Summary: Memorial Day was once a time for harmless escapism. No more. A decade and a half of unending war half a world away forces us to face a number of inconvenient truths that are either politically, militarily, or socially discomforting. Memorial Day emerged from a great struggle for social justice. Endless war has stretched the army to the point where senior generals worry about breaking the Army. Our maritime pivot to Asia is being starved of resources. Our capacity for civil discourse is diminishing. These are some things to contemplate on Memorial Day. These are the challenges the day calls to address.
Time was that Memorial Day was a time for barbecues, a time for putting on white shoes, a time for scoping good-looking dudes at the beach or poolside, while ever and anon paying lip service to the memory of America’s fallen.
That was Memorial Day in peacetime, during those intermittent gaps between America’s normal state of being, military conflict.
But the United States has been at war for half a generation now. Kids are being blown up in Afghanistan who were toddlers on that thrice cursed day in September, 2001, when a bunch of Muslim terrorists drove airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
As we remember, therefore, those who have given their lives in at least the nominal defense of the United States, we should, perhaps, take time to recall what sometime Vice President Al Gore might have called “inconvenient truths.”
Truth telling is an integral part of most military cultures. Indeed, in the Marine Corps, truth telling is held at an almost unbearably high premium, because when leaders lie, Marines die.
But it’s not just Marines who die when leaders lie. When leaders lie, American fighters from every branch of the armed services die. Too many leaders have lied and too many American soldiers have died for us ever to forget or forgive the systematic untruths by which we were buffaloed into a war in Iraq that should never have happened, but which George Dubya Bush and Dick Cheney manufactured and sold to a hoodwinked American public.
Let’s take a look at some inconvenient truths we need to confront today.
INCONVENIENT TRUTH, MEMORIAL DAY IS ABOUT SOCIAL JUSTICE: Our commemoration of America’s war dead emerged from perhaps the greatest struggle for social justice ever waged in this country. Now, a lot of American conservatives like to pooh-pooh the whole concept of social justice. Many of them turn a deaf ear on Massachusetts abolitionist Theodore Potter’s immortal observation that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” If getting rid of slavery was not a struggle for social justice, then I daresay most of us don’t know what is.
INCONVENIENT TRUTH, THE DEAD WERE HARDLY MORE THAN BOYS: We should consider this Memorial Day, as we remember our war dead, how few has been the number of years when America could truly say that she was at peace at home and abroad. Yet, since 2001, unending war in distant places has become our new normal. It should be a little shocking to us that children too young to have even the fuzziest memories of 9/11 should be coming home in boxes from a battlefield on which American soldiers have been fighting for more than a decade. And as we watch the flag draped coffins come back to cities and towns and burying places all over America, we cannot help but remember the haunting words of Grantland Rice, “I’ve noticed that the dead were hardly more than boys.”
INCONVENIENT TRUTH, THE WAR HAS REIGNITED DEBATE OVER CONSCRIPTION: If the dead have been hardly more than boys, the prosecution of our endless war in the sands and mountains of Iraq and Afghanistan has raised disturbing questions about the utility of an all volunteer military. Some have suggested that we should revert to a draft, arguing that an updated version of conscription will ensure that the rich as well as the poor find themselves in harms way. Opponents of the draft argue that the willingness of young men and women to volunteer constitutes a useful barometer of public acceptance of America’s military conflicts. Between these two positions is an almost impassable gulf, one not made any easier by the fact that volunteering for armed service is often either a function of dire social necessity or a deeply Freudian decision by those not in economic straits to plumb the depths of their own warrior nature.
INCONVENIENT TRUTH, YES, IT IS POSSIBLE TO BREAK THE ARMY: Yet, as a number of senior military leaders have warned, mere warrior nature won’t avail against the serious structural problems confronting the American military in consequence of a decades long war prosecuted half a world away. As early as 2003, senior commanders were warning that multiple operations in both Afghanistan and Iraq had potential to “break the Army.” The Army remains largely unbroken, largely because it has treated the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as a laboratory for developing new war fighting methodologies. The experience of Afghanistan and Iraq has been a vade mecum for how boots on the ground can fight a new kind of war.
INCONVENIENT TRUTH, WE STILL NEED TO BE CONSCIOUS OF THE MARITIME THREAT: All the on ground experience in Afghanistan means little at sea elsewhere. Afghanistan and Iraq have not taught the Navy much about maritime conflict. Aside from raiding the Navy for ground pounders, and with the exception of Navy corpsmen attached Marine units, Iraq and Afghanistan have been largely irrelevant to the Navy’s larger mission within the defense context. The inconvenient truth we confront is that as America pivots more to the Far East, our increasingly contentious posture with respect to China will be largely driven by our ability to marshal naval assets to counter the increasing blue water power projection capabilities of the PLA Navy.
INCONVENIENT TRUTH, ENDLESS WAR IS BEREAVING US OF THE FACULTY OF CIVIL DISCOURSE AND DEBATE: Whether we speak of lessons learned by the Army and the Marines or unwonted burdens borne the Air Force, the Coast Guard, and that majority of the Navy which are not Marines, the fact remains that on this Memorial Day, the greatest of all the inconvenient truths from which we shy is that a decade and a half of war has helped coarsen our own national discourse. We Americans seem to be losing the capacity to agree disagreeably, to find common ground even in the presence of divergent views, to acknowledge that it is possible for one who sees the world differently to be just as patriotic as oneself.
And in such a polarized climate, though we may account ourselves fortunate that no single party or political ideology has successfully repeated the Nixon Administration's 1970s-vintage efforts to appropriate national symbols to the exclusive use and benefit of the Republican Party, we still need to make a greater effort to relearn our American faculty for honest, forthright debate over the issues of war and peace that transfix us as much today as when American fighters first went to wage war in an Islamic country more than two centuries ago, at the time Thomas Jefferson sent the Navy to chastise the Barbary Pirates. For if we are to be a country fit for heroes to live in, then “substantial additional work,” Bush v. Gore (2000) 531 U.S. 98 at 110, is necessary.
On this Memorial Day, as we find ourselves on the cusp between two wars, one in Afghanistan and a possible new one in the Middle East against the cartoonishly evil Islamist extremists of Daesh (the so-called Islamic State), we need to set ourselves to the accomplishment of that substantial additional work, so that we can say we have done right by the fallen and also preserved for our returning veterans a country in which a rich marketplace of ideas can still thrive, where “freedom” remains more than a buzzword, devoid of meaning in an increasingly polarized, militant “'Murica.”
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