I'm one of the truly lucky ones. I have never gone to war. I have never seen combat. My generation went to Viet Nam and many of the young men and women who lived through it and made it back came back broken. In spirit and in body. The older I get and the more I learn, the more I appreciate just how lucky I am.
For our grandparents and great grandparents generation it was WWI.
The total number of military and civilian casualties in World War I was over 37 million. There were over 16 million deaths and 20 million wounded ranking it among the deadliest conflicts in human history.
The total number of deaths includes about 10 million military personnel and about 7 million civilians. The Entente Powers (also known as the Allies) lost about 6 million military personnel while the Central Powers lost about 4 million. At least 2 million died from diseases and 6 million went missing, presumed dead. This article lists the casualties of the belligerent powers based on official published sources.
About two-thirds of military deaths in World War I were in battle, unlike the conflicts that took place in the 19th century when the majority of deaths were due to disease. Nevertheless, disease, including the Spanish flu and deaths while held as prisoners of war, still caused about one third of total military deaths for all belligerents.
In that "War To End All Wars", it has been argued that of those who fought, it was the ones who died quickly who were the lucky ones. [More below the fold.]
My parents fought in WWII.
The Unbearable Psychic Burden Soldiers Carry | By Clancy Sigal
A large number of the men who stormed Utah Beach on D-Day 70 years ago also carried in their backpacks an invisible mental weight.
http://www.alternet.org/...
Excerpt:
Almost all wartime soldiers, from 1776 to the Civil War, World War II, Vietnam and today, come from poorer and workingclass families. (Jack and I are Great Depression babies with all that emotional baggage.) For me, EVERY generation is “the greatest” for surviving not only war but the shit we came from and the shit we often come back to.
A large number of the men who stormed Utah Beach on D-Day carried in their backpacks along with entrenching tools an invisible psychic burden, a sort of economic PTSD, from the shock and awe of mass unemployment and the ordinary violences of a shortchanged prewar life. Every survivor I talked to in the unit I later joined, the 8th Regiment of 4th Infantry Division, that landed on D-Day would scoff at the very idea of a “previously existing condition” (as army psychiatrists call it) of a psychic burden caused by poverty or near enough to it. GIs griped but theirs was essentially an uncomplaining culture, still less psychoanalytical. For many combat was just like civilian life only with better pay.
Or as Jack says, “They call us guys the ‘greatest generation.’ So much crap. Your mother and mine spent more time on the combat line than any soldiers, only it was an undeclared war in our homes. You and me, too, we’ve been at war all our lives.
Overwhelmingly U.S. drafted soldiers in Vietnam – the ones who did the actual fighting – were working class or “minority”; i.e. African American or Latino. I worked among the Vietnam-era Bob Bergdahls of their time, the AWOLs who walked away: sons of factory workers, bus drivers, mortgaged-to-hilt farmers, gang kids and aimless high schoolers, joovie delinquents and boys who simply signed up after seeing John Wayne The Sands of Iwo Jima too many times. (Bergdahl’s dad is a former UPS driver.)
Now we have an all-volunteer military, and unless they’re listed casualties you’re never quite sure of who they are, where they come from and what’s in it for them aside from 9/11 patriotism. Some stay in for career advancement and financial stability ( such as it is). Or college on the GI Bill or a fast track to citizenship for immigrants. You’d have to stop to ask each and every one. Even then, if they’re at all like previous great generations, they may think it’s a foolish waste of time to dig into that tender spot. My guess is that despite all of today’s talk of therapy for returning veterans it’s still that same old World War II mantra: “Got a problem, buddy. Go ask the chaplain to punch your (tough sh*t) ticket.”
I am currently reading "
They Were Soldiers - How the Wounded Return from America's Wars - The Untold Story" - by
Ann Jones.
