puppet governments going back generations. Americans, and hundreds of thousands of innocent Afghanis and Iraqis were dying, and for what?

     It took twenty years to get out, and still, nobody could really answer why we were there, except the world’s manufacturers of weapons and military equipment, who walked away making billions of dollars in profits, giving rise to new war profiteers, like Haliburton and Blackwater, whose employees earned hundreds to thousands of more dollars than the Army, Navy, and Marine forces fighting and dying. Luckily, when the media began reporting this to the public, some people began to understand the waste, and the military recruiters slowly disappeared from campus.

     So, as this Veteran Day nears, I think about some friends who never made it home from Vietnam, like Wayne Podlesnik, a handsome nineteen-year-old lady’s man, a real charmer from a steel town in Pennsylvania; Nathaniel Dabon, a buck sergeant, a husband and a new father, from Chicago, who just wanted to get home to his family, and a guy we knew only as Mac, something of a hustler, but a joker with a great laugh, all gone on the same day, their bullet riddled bodies found scattered around the battery area after an attack.

     Eventually, many in the government, like Robert McNamara, ex-Secretary of Defense, admitted that the country had made a terrible mistake going to Vietnam.

     Yes, and for all of us vets, as this day, our day nears, only we can answer for ourselves what Alfred Lord Tennyson may have meant when he wrote, “Theirs is not to reason why, theirs is but to do and die.” 

     Maybe we should do a little more reasoning before engaging in wars with other countries, especially when we all believe that “God is on our side.”