The blog of J.L. Wasson

Taken from The Classical:

 

I’ll be taking the day off. I don’t want thanks. I don’t want a parade. I don’t want my experience boiled down to 30 seconds so it can be easily digestible to a national audience. I will want to talk to the handful of people I know who can understand what it’s like to run over a vehicle with an M1A1 tank like the world is a sunbeaten, bullet-riddled monster truck rally.

I don’t begrudge sporting events their brief nods to veterans; a brief, pro forma remembrance is better than no remembrance at all. But that sanitized teaspoon of patriotism shouldn’t obscure the grim reality of theveteran suicide epidemic or increased domestic violence or rampant alcohol abuse or skyrocketing divorce rates for veterans returning to their families. Not everyone comes back broken, but nobody comes back whole.

The echoes of war last a lifetime.

Read the full article here.

Stanley Hauerwas: War as the Sacrifice of the Refusal to Kill

 

I think it is a well attested fact that war veterans seldom want to talk about the experience of battle. No doubt the complex emotions of fear, the exhilaration danger produces, and the bonding between comrades, make speaking of battle difficult. But how do you explain to another human being that you have killed?

No doubt there are mechanisms that allow some to create an emotional distance between themselves and what they have done. But, at least if Grossman is right, men often remain haunted by their experience of having killed in a manner that can have - sometimes years later - destructive results.

To kill, in war or in any circumstance, creates a silence. It is right that silence should surround the taking of life. After all, the life taken is not ours to take. Those who kill, even when such killing is assumed to be legitimate, bear the burden that what they have done makes them “different.”

How do you tell the story of having killed? Killing shatters speech, ends communication, isolating us into different worlds whose difference we cannot even acknowledge. No sacrifice is more dramatic than the sacrifice asked of those sent to war, that is, the sacrifice of their unwillingness to kill. Even more cruelly, we expect those who have killed to return to “normality.”

Read the full article here.