In Memorium III ; the last ...

It’s a little bittersweet, coming to the end of the Memorial Day Weekend. There was so much divisiveness on social media that we left and worked on the farm all afternoon. It seems that, instead of relying upon the sadness of previous wars to steer us from another, they are drawing us inexorably into another Middle East quagmire. They say that US military spending for FY 2020 will reach $989 billion once you add components hidden in other budgets. That’s nearing a trillion dollars, people.

Perhaps when you spend that much money on something, it makes you want to use it.

We ended the weekend revisiting some stories from the 79^th Infantry Division, Brenda’s dad’s unit. The first wasn’t a story he told. Rather, it was something that she read this week that he never mentioned at all. It seems that the 79^th was one of the units that discovered a Nazi concentration camp. According to the piece she found, they made the entire division view it.

As I say, he never mentioned it. He did tell about a squad of American soldiers taking a group of men claiming to be “Polski, nicht German,” behind a building and shooting them. War can make your children do things you never imagined, sometimes to other people’s children. There’s sad scene in one of the documentaries about the fine sunny morning that the United States of America began dropping bombs on the people of Baghdad. There’s a snippet where a man runs across a plaza between explosions carrying a son of maybe 11 or 12 years of age. The child has wet himself through fear, his backside revealing it to the camera. In all likelihood, he’s not an American ally today.

The other incident we discussed yesterday was one that her dad did relate. It happened during the last few days of WWII in Europe. The 79^th was encamped at some resort area in Germany, awaiting the Armistice. German forces still occupied the nearby hills and were laconically, it seems, getting rid of their artillery. They were lobbing shells in with no apparent tactic in mind in the general direction of the spa. A squad of Americans, including B’s dad, were lined up for chow. A random shell hit nearby and took the off the head of a soldier standing in line. It was the unit’s last casualty.

Julius would always end this story with, “And he was the shortest guy in the squad.”

War is a terrible, unpredictable, inexplicable thing. Why, after once losing more than 58,000 of our country’s best in its idiocy, we would let it all happen again is beyond me. Dick Cheney, in his grotesque and twisted “logic,” hit a nerve when he tried to justify an all-volunteer army. “Why send men to war who don’t want to go to war when you can pay men to go who do want to go to war?

Only a Dick Cheney could fail to miss such a point as lay nested therein. If only Lysistrata and her comrades were here, they might could explain it.

Shall we say "lo, look what
our hands hath wrought?