I WANT YOU

It is an interesting employment. It is the only job where you are trained to legally kill people in massive numbers. It is also the job where you accept up front the possibility of also being killed.

Now there are other dangerous jobs and some allow wearing weapons, but to kill is not the prime directive.

To be hired you sign up. You can join or volunteer or if there are not enough bodies to count, be drafted.

Once enlisted the process is much like prison. The hair is cut, a uniform is required to wear and authority figures yell instructions that must be followed. This intimidation is the method of making groups of people follow, orders without question.

No. I didn’t sign up. I didn’t volunteer. I wasn’t drafted. I did get a selective service card that was required to every lad my age (the ladies got a pass).

I saw as many WWII movies as the next kid my age. The movie newsreels showed how our troops won the war with flag waving and parades and stimulating music but didn’t show the body parts. I played with toy guns and simulated battle but everyone got up and went home.

I understood the survival emotion if someone is shooting at you, and then you should shoot back at them. I didn’t understand when you were ordered to shoot first. In all the screaming and explosions and panic of war, that ‘thud’ that was hit was a son or a father or an uncle or a mother. They would not be going home.

On these holidays remembering the dead, we lower the flags, bring out the survivors’, make patriotic speeches and play Taps. Families look for names of a relative and veterans wear the jewelry that says ‘they survived’.

The gravestones were not only for the GI Joe who died heroically in battle but those who were bringing up the ammunition or taking away the wounded. They are those who tried to put out the crashed plane or shoveled the coal on merchant ships torpedoed.

So we celebrate the patriots or the heroes or whatever popular term we use for kids running forward into the hail of bombs and bullets hoping they won’t be the one. When we are the winners we build monuments to the fallen on our side.

What about all those men and women wearing the other uniform? They were sons and daughters and fathers and uncles and mothers who were murdered in a game called war. Did they have the same belief in their cause or were they just trying to protect their homes from an invader?

At the end, maybe they had more bodies to bury than we did?

War still seems to be our favorite pastime so our gladiators will continue to find some reason to murder each other.

Leave some room in the back; there will be more coffins.