Honor and Memory

I spent yesterday making good use of my freedom.  I played in the backyard, I went out and indulged in some free market capitalism, and I went home for a nap on my back porch.  It was Memorial Day in these United States of America, and I read quite a few things as I lounged around, about how we should honor the memory of those who died in the various conflicts that our nation has gotten itself into over the years.
I have done enough funerals for veterans to be familiar with the pathos of soldiering.  If you listen to the little poems that are read as prayers of a sort by VFW details at the funeral of their "fallen comrade," you will understand that there is a complicated, in some ways beautiful, thought process that goes into honoring a life that included service to one's country.  The flag folding, the playing of Taps and the presentation of that flag with empty rifle cartridges inside to the surviving family is touching and solemn.
I have been around enough veterans in enough different circumstances to understand that really honoring them is a more complicated process.  So here's my after Memorial Day thoughts.
When I worked as a chaplain at the VA hospital in Pittsburgh during seminary, I was assigned to several psychiatric wards, and there I met men (and a few women) who had been involved in the peculiar event that we call war.  Some had been wounded in combat, others had gotten away unscathed at least physically.  It was here that I first really learned about Post Traumatic Stress.  It was here that I met people who had spent thirty years trying to deal with things that happened to them when they were 19 or 20.  I met people who were broken, damaged and otherwise lost in battle.  But they still had to navigate the rather difficult task of living.  Some could do it, with a few breakdowns here and there, others had no way of coping with the actual world.  There were so many different experiences, and so many different ways of breaking, but one thing was common enough that it stuck: they had almost no idea why they had to fight in the first place.
This brought me to an awareness of something, most of these soldiers had been poor and marginally educated.  Most of them had either been drafted or enlisted because they had to.  Most of them, even after thirty years, still couldn't give a good reason why we needed to be in Vietnam (because of timing most of them were Vietnam Vets).  I had grown up learning that it was to stop communism, and that seemed like a good idea to me at the time, but I understood that, from the perspective of a soldier, ideology is a pretty stupid reason to fight.  If I was going to be in that kind of peril, I think I might want to know that I am protecting more than just an idea. Wars are fought for some really abstract reasons, and that make life hard for those who fight them.
It was a little shocking to me at the time, to hear these people still trying to figure out why they had been sent to war, I'm not talking about basket cases either, I'm talking about intelligent, and thoughtful people, who would otherwise be very productive members of society, if it hadn't been for the trauma they experienced and the trouble they were now having finding the meaning in it.
If they had died, they would not have raised these questions.  It's easy to honor those who have made the "ultimate sacrifice," it's harder to deal with people who lived to tell you how pointless the whole thing really was.  And they did, almost to a person, at least the ones who were willing to talk about it.  Many won't, it's only the ones who can bring themselves to face the horror again that are willing to tell you.  I'm not even going to dishonor their courage by listing any of the more grievous examples that I heard that summer.
All I want to say is that they changed the way I feel about patriotism and they changed the way I feel about honoring soldiers.  I have come to believe that the best way to honor those who serve our nation, is to stop sending them to die in futile and often sinister conflicts that are started by politicians and corporations.
While I am deeply thankful to those that serve, my gratitude leads me to desire that their service be truly honorable, which entails righteousness in the mission and purposes they are asked to pursue.  No amount of battlefield valor can make unjust violence a source of glory.
Movies and fiction sometimes present us with the myth of the gung-ho soldier, who longs for glory and action.  I have known some of those characters, they were people who had not been to war yet.  Most of the people who have experienced the reality had a more circumspect attitude about it.  That was another surprise that I got in the VA: the humility, and the soul searching that comes from being put in a place where you are asked to kill and have others who are trying to kill you. This may only take place after the noise has died down, and when it does the battle can be truly fierce. So this day after Memorial Day I would like to honor the true soldiers: people who realize that their personal honor is the only thing that separates them from murderers and mercenaries, and people who are willing to put that honor to the ultimate test when bullets are flying and things are exploding.
If only the ones who start the wars had the same sensibility.