War is a funny thing when it comes to this country. After all, this nation was founded through one. It established its status as a world superpower because of one. We eliminated one of our nation’s great injustices in one that split the nation in two. And we divided our house and created one of its greatest specters with another.
Yet war is one of the few things this nation does united and quite frankly, we’re good at it. Is it because we are a militaristic people that are restless for the next conflict as jingoistic ideas fill our heads?
Hardly. If anything, we have a sort of reluctant-worker mentality to wars. We either avoid conflict until we have no other choice or the war is brought to us. Then once the sleeping giant has been awakened, the message is simple: “You messed with America, and now you must pay!”
During times of war, we realize – though tragic as it is – that reality has set in. We realize that sacrifices must be made not for us, but for those of us yet to come. With the exception of Vietnam, every generation has answered the call to prevent tyranny from spreading and affecting not them, but their children and grandchildren in the years to come.
British author John Keegan in his novel “Warpaths: Travels of a Military Historian in North America” explained America and war this way: “Americans are proficient at war in the same way they are proficient at work. It is a task, sometimes a duty … It is not their favored form of work [but they] shoulder the burden with intimidating purpose.”
These words ring true today with the War on Terror. We didn’t start this, but we do plan on ending it.
But when Keegan’s words are looked through the eyes of history, they ring truer. It was America that put an end to the aggression of Kaiser’s Germany on Europe; even after he doubted the nation’s willingness to fight. Hitler and Tojo’s dreams of world conquest and eugenics died after Pearl Harbor, and once again the willingness to go to battle was questioned before the attack.
During the Cold War (often called the War without a shot fired or most recently World War III by some historians) Khrushchev stated that his Soviet Union will “bury you.” So almost 50 years after that prediction, America still stands while the Sovie Union is a memory.
To me, Keegan’s sentiments on war begin work and duty are true, but in America it’s something more.
Each of us, no matter what the ethnic group we were born into had ancestors that had to overcome something to ensure a better life for themselves and their descendants.
Blacks were enslaved. Irish fled from famine and later endured religious persecution. Germans came for economic freedom and the ability to farm their own land. Japanese Americans were put in interment camps. In turn, as each group was assimilated into the melting pot of American society, an idea began to simmer up to the top: that this nation, having paid for its past sins will make sure that no one else in the world would have to endure them.
So now, when all the cries for international isolation are heard, we have to realize that in the end we are the only ones that can save the world from itself. A sort of big brother that goes off on its own to do its own thing, but appearing just in time to make everything right and better than it was before.
It is strange though, war, for all its destructive nature, is often the only thing to bring a divided nation together into a united force to be reckoned with.
Ronald Reagan once thought that if some alien invader attacked the entire world, we as humanity would rise up and try our damnedest to defeat them. That for those brief moments in history, all the world’s petty problems would be forgotten as survival, family and utility took over.
It’s funny.
