American Youths and War: An Interesting Study

I recently read a piece about what it means to be a veteran, where the author bemoans his five years in the military, 2011-2016, without ever being given the "opportunity" to deploy to combat. He states, “I will never know if I am the kind of man I admired in the documentaries and books I cherished as a kid. I doubt I’ll ever feel like I am wholly a veteran, worthy of the thanks, praises and even the discounts endlessly showered on us today.” If it was combat he was seeking, The War Horse should have stayed in and continued to reenlist, or seek a commission. If there is one thing that is guaranteed in this world, it is that there will be more wars. Missed this last one? Just keep training; there'll be another along, soon enough.

I spent the first fourteen years of my career preparing for war: watched Just Cause unfold on AFN; guarded housing areas in Germany during Desert Shield / Desert Storm; heard about the battle of Mogadishu on a Bright Star Exercise in the sands of the Sahara; watched our Haiti invasion force in Cuba stand down in what seemed like minutes before launching; Bosnia, Kosovo, missed them all. The 1990s seemed like one operational deployment after another, but my only taste of it was three weeks at GTMO with a JSOTF ordered to invade and then stand down. I actually had many of the same feelings--though never spoken nor written--as The War Horse in his article.

Then came 9-11. The second 14 years of my career have been: prepare to deploy, deploy, recover, repeat: 7 months in Qatar and Pakistan; 27 months in Iraq; multiple rotations to Kuwait. Oddly, never Afghanistan (knock on wood).

I was barely old enough to remember my father returning from his second tour in Vietnam. It is my earliest memory of Dad. It was his last deployment or remote tour. He was always in my life from that point on despite serving another 17 years. My children had the opposite experience; when they were young children, I was always there. For their formative teenage years, I was never around; on field exercises or CTC rotations preparing for the next deployment, or deployed for what must have seemed a lifetime to them. That experience left my children cold to the idea of military service. Through their eyes, Army service tears families apart and leaves moms to raise kids on their own.

Every generation has its wars. The gnarled and scarred old men stoically hold back their tears as they watch their military-aged-children eagerly head off to what the combat veteran knows will be the worst horror filled experience of their young lives, but all those youths can think of is the glory they'll attain and the respect they'll earn.

The following link is an interesting study from the Pew Research Center written in 2006. "There is a generation gap over U.S. military interventions, ­but it is older Americans, not young people, who typically show the greatest wariness about using military force."

http://www.pewresearch.org/2006/02/21/youth-and-war/

General Douglas MacArthur famously said, "The soldier above all others prays for peace, for it is the soldier who must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war." But, he was an old man, a retired soldier, when he said it. I doubt he held such an opinion when he was a young lieutenant fresh out of West Point.

MacArthur also famously mis-attributed the following quote to Plato, but it was George Santayana who so succinctly said:

"Yet the poor fellows think they are safe!
They think that the war--perhaps the last of all wars--is over!
Only the dead are safe;
only the dead have seen the end of war."
--George Santayana's Soliloquy "Tipperary," 1918--

One final quote...

"War is hell, but that's not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead."
--Tim O'Brien, "The Things They Carried," 1998--