Those Who Have Borne the Battle (44 page)

 

 

In the fall of 2005, I was visiting Walter Reed Army Medical Center. I was in the physical therapy fitness center, watching young men and women with prosthetic legs push themselves on treadmills and do weights and other exercises from wheelchairs. It was a terribly moving and terribly inspiring sight. I walked around speaking to many of them, and they all affirmed their commitment to doing better and getting as well as they could. They were all dealing with interrupted lives. One young woman, a single parent called up with her reserve unit, talked haltingly about the difficulty of recovering from an explosion that destroyed her vehicle. She sobbed a bit only when she said how much she missed her three children who a neighbor and friend back in Kansas were looking after.

I went to talk to a young man in a wheelchair. His head and face were disfigured, and he was missing an arm and had leg injuries. He said his vehicle had hit an explosive device, and it rolled over, first tearing off his arm and then landing on and crushing his skull. I spoke to the man who was holding the wheelchair. He was the young man's father. I asked where their home was. The father said, with a wry chuckle, New Orleans. This was less than six weeks after Hurricane Katrina. I said that I hoped they got through that disaster well, and he replied that, no, they had lost their Ninth Ward home and everything in it. He then put his hand on his son's shoulder and said, “But that is okay. We will recover, for you see I still have my boy.”

The father's pleasure in this first priority was understandable, for not all parents still had their sons—or daughters. But as marine lieutenant general John Kelly, who lost his son Robert when he stepped on a mine while on patrol in Afghanistan, said, “We are in a life-and-death struggle, but not our whole country,” he said. “One percent of Americans are touched by this war. Then there is a much smaller club of families who have given all.” Kelly had worried greatly when his son was in the field. He knew what he was facing. He had also given him the advice of an old veteran, urging him to remind his men to focus on their mission and their
values, “Do not let them ever enjoy the killing or hate their enemy. . . . Combat is so inhumane; you must help your men maintain their humanity as well as their sense of perspective and proportion.”
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Knowing the human side of war, waiting for the knock on the door, visiting loved ones in hospitals—these things are not shared. And quite frankly, they simply cannot be shared, given the size of the force. They could be more representatively experienced, but they will not be widely shared. Robert Stanton wrote poignantly about fearing the knock on the door. It came for the Stantons on March 4, 2011, when two marines and a navy chaplain informed the Stantons that their son, Corporal Jordan Stanton, had been killed in Afghanistan. When they met the plane bearing their son's body at Dover Air Force Base, “the emotion of seeing our son in that moment nearly overwhelmed us all.”
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It is not clear what the political conversations would be like if these sorts of experiences were shared among more representative groups of the population. If serving in the military is a rarer choice at this time in our history, so, quite frankly, is the willingness to make any personal sacrifice, particularly for the government.

By the late spring of 2011, there were some political figures talking about the financial cost of the war. There have been only a few instances when political leaders have proposed that we address this disconnect as well as the issue of shared sacrifice by actually paying for the cost of the war. Wisconsin congressman David Obey, who had been a persistent advocate of a surtax, said in November 2009 that only military families have had to sacrifice, and do this “again and again and again,” while “everyone else is blithely unaffected by the war.”
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When President Barack Obama in June 2011 announced the beginning of a drawdown from the augmented force in Afghanistan, there was growing opposition politically to continuing the engagement. Public opinion polls revealed a sharp rise in the percentage of people supporting a pullout from Afghanistan. Some congressional opposition focused on the considerable expense of the war, and it was perhaps sustained by a growing sense of isolationism. Basically, the tone was that the United States should deal with its own problems and not those of other countries. The financial costs of these wars are significant, and it is time to recognize and address this. Nonetheless, it was frankly troubling to hear major
voices focus more on the trillion dollars than on the lives lost, the lives profoundly affected by the multiple deployments in this long war.

