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Being a Monday morning quarterback is a job
almost anyone can fill. You
sit comfortably in an easy chair and can say with certainty what play
should have been used by the quarterback in Sunday’s foo With the perspective of time and looking back,
it’s easy to consider everything and know the right call. It’s a lot different in the heat of the
moment. That is
particularly true in war and battle. A soldier in the midst of a firefight can’t
pause to consider the merits of his situation, or why he’s there.
He can only follow orders. As
Rudyard Kipling wrote in his Charge of the Light Brigade, the troops
followed orders because it was “theirs not to reason why.”
A soldier obeys the command he is given.
Anarchy and chaos take control if he does not. A lot of writers are coming out with books now
reexamining The War to End All Wars.
Various Monday morning quarterback have analyzed the events of
World War I with a microscope, looking back from the vantage point of 90
years. It’s not quite the same as the world temperament at the
time. The world was at peace the first of June in
1914. No one even thought
of war. Archduke Ferdinand
was on an official visit to Sarajevo when he was assassinated on June
28. He wasn’t very popular with his own people, but Germany and
Austria began posturing and rattling sabers.
Everyone started rattling sabers and honoring alliances.
But that was all it was, until the first week in August of that
year when the carnage began. No one wanted to look weak. The machine gun and rapid firing rifles had come
into their own. You could
kill people quicker. One
day in 1916 during the Battle of the Somme, 50,000 British troops were
killed—marching obediently into the blistering fire across no man’s
land between the trenches. Some
trenches were 30 feet deep. At
places, the space of trenches between friend and foe was only a few
yards. It was also a war where the soldiers sensed the
futility. Commanders were
harsh with deserters. The
French shot some 600 and the British executed around 400.
When the casualty rate became unbearable, a French unit mutinied
in 1917. Americans reelected Woodrow Wilson for a second
term in 1916, because “he kept us out war.”
A year later America was at war. My father was still a teenager and my
grandmother had to sign for him to join the Home Guard in Virginia. He went to France with the 29th Infantry Division and fought
in the trenches. Luckily,
he came back alive, only weakened by the pneumonia that killed more
people at that time than the Bubonic Plague. Looking back now, most agree it was the wrong
war for the wrong reasons. Poets
wrote of the cleansing of society of war, as if wading through a bloody
battlefield could make something clean.
The result was that Germany was a fertile ground for Adolph
Hitler and Russia was too weak to resist a Communist takeover. German author Erich Maria Remarque wrote “All
Quiet on the Western Front” about the futility of World War I. On a day when there was little action and headquarters
reported it was all quiet on the western front, the main person in his
story—a young man with dreams and a future—was killed. Had my father been killed on a “quiet” day
on the front, I would not have been born.
My children and their children would never have come into the
world. Some historians believe the two wars that
destroyed that which needed to be destroyed were the Civil War and World
War II. Perhaps Lincoln
best described war with one word—devastating. Since the two world wars, each of which had a
different scope, world leaders have been torn between inaction for fear
of doing the wrong thing or taking action to prevent a worse calamity. It is said that President John Kennedy had
“The Guns of August,” a book about World War I, beside his bed the
night he wrestled with decisions on the Cuban missile crisis.
At the same time, the specter of Hitler rising to power unchecked
at Munich was in his mind. He
took action. History will decide if President George W. Bush
did the right thing in invading Iraq, or if it was the wrong war for the
wrong reasons. Events will
determine if he took a step toward snuffing out terrorism or only
inflamed it. As of now the death toll of Americans stands
over 1,000. Other
casualties reach above 10,000. These
aren’t statistics. They
are human beings with ambitions and plans that will never be. Kipling was very much a nationalist for England
at the outset of World War I. When
his son was killed on the battlefield, he wrote: “If any question why we died “Tell them, because our fathers lied.” One day in the future, perhaps some military
headquarters will send out a dispatch saying, all quiet on the Iraqi
front. Let us pray there
won’t be another statistic that means a life was lost.
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