Yesterday I was at the VA Medical Center and as usual took a slow drive through the neighboring National Cemetery to visit my favorite tree and the thousands of vets buried there. As it happens, I am reading West Point professor Elizabeth Samet's 2021 book "Looking for the Good War" in which she lays waste the myth that World War II (or any war) is a "good war." One part of her focus is on the ideal of "leave no man behind" and its suggestion that individual soldiers are very important to the political entities that send them offf to kill and be killed for political and economic purposes. That sentimental fable was suggested in Steven Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan." Professor Samet points out that real wars are mass casualty events, and World War II was hardly 'good' from the point of view of the KIAs, WIAs, and MIAs. In WW II alone, there are approximately 72,000 American bodies never recovered, and another 8,000 from our wars after WW II. One of them belonged to a friend of mine in RVN, Capt. William F. "Moon" Mullen, shot down on April 29, 1966, while piloting an A4 'Skyhawk' over the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos. On the Vietnam Wall in Washington, he is listed as MIA. At the time, the government's official Big Lie was that we were not conducting combat missions in Laos, so Moon's wife and 2 sons were told he was missing in Vietnam. At the end of the Vietnam occupation by the U.S., there were still 2,338 service people listed as "missing." I do not mean to suggest that "leave no man behind' is not a motivating aspiration for indiviual members of the military, but only to suggest that the same aspiration is of little moment to their governments. On the other hand, I take some comfort in the fact that our local National Cemetery and the neighboring VA facilities do give evidence of the nation's attempt to honor Abraham Lincoln's exhortation "to care for him who shall have borne the battle . . ."
No comments:
Post a Comment