“This is a painful odyssey. Ann Jones’s superb writing makes it possible to take it in without sugar coating. Her scene painting takes you there with compassion and without flinching—no sentimental bullshit here, no lofty pity. We fly with her in the belly of a C-17 medical evacuation from Bagram, into operating rooms of the Landstuhl European way station, more surgeries at Walter Reed, into the gymnasium for the long, determined work with prosthetics, with the physical and occupational therapists. We go with her to the homes of the families receiving the brain-injured and the psychologically and morally injured. We hear firsthand accounts by families of service members who died of their war wounds in the mind and spirit, after making it back in one piece...physically. Her breadth of vision includes even contractors, whom most dismiss from their minds and forget. Read this book. You will be a wiser and better citizen.”
—Jonathan Shay, MD, PhD, author of Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character and Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming
Excerpt:
On the plane I talk to some of the ambulatory patients sitting along the walls, wrapped in blankets like so many Pashtuns. Most are hurt just enough to have to be out of action for a while. One boy got a boot caught in the door of an armored vehicle, an MRAP, that wasn’t moving at the time. It’s a long way down from the passenger seat. He broke his arm. He blurts this out, then tells me he worries about what he’s going to say back at his home base. “I can’t tell them I just fell out.”
Another kid dropped a barbell in the gym and broke some bones in his foot. Two others hadn’t recovered from chronic back pain and muscle spasms induced by carrying too much weight. Doctors sent them back downrange to their units two or three times and each time they broke down again. The painkillers had only left them dazed. One says, “Everything still hurts, and you can’t remember what you’re doing, so it makes you nervous. So now they’re sending me home because I guess maybe the pain doesn’t make you so nervous in the U.S. of A.”
One young man collapsed while jogging at a base in the Persian Gulf. “I need a new valve in my heart,” he says, “so they’re sending me home to get it done there. I’m really lucky they found it. The Army saved my life.” His wife sits beside him, wearing a brand new Frankfurt sweatshirt and a bracelet dripping with gnomes. While the doctors at LRMC [Landstuhl Regional Medical Center] assessed her husband’s cardiac function, she went shopping. She tells me confidentially, “I for sure didn’t want to sit around any old hospital.”
An older Army officer calls me over and gestures toward the empty seat by his side. He sits ramrod straight, wrapped in his blanket, and speaks through tight lips as if he fears what might come out of his mouth. “I’ve been in the Army twenty-six years,” he says, “and I can tell you it’s a con.”
He has been an adviser to the chief counterterrorism officer in Iraq. It’s hard even to imagine what’s involved in work like that, but his version of his job description evidently failed to match the official checklist of his boss. He doesn’t think much of military bosses or politicians or Americans in general who send the lowliest 1% to fight wars that make the other 1%, on the high end, “monu-fuckin'-mentally rich.”
He says he’s going home for “psych reasons” caused by “life,” and he is never going to deploy again. He has two sons, 21 and 23, in college, “They won’t have to serve,” he says. “Before that happens, I’ll shoot them myself.”
I ask if he has any particular reason to dislike the military so intensely. “War is absurd,” he says. “Boys don’t know any better. But for a grown man to be trapped in stupid wars -- it’s embarrassing, it’s humiliating, it’s absurd.”
A chaos of our own devising, I think. We try so hard to invest it with meaning. But what can it mean? One boy is lucky, his brother is not; one man is a little too clever, another too dull; one too clumsy, another too quick. Many break down under the weight of high tech equipment developed by private defense contractors at great cost to taxpayers to keep "our warriors" safe.These are peculiar wars in which men and women can be disabled by their own body armor. Or called upon to lose their limbs or their lives for no particular reason that anyone can remember.
I was thinking such thoughts when a hand fell upon my shoulder. It belonged to a kid in an upper bunk in the non-critical section of this flying ambulance. He lay under a homemade quilt trimmed with yellow ribbons. "Hey," he shouts, "I seen you before on the flight from Bagram. What the fuck are you doing here?"
I tell him, "I write about Afghanistan. I'm just looking around. Just trying to see how you guys are doing. How about you?"
