Shifting Sands: Dulce Decorum Est

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Shifting Sands: Dolce Decorum Est

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It was nearly four years ago to the day that I found myself nearing the end of a difficult tour as part of the 332nd Expeditionary Medical Group in Balad Air Base Iraq.  My time under the gun of our nation’s enemies is perhaps insignificant and unworthy of the enormous sacrifices made by the families of our fallen, and by the men and women of other service branches who have served multiple extended tours.  Nonetheless, Iraq was a time in which I discovered what I was truly made of as a human being and saw firsthand the grit and mettle of the human spirit in warfare.  I suppose some would sugar coat this piece and flag wrap the readers with a gung-ho patriotism manifesto. I will not. I will simply tell it to you how it was and in fact is.

While I was in Iraq I witnessed female officers get raped (not literally witnessed; witnessed the after effects). I witnessed people ruin their marriages through adultery. I watched the legs of children be amputated because of crossfire. And I saw what the inside of a human skull looks like after a bullet has traveled through it. During my short time as a part of the war I witnessed religious men lose their faith and atheists find god. I saw children die of starvation and intelligent men sacrifice their lives for their religion. These things seem to be the things by which our culture loves to characterize wars. So I will come right out and tell you, I saw the worst and it was horrible.

Long ago someone coined the phrase “War is hell” I am not sure this is accurate. I think that war is really just life put in fast forward and confined to one small space. All of the things that happen that make war so terrible happen one way or the other in our daily status quo as human beings. What makes war so hellish is that we make the decision to not let the status quo chart its own course and decide to use all of our resources to chart that course for it. It is like taking the horrors all around us every day and cramming them into a small box, shaking it up real good, and then spilling them out in front of our eyes so they can end up being debated on The View and pedantically analyzed by Katie Couric.  For us war is not only morbid but morbidly entertaining. Put simply, war was the worst event I have ever endured.

I still think about it daily and dream about it most nights. I do not believe that it will ever go away. My family has suffered through my emotional breakdowns and fits of anger and I have suffered through self medication, addiction, and abuse. The reality of war for me seems everlasting but another reality that is also everlasting is the thought that even knowing what I know now, I would do it all again.

The only existential truth that substantively matters now is the fact that this Memorial Day marks one of the few celebrated while the men and women of the military are actively engaged in combat. As of today 4083 coalition troops have been killed in action fighting the war in Iraq. These men and women, these 4083 patriots, voluntarily answered their nation’s call and ultimately paid the highest price.

A coach of mine once told me when I was young “We (our team) are only as good as our weakest link” I think this colloquialism applies to humanity as a whole. We are only as good as our weakest link and war, my friends, is the weak link. Thomas Mann once said that “War is the cowardly escape from the problems of peace” and Agatha Christie aptly described war by saying “One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing; that to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one.”

The harsh truth is that Mann and Christie are both right and the ugliest underbelly of humanity can be found only in war. However, as ugly as they may be and as undesirable as they indeed are, wars are undeniably an inexorable part of the human experience. For better and worse they have always been fought and for good and evil they always will be. Just as every action bears it’s equal and opposite, the hell of war is also coupled with the heroism, valor, and bravery of the human spirit. Men who have seen war find an unspeakable fondness of them and as the hands of the devil himself work upon the fields of battle so to do those of the almighty.

After the Battle of Fredericksburg in 1862 General Robert E. Lee remarked “It is well that war is so terrible-otherwise we would grow too fond of it.” These are not the ravings of a lunatic but words of art from an American of legend’s very fabric. General Lee was regarded by most as something of a grandfather figure. Abraham Lincoln himself remarked once that there was no finer man than Robert E. Lee. Lee was hardly the sycophant that many today would brand anyone that dares to speak such a quote. Perhaps that same many will brand me as mad for embracing my war horrors.

Though years of warfare in both Iraq and Afghanistan have wrought horrors untold on many, the opposite is also true. Hundreds of thousands of troops have brought hope to those who had none and brought food and medicine to many who have always been without. From Baghdad to Berlin history will count those whom America has liberated and regardless of where we all now stand on the war, the war its self now binds us all to one undeniable obligation; the obligation to the 4083 who we remembered this Memorial Day. The cold truth of today is that the comrades of the fallen 4083 still wage a war which they were sent to win by a broad and bipartisan coalition. From John Kerry to George Bush, from Harry Reid to Dianne Feinstein the authorizing mandate was sent forth and the men and women of our armed forces have relentlessly pursued that mandate ever since. In our insulated and emasculated western lives the far away battlefields are nothing more than a political conversation. To the ones doing the fighting it is our life’s work.

Alexander Hamilton once said “A nation that would prefer disgrace to danger is a nation prepared for a master and deserves one.”  As a veteran of the current war I can only pray that Hamilton still speaks to the people who wish to embrace the disgrace of retreat from the battlefield that so many of our soldiers have died to take. As a member of a once proud and valorous citizenry I can only hope that there is still an ounce of honor left in our leaders and that the proud 4083 can look down from the heavens somewhere a long time from now and still be able to chant that age old line, Dulce Decorum Est.     

P.H. Rolen is an Operation Iraqi Freedom veteran and columnist writing from from Billings, MT. He serves as a guest editor for Nowpublic.com and has published policy papers for the Heartland Institute 's Infotech and Telecom Newsletter. He has also been featured on WorldNetDaily's (an Alexa top 50 site) commentary page.