War is a bloody, filthy business. It’s a deadly enterprise and mostly wasteful. I think of some lines from the ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus: “They sent forth men to battle, But no such men return; And home, to claim their welcome, Come ashes in an urn.” We hide that reality, really well. We hide it in flags and snappy uniforms, in patriotic songs and cheering parades. The dead don’t see or hear any it. They are buried and forgotten because what is promoted and endlessly exhibited before us are the supersonic bombers, the giant warships, the sleek nuclear missiles that promise our protection. Our soldiers are strewn across a battlefield of gross cynicism and lethal greed created by what must be completely soulless politicians, warmongers, psychopaths, killers, puffed up blowhards, and scandalous hustlers who pay our soldiers pennies, use and waste them, and leave them broken, ravished, and demolished. And we celebrate these atrocities as patriotic? It’s all
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