"Ha," he says, "I stepped on a fuckin' IED and broke my foot. I gotta go back to base 'til it heals up." I recognize him then as the kid I'd seen on crutches wearing some kind of high tech boot. I remember that he'd gone horizontal on the flight up from Bagram, and here he was again, bedridden.
"An IED broke your foot?"
"Damn right," he says. "It was some kind of fuckin' dud. I'll be back with my unit in two months, no fuckin' sweat."
"What incredible good luck!" I say. "Why risk it a second time?"
"Shit," he says. "I've already served four years and signed up for four more. I love this fuckin' shit."
I ask him what exactly he loves about being in the Army, and he snaps back, "I like to hang out with guys. Where else can I get a job doin' the stuff I love?"
"So what's to love?"
"Shit. You don't even know, do ya? Shootin' people. Blowin' shit up. It's fuckin' fun. I fuckin' love it."
I search his voice for a boys bravado, but I hear intensity and a kind of hyperactive glee. I say, "I believe you really mean that."
"No shit," he says. "I'm tryin' to educate you."
If that young man survives intact he might find a job as a civilian contractor providing security to diplomats, politicians or pipelines or he might return to the US and go to work in law enforcement. Or he might eat his own gun.
In this war we lose more soldiers to suicide than enemy action. And that's not even counting the ones who were given a less than honorable discharge for being too fucked up in the head. We get them addicted to painkillers and when they become too much of a problem we cut them loose to fend for themselves. When these boys kill themselves, whether it be drug overdose or gunshot, they are not counted as casualties of war. They are not listed among the honorable dead who fell in battle. We ask them to commit the most heinous, immoral acts and we have no idea how to help them reconcile that with the ideals of our "shining city on the hill". Too often, they can't even face what they have done and seen, much less talk about it. They never talk about it. They don't do feelings. They are trained to "suck it up" and "gut it out". And when they do make it home they all too often have no idea how to relate to the society they were told they were "protecting".
And now, thanks to Nick Turse, whose book "Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam" has brought to light the accounts of Vietnamese civilian survivors and the GIs who are finally able to tell their stories, we understand that "isolated" incidents, like the infamous My Lai Massacre, which made the news were in fact commonplace occurrences resulting from official policy and carried out by traumatized, scared young men conditioned to blindly follow orders and protect their buddies.
"Turse has described Kill Anything That Moves (2013) as a history of Vietnamese "civilian suffering" at the hands of U.S. troops during the Vietnam War.[27] The book is based on archival materials Turse discovered and interviews he conducted with eyewitnesses in the U.S. and Vietnam, including a hundred American Vietnam War veterans.[28]"
Today's average American citizen is fed carefully sanitized tidbits. Heroic actions, honorable self sacrifice in defense of freedom... with videos on You Tube of upbeat American kids killing "Taliban" with an impressive variety of high technology, high explosives and deadly machinery. Movies like "Zero Dark Thirty" glorifying torture used to try to obtain the intel that allows us to carry out an extra-judicial assassination which becomes a cause for national celebration, or the latest offering, "Lone Survivor", the story of a spec-ops team operating behind enemy lines whose mission is endangered by their own act of compassion and morality, complete with the deaths of every young man involved save one and a heartwarming feel-good ending.
When the deaths of civilians are reported they are treated by the media as unfortunate accidents, collateral damage and remarkable exceptions. Never as the result of policies necessary to the prosecution of war amongst civilian populations who are indistinguishable from the enemy. Never as the result of intelligence obtained by tactical planners and carried out by operatives who do not speak the language or understand the culture. Most Americans have absolutely no clue of the true price our young men and women are paying to wage this never-ending and unwinnable war on terror. Not just the horrific wounds such as those caused by IEDs that sometimes remove pretty much everything below the bellybutton, but the awful psychic burdens we ask our children to carry for us as well.
We have absolutely no fucking idea how truly lucky we are!