Andy Rooney_ 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit - Andy Rooney [44]
Dwight Eisenhower, 1962: “I think it’s only defense, self-defense, that’s all it is.”
John Kennedy, 1963 : “In the final analysis it’s their war. They’re the ones that have to win it or lose it.”
Lyndon Johnson, 1969: “But America has not changed her essential position. And that purpose is peaceful settlement.”
Richard Nixon, 1974: “But the time has come to end this war.”
There are a lot of reasons for the confusion about a war. One of them is that the statesmen who make the decisions never have to fight one themselves. Even the generals don’t fight the battles.
Professional soldiers often say they hate war, but they would be less than human if they did not, just once, want to play the game they spent a lifetime practicing. How could you go to West Point for four years and not be curious about whether you’d be any good in a war?
Even in peacetime, nations keep huge armies. The trouble with any peacetime all-volunteer army is that the enlisted men in one are often no smarter than the officers. During a war when the general population takes up arms, the character of an army changes and for the better.
In the twentieth century there is open rebellion between the people who decide about whether to fight or not and some of the young men being asked to do the fighting. It hasn’t always been that way. Through the years, even the reluctant draftees have usually gone to battle with some enthusiasm for it. Partially the enthusiasm comes from the natural drama of war and the excitement of leaving home on a crusade. It’s a trip to somewhere else, and with the excitement inherent in an uncertain return. It is a great adventure, with the possibility of being killed the one drawback to an otherwise exciting time in life.
There have been just and unjust wars throughout history but there is very little difference in the manner in which people have been propagandized to believe in them. Patriotism, sometimes no more knowing or sophisticated than pride in a high-school football team, is the strongest motivator. With flags enough and martial music enough, anyone’s blood begins to boil.
Patriotic has always been considered one of the good things to be in any nation on earth, but it’s a question whether patriotism has been a force for good or evil in the world.
Once the young men of a country get into a battle, most of them are neither heroes nor cowards. They’re swept up in a movement that includes them and they go where they’re told to go, do what they’re told to do. It isn’t long before they’re tired and afraid and they want to go home.
True bravery is always highly regarded because we recognize that someone has done something that is good for all of us, certainly at the risk and possibly at the expense of his own life. But in war, the mantle of virtue is pressed on every soldier’s head as though they were all heroes. This is partly because everyone else is grateful to him and wants to encourage him to keep at it. All soldiers who come home alive are heaped with the praise that belongs to very few of them . . . and often to the dead they left behind.
In part, at least, this accounts for why so many men like being exsoldiers. Once the war and the fighting are done with and they are safe at home, it matters not that they may have served in the 110th emergency shoe-repair battalion. In their own eyes, they are heroes of the front lines.
Even in retrospect, though, a nation has always felt an obligation to honor its warriors. The face of the earth is covered with statuary designed for this purpose that is so bad in many cases that were it not in honor of the dead, it would evoke not tears but laughter.
During and since World War II, the United States alone has bestowed