President George Bush ran his 2000 campaign on a promise of tax cuts. He delivered on this promise just a few months before 9/11. Despite changing circumstances, he and a majority of Congress never wavered from this position. These current wars are the first extended wars in American history that have not been supported by new taxes, and there has been little inclination to pay as we go for these very expensive operations.

Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes in 2008 estimated the long-term cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars at $3 trillion. It may be significantly greater than that. Much of the expense is debt financed or deferred. As one group of scholars of tax policy noted, there was sacrifice in the Second World War and, to a lesser extent, in Korea. Since then, “The voice of resistance, reluctance, and opposition to wartime tax burdens occupies a more prominent role in American political discourse.”
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There are few voices today like Congressman Obey's or like Sam Rayburn's in 1950, demanding that we not ask those who are fighting the war to then come home and pay for it in the form of a legacy of debt. David Obey did not run for reelection in 2010.

I would suggest that as Congress imposes upon the executive branch a requirement that presidents actually follow the requirements of the Constitution and of the War Powers Act, it also impose on itself—and then the citizens of the country—a related obligation. There should be no military action authorized by the United States that does not include income- and corporate-tax surcharges for the duration of the engagement. These should be sufficient to cover all of the operating costs of the war and should provide a trust fund to provide for lifetime support for those who serve and sacrifice in the war. It could be considered the complementary burden upon the rest of us for the narrowing group of our fellow citizens who will serve and sacrifice and suffer. This might be a more patriotic first principle.
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The week following Memorial Day 2011, my wife, Susan, and I visited Gettysburg. I had last been there in the spring of 1957, on my Galena
High School senior class trip to Washington. Susan had never been there. It was a profoundly moving experience for us. On a warm June morning we stopped at peaceful places with pastoral names, the Wheatfield, the Peach Orchard, Plum Run, the Rose Farm, bucolic places like McPherson's Barn, the Culp Farm, and the Codori Farm. We looked at a long line of Confederate cannons ironically resting on Seminary Ridge. Across a gentle valley Union cannons faced them. They sat on a peaceful Cemetery Ridge. The fields and hills in and around this community were filled with stilled and spiked cannons and with monuments, monuments to individuals, to battles, to military units, to states. By one count there are thirteen hundred monuments, solid works of bronze or granite that silently memorialize.

The southern states were reluctant in the early years to establish monuments at Gettysburg. In the twentieth century they did. The North Carolina Monument is striking. A bronze sculpture by Gutzon Borglum, who did the famous sculpting on the face of Mount Rushmore, this monument has five figures in it. Each wears the look of a man engaged in a very emotional experience. One is downed with wounds and is urging his friends to advance; another is young and scared; others are resolute. The sculpture is positioned on Seminary Ridge, near the fields where a North Carolina brigade went to join in Pickett's bloody and unsuccessful charge on the third and final day of the battle. The 26th North Carolina Regiment had suffered extremely heavy casualties on the first day of battle at McPherson's Ridge, and the remnants then joined with Pickett on day three. They suffered 82 percent casualties in these two days at Gettysburg, the highest of any regiment on either side in the battle. This included, by some accounts, four sets of twins, all of whom were killed or wounded.
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Across from the North Carolina monument, we stood at the “Angle,” that place where the old stone wall on Cemetery Ridge moved sharply perpendicular. Here was the high point of the Confederate charge, a high point touched but never held. A small remnant of the 26th North Carolina planted their colors here briefly. A monument marks the spot where Brigadier General Lewis Armistead was mortally wounded while leading a charge into the Union lines. A few hundred yards away, Abraham
Lincoln delivered his address inaugurating the cemetery. Looking out from the Angle to the west and northwest is a long sloping field that was a major killing ground. Now a meadow, in the summer of 1863 it was corn and wheat and clover. The Emmitsburg road, a country lane, meanders through, and its wooden fence evokes pastoral nostalgia. On July 3, 1863, the fence that stood there was an obstacle that slowed the charging Confederates and made them even better targets for Union fire. Over three days in early July 1863, there were more than fifty thousand casualties in the fields around Gettysburg; some seventy-nine hundred men died.

