War is hell and It’s wrong

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War is hell and It’s wrong

Editor, The Beacon:

I have lived for 74 years and I know one thing: War is hell and it is wrong.

I grew up during the Cold War, robbed of a carefree youth by duck-and-cover air-raid drills in school and lessons in the fourth grade on how to survive in a fallout shelter. I never took for granted that the world as I knew it would survive as I watched the Cold War evolve into a nuclear-arms race held precariously in check by a “strategy” referred to as “mutually assured destruction (MAD).”

In my high-school years, I heard President Lyndon Johnson talk about a Great Society of equals and an end to poverty. I dared to believe it could happen only to watch it go up in flames while my generation was sacrificed to the anti-communist crusade known as the Vietnam War. The “enemy” won and, 50 years later, Ho Chi Minh City, formerly known as Saigon, is filled with American tourists.

In my early 20s, I lived in London. The Irish Republican Army was planting bombs in English pubs, the latest iteration of a centuries-old war with Great Britain. The illusion that the bombings happened somewhere else was shattered along with the broken glass I had to walk around from a bombing not far from where I lived.

In my late 20s, I was a journalist covering wars in Central America. I saw dead women in aprons, heard the agony of mothers wailing over the bodies of their dead sons. I watched 10-year-olds put on uniforms and take up rifles to fight wars started by generals.

In the last year of his life, my father, a World War II veteran, had to move to a nursing home because dementia had robbed him of his ability to live independently. When I called him to ask if he was adjusting to his new surroundings, the clarity of his response stunned me.

“When I was still a boy, they taught me to kill people. I adjusted to that so I think I can adjust to this.”

He did not know the term for it but what he suffered from and adjusted to is now called moral injury. It’s why 20 U.S. war veterans commit suicide every day.

My father idolized Dwight D. Eisenhower, the war hero elected to the presidency when I was a child. The five-star general, who led the Allies to victory in Europe, had this to say about war.

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”

We all have been robbed of the dignity and security of living in a nation where no child goes to bed hungry, where quality health care is a human right, and where educated voters are not susceptible to manipulation by power-mad autocrats.

Instead, our government has spent $8 trillion on wars since 9/11, money which should have been spent on securing our future through providing a first-class education to every child in America, making sure every American who wants to own a home can afford one, making quality health care available from cradle to grave, and seriously addressing global warming, which threatens every American’s health, home security and quality of life.

Civil War Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman is said to have originated the statement, “War is hell.” The full quote is: “I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell.”

The hell war creates and perpetuates is evident every evening on the news. Acknowledging that awful truth could set us free, but only if we’re brave enough to repeat it over and over and insist that our “leaders” be brave enough to stop it.

Kathy Hersh
DeLand

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