Who knows what any day will bring. But around noon on Saturday, June 21, after running the RC Cola Moon Pie 10-Miler in Bell Buckle, Tennessee, I was lying in bed (after a shower), cooling off (it took hours).
I switched on the TV. I am suddenly seeing reports of the United States’ military’s completion of …Operation Midnight Hammer. U.S. forces had completed strikes on three Iranian nuclear facilities. Despite… everything. The “hardware” involved included B-2 Spirit stealth bombers and Tomahawk missiles launched from a U.S. submarine.
All runner’s highs, all post-run bliss, all sense of the world being safe for a brief moment… gone.
Here we go again.
I was 26 as the 9/11/2001-instigated George W. Bush response w/Afghanistan Bin Laden-WMD-Iraq super-quagmire began. While U.S military involvement in Iraq spanned from 2003 to 2011, activity in Afghanistan had begun in 2001 and lasted until 2021 (!?). Trillions of dollars spent and at least one million total deaths. Looking back, all of this had fostered my socio-political coming of age. I’m still dealing with it.
A thought from this time:
You mean you can have millions of Evangelical Christians believing an Evangelical Christian president (George W. Bush) that starting a war (two, in fact – Afghanistan and Iraq) is the correct response to an act of aggression?
Oh, you really can.
And we may well have it all again with this current conflict.
The general news coverage is hauntingly similar, and the feelings (somehow?) quite familiar.
It’s storytelling. It’s always storytelling. Left to our most individualistic impulses, we think in stories. Even when we know facts, stats, science, history, and modeling, The Drama is right there, alluring, seducing, conniving with a thousand, “yes, but what-ifs, dahling?”
It’s storytelling. It’s always storytelling.
So, this is a literary Substack, not a political one (at least not overtly).
And so, I give you not commentary, but literary themes.
Stories outweigh sense; we humans will almost always indulge story.
Why would war be wrong when you have thematic literary vehicles such as these?
Glory & Honor – heroicness for future generations; a kind of immortality; battlefield bravado
Christian Righteousness – Got Jesus? I don’t mean the one in the gospel texts who loved others, was economically socialist, espoused progressive gender policies, and practiced non-violence to the point of letting himself be a political testament to the might of the Roman Empire. No, I mean Manifest Destiny, Civilizing the Barbarians! Kingdome Come Riding on A White Horse. With God On Our Side! (Bibliographical notes: see Western Civilization 1492-present).
Rite of Passage – Hey, war converts youths to adults. And if a newfound “maturity” is also fraught with trauma, hey, “you made it, brave one.” You’ll finally “understand,” or understand more deeply, what being a countryman is. You’ll be grateful, and you’ll encourage it in others.
Here's a few more literary war themes, in name only. I’m making these up more or less, they go on and on …
Heroism
Comradeship/Found Family
Showing-off Technological Prowess
War as Economic Engine
Martyrdom & Sacrifice
Utopian Longing for Peace
The desire-for, and chance, to feel these themes goes back to the dawn of mankind. My tribe’s purity is greater than those cave-peoples’, and their blood must be spilt. It’s been talked about at length by all manner of writers, of course.
Written a few years back is Sebastian Junger’s book, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging (2016). Reading it, I was haunted and helped by it in regards to U.S. military service. Why did folk so appreciate their years serving? (I ask this as my father and both grandfathers served during the Vietnam War and WWII, respectively.)
Junger’s experience interviewing and learning from war veterans was essentially – shoulder to shoulder community is profound.
He proposes that the only place this may exist anymore in our fractured, iPhone-swiping world, is in our armed forces, and most pointedly, combat itself.
I wonder how this can be true, if it is? How do we not have something else more constructive, more positive – as a container for community? For meaning? TBD.
As Psalm 2’s author posed millenia ago during what seemed to be a Bronze Age moment of surrender, “Why do the nations rage and the people plot in vain?”
Odd pivot, but I've attempted stranger segues:
Oh, hey… The Attentionist Podcast! Hear a fictionalized young British soldier’s experience traversing the Darien Gap. He volunteered, all on his own, to go into one of the most sordid warrior-infested (including many renegades and rogue soldiers) for the thrill of an experience.
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Cloggers: