I don’t think that any of the young men throughout time ever thought that the death they planned for others would actually happen to them. The young are like that, full of themselves and cocky, thinking that their days are endless. Those of us who have made it to creaking and painful four score or more can tell that living long may have its costs but there are moments that should never have been missed.
The death toll of Americans has now reached the point where more have died AFTER the END of the war than during the battle to invade and degrade Iraq. The war costs will also have to take into account all those whose bodies were mangled so the scars would follow with them throughout their lives. All wars are like this in the warping of life, torn apart by weapons of all descriptions. The search for sources of weapons of mass destruction is made trivial by the death caused by portable ones carried by determined enemies of the sons and daughters who are doing their duty in the unfamiliar ground belonging to others who do not want them there.
It is actually not too long ago that the cost of the Civil War to soldiers’
families of both the north and the south were still being paid in pensions to fighters in that war to the widows of very ancient veterans. These pensions as well as costs for keeping the assets of captured materiel may continue even down into this century. The practice of finding a family where a young daughter of a sympathetic family would be married in name only to a hundred or so year old veteran just in order to give her his pension is not unknown in other venues. It is a practical plan to continue the costs of war in such a way that you and I pay our taxes to perpetuate. Perpetuate paying taxes, that is.
Hospitals, reparations, court costs for bickering over the spoils and ongoing disputes about who did what to whom go on ad infinitum. We will be paying for Korea as long as there is a North Korea. We will be paying for South East Asia’s malaise because of our involvement in a “police action” in Thailand, still a disputed U.S. supported south while the North is attractive but Communist. Our wars in Kosovo were limited but we were there and it cost you and me. Afghanistan, the retaliation for 9/11 was short, ugly and still unsettled. It is curious that the Russians met their major defeat there while we waltzed through it and are still paying the costs.
War is hell but paying for it is relatively painless. We bought the Bush explanation that we needed this war and now we need our children and children’s children to pay for the war.