My father was an infantryman in the Korean war. He served only the final six months or so of the war, in static trench fighting. It gave him the opportunity to go to college (he graduated from the Citadel, class of 1957? 1958?) and become a civil engineer, and so it gave him the capacities that led him on the amazing life he had.  The war also ruined him as a human in some ways--not for others (as he was, pretty reliably, a loving and a joyous man), but for himself.  From when I was a small child, till my last times visiting him and my mother at home when he was still alive, a constant reality was his crying out in the night in his sleep, as he dreamt of some of what happened to him, and those with whom he served.  All of this was still vivid to him, almost fifty years after his war had ended.

He had some real experience of combat--he ended up leading a scout section, sneaking beyond the front lines.  He "won" a Purple Heart when he got hit by shrapnel from a mortar shell.  He was awarded a couple of medals, though the only one he thought meant anything actually was the Combat Infantryman's Badge. He knew what fear and terror was, and I think he knew something of murderous rage.  But also the endless boredom of waiting was something that was especially interesting to him.  I remember him, describing the period before setting out on a mission, and talking about a poem, maybe by him, in the Citadel's literary journal, to describe that time: the crucial line was, "and you wait. You wait. You wait."  Waiting would be an excruciating part of the war. In a way, it was worse than the fighting itself, he said.

Veterans' Day is a day to be grateful, and also a day to remember the cost of war.  I am not a veteran, and so I am hesitant to say much (dulce bellum inexpertis), but I will say that when we think about the costs of going to war, we cannot only think about the literal body count. We must also think about the lives significantly altered, not for the better, by discovering something about the cosmos's apparent indifference to our suffering, and also about our apparent capacities to inflict monstrous cruelties on one another.  It is no sin against the fallen to say that the cost of lives is amplified beyond the literal dead in war, especially since some of those dead understood themselves to have sacrificed themselves so that the others would live.  The dead care what happens to the survivors, as should we all. The physical, psychological, and moral traumas they bear should be acknowledged; they carry those invisible wounds for all of us, not only their fellow citizens, but for humanity as a whole.  They are martyrs to our collective failure to find a better way.  They do not deserve to have to bear the cost of what they have done, and what has been done unto them.

How to think about this is an interesting question. I have a few pieces that stay with me. Paul Fussell's autobiography Doing Battle; Simone Weil's "The Illiad, or, The Poem of Force," and also Tim O'Brien's "How to Tell a True War Story" stay with me.  But a few poems are also poignant.  Here's one that I return to, again and again.  

Eighth Air Force

Randall Jarrell

 

If, in an odd angle of the hutment,

A puppy laps the water from a can

Of flowers, and the drunk sergeant shaving   

Whistles O Paradiso!—shall I say that man   

Is not as men have said: a wolf to man?

 

The other murderers troop in yawning;   

Three of them play Pitch, one sleeps, and one   

Lies counting missions, lies there sweating   

Till even his heart beats: One; One; One.

O murderers! ... Still, this is how it’s done:

 

This is a war.... But since these play, before they die,   

Like puppies with their puppy; since, a man,

I did as these have done, but did not die—

I will content the people as I can

And give up these to them: Behold the man!

 

I have suffered, in a dream, because of him,   

Many things; for this last saviour, man,

I have lied as I lie now. But what is lying?

Men wash their hands, in blood, as best they can:   

I find no fault in this just man.