David Smith was a thirty-nine-year-old blacksmith from Elmer, New Jersey. He volunteered to serve in the 12th New Jersey Volunteers. At Gettysburg he was near the Angle, and his unit was also involved in heavy fighting in the area down the hill where the Bliss farm was located. Smith would write to his wife, Elizabeth, in early August 1863, “I think you would not want to read the details of the fight as it was.” He said that on the afternoon of July 3, he sat by the stone wall at Cemetery Ridge and fired until he “had blisters on my hand as big as 10 cent pieces.” His gun was too hot to touch. After the fight, he went down onto the field littered with Confederate dead and dying, “the hardest mission I had ever been on, the ground being nearly covered with the dead and wounded, the wounded crying for help & water & to be killed & so on.”
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Gettysburg is as good a place as any to reflect on the meaning of America's wars and the sacrifices they have required. Such reflections need to acknowledge that they cannot provide absolute answers or generalizable meanings. Each war and each battle in each war were different. Here, around this little Pennsylvania town, finally the momentum of this great and terrible war shifted; there would be more bloody battles, but the Union would be preserved, and it would be a Union without human slavery.

If these are causes worth fighting for, and I believe they are, it would require more providential judgment, or simple arrogance, than I care to inflict in order to proclaim that these causes worth fighting for were also worth someone else dying for. But if we have learned anything, it is that the one always follows the other. The more abstractly the deaths are
counted, perhaps the easier to rationalize their sacrifices. Among compilations of numbers on reports and then names chiseled in stone, there are very human stories to be told. Numbers obscure names, and in time even names fade away from signifying human beings doing difficult things and dying too soon. Or suffering for a lifetime the trauma of a single moment.

Harvard philosopher William James spoke in 1897 at the dedication of the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial in Boston. He was not comfortable with what he believed to be the romantic view of the Civil War. He said it was necessary to remember the horror, “the great earthworks and their thundering cannon, the commanders and their followers, the wild assault and repulse that for a brief space made night hideous on that far-off evening, have all sunk into the blue gulf of the past, and for the majority of this generation are hardly more than an abstract name, a picture, a tale that is told.” Soon the great war will be like the siege of Troy, “battles long ago.”
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Wars may sometimes be necessary, even unavoidable, but for those who must decide necessity, it needs always to be remembered that fighting in wars means dying in wars. It is perhaps even more essential in this era of different types of wars, less crisply defined engagements, fought by less representative American forces, that Congress and the president agree up front that this is a necessary engagement and that they agree upon the military goals. And they agree that the Republic is willing financially to pay for them. If not, no one should ask others to pay, possibly with their lives. Wars will never be constant from declaration to conclusion; goals will change as circumstances do, but if there is not a clear consensus up front and sign-off along the way, these will become more undefined wars. Undefined wars are dangerous things; undefined, unknown, anonymous warriors are more than dangerous. They allow wars stripped of the very human dimension and understanding of personal sacrifice that are necessary consequences of war.

The heroic narratives of war and the abstract celebration of warriors do sanitize wars by stripping them of their personality. It is hard to take the personal stories of combat and fit them easily into the heroic narrative. Moreover, if Lincoln would instruct us to remember our obligation
to ensure that those who died on this “hallowed ground” did not die in vain, what about grounds less hallowed or even less remembered? Did those who died on Pork Chop Hill in Korea or Hamburger Hill in Vietnam or the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan, all places marked by fierce fighting that were later determined to be strategically unnecessary, then die in vain? I hope not, but declaring these things is beyond my specialty. Nonetheless, each of these places is a reminder of what it is we ask young people to do. Neil Sheehan wrote of Hamburger Hill, “It ought to be one thing to perish on the beaches of Normandy or Iwo Jima in a great cause and another to fall in a rejected and unsung war.”
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I am not sure who gets to define the “oughts” of these things; nor am I positive it is different for those who fall or for their families.