War! Huh! What Is It Good For?

(First published in Bali Advertiser, January 31, 2007)

“And some are very, very bad.
Why are they
sad and glad and bad?
I do not know.
Go ask your dad.”
– Dr. Seuss

Sam, the only son of a childhood family friend, is a U.S. soldier in Iraq. I have never met him. I guess he’s the usual age of young men who go to fight America’s – or any country’s – wars. Sam’s father, Ben David, was a teenager when I was in kindergarten and was famously banished from the LeRoi house in 1967, because of the many merry adventures – some of which became minor legend – he’d lead my brothers and me on, along with his own younger brother and sisters.

Later, Sam’s grandfather, Ben, was my high school basketball coach. His grandmother, Betty, among many other things she did and I remember, met me with hot chocolate one drizzly Taipei winter day when I arrived home from school and she was watching the children while other missionary parents met in our house. I’ve played soccer with one of Sam’s uncle, volleyball and basketball with his aunts, and I have been thinking about him in Iraq ever since Ben and Betty said in October that Ben David had asked “everyone to pray really hard” for Sam.

The question in the title, from the 1970 song by Edwin Starr, isn’t profound. If Mr. Starr himself is to be believed, the song wasn’t even an anti-war anthem; it was a song about the personal battles between people, “the war people wage against each other on a day-to-day basis. All the words are applicable to neighbors who fight with each other,” he said in a profile posted on www.superseventies.com. (Mr. Starr died in 2003 at age 61.)

What good is it anyway to say war isn’t good for anything when sometimes it is absolutely necessary, or if not necessary, unavoidable? You’ve got to do something besides stand and bleed if someone keeps punching you in the nose, and some people just won’t stop doing so until they – or you – are dead. The practical question is what do we personally do once war is here and underway? Join up? Head for the hills? Howl at the moon? Invest in steel and munitions? What do we do when the dogs of war won’t lie down and get along?

It’s not a question that can be honestly answered in the abstract. Most of us – me, people reading this newspaper, most Americans, the majority of Europeans in the last 60 years – haven’t had to think seriously about war. War is never on top of us. If it threatens, we have the means to escape. We don’t have to face the choice of which child to save from a bomb or a bullet, which to trust to God and luck. We don’t have to choose between personal dignity and getting enough to eat, between following orders and facing a firing squad. We can sit relaxed in our armchairs – feet crossed, fire roaring, cat curled on the hearth – while we decide if we are ‘fur it or agin it’.

For us, war is an idle topic of discussion at the dinner table or over beers after work. No matter what the death toll was for the day, we still go home to a warm bed, a warm, living bed partner, and warm, happy, breathing children. We’ve got no blood riding on the outcome. Does it even do any good to anguish about it? Does anguish ever overcome what is, at heart, our indifference as long as we and ours are safe?

Just what do we do then when the dogs of war refuse to cease to howl? Wear sackcloth and bathe in ashes? Gnash our teeth and pull our hair? Stalk presidents, picket military bases, spit on generals, paint flowers on war machines and peace signs on heroes’ statues?

In all the history of wars and war protests, none of it’s ever done one bit of good, has seldom stopped a war in progress, has never stopped the next war from coming, has never stopped war from being a daily, on-going event somewhere in the world, round-the-clock, week after week, year in and out, a display of the same bloody-minded ferocity that we have time and again proven lies deep – and sometimes not so deep – inside all of us.

So, unless you’ve got some magic potion that will turn all us war mongers into peace lovers ready to lie down with lions and sheep, please, bow your head and pray to whatever God or gods you pray to, and pray for Sam. Pray really hard. Because it looks like it’s going to get worse.

Copyright © 2007 Lee Roy LeRoi