The idea is old: The romantic bend to dying in a war. You die for glory, honor, humility; an endearing shadow of nobility blankets you for your sacrifice. For the lost young men of the past, it had allure in lieu of the grandeurs of industrial labour and menial agriculture. Margaret heard you got drafted and after pilfering bloomers, you marched off to adventure with the hands of your country at your back and your friends at your side. Even if you ate it, you were a damn hero, remembered for as long as those that mattered, could.
But romance is dead. Reality is bathed in stark waves that beat an endless note. Grueling days, illness; Death and suffering and depravity until your fellow soldiers and you are animals vying and tearing and ripping. Until your insides look like ribbons tied from an air conditioner. Until errant shells render you a fine red mist. Until you get blended into the mud by the rain and passing tanks or holes appear where your organs used to sit and play cards with each other. The sheer veil is torn off the gaping maw of war’s enraptured face, you don’t think she’s as pretty as you thought.
I want to die in a war. I wish to see its bits and vittles. Ernst Jünger (29 March 1895–17 February 1998), a Great War veteran who compiled his wartime diaries into a novel called Storm of Steel (1919), had it right. This man, wounded four times, enlisted from when it began and relieved the day it ended, loved war. He is one of those men who relish it, thrive in it, live in it, above anyone else. From him is the articulation of adventure and love in what most saw as the worst loss of man since its inception. The more popular American who comes to mind with kind ideas is Teddy Roosevelt. He had similar ideas of the jolly good fun of war, the spirit of adventure and the hardships of war building strong and respectable men. If another Great War occurred, a war of love and meaning, you could sell my things and burn a candle. World War I was not defunct of less than perfect reasons for its breakout and undertaking, but it was of war of love at its beating, bleeding heart. F. Scott Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896 — December 21, 1940) explains it in Tender is the Night (1934).
“…This western-front business couldn’t be done again, not for a long time. The young men think they could do it but they couldn’t. They could fight the first Marne again but not this. This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation that existed between the classes. The Russians and Italians weren’t any good on this front. You had to have a whole-souled sentimental equipment going back further than you could remember. You had to remember Christmas, and postcards of the Crown Prince and his fiancée, and little cafés in Valence and beer gardens in Unter den Linden and weddings at the mairie, and going to the Derby, and your grandfather’s whiskers.”
“General Grant invented this kind of battle at Petersburg in sixty- five.”
“No, he didn’t — he just invented mass butchery. This kind of battle was invented by Lewis Carroll and Jules Verne and whoever wrote Undine, and country deacons bowling and marraines in Marseilles and girls seduced in the back lanes of Wurtemburg and Westphalia. Why, this was a love battle — there was a century of middle-class love spent here. This was the last love battle.”
Look at how romantic it is. What modern war compares to this? What love is bestowed except that from the pockets of lofted bureaucrats and politicians or the defense industry? Perhaps in their own worlds, the opfor fighters of today’s middle eastern conflicts wage their war from their own place of love, no matter how reflexively vile or hateful it’s foundation may be. But where I am concerned, where we are concerned, as American citizens, there is no love in these wars. They are manufactured like cars and toys and computers and we all bleed a fake and postured blood when someone is swallowed in its gullet.
Who loves? Who loves death and destruction to pad a corporate pocket? Who loves Banana Wars? Who loves Haliburton and Colt and Honeywell and everyone else that builds the inanimate that renders others the same? Who loves the interest of American reach and imperialism but in the guise of humanitarianism, and reaps the benefits when a foreign country is in shambles rather than free?
There is no glory. There is corporate profit. There is no national honor. There is foreign interests. There is no humility. There is cold slaughter. There is no love. There is apathy.
What I ultimately found was that there is no war to die in where any of the virtues extolled apply. The human nature of it has been gutted, and in place of its warm entrails is the cold moves and games played by players who’s worlds dwarf any of ours.
I still want to die in a war in some way. No war is worth dying in, I’ve concluded, unless it is a war that you make for yourself. You gotta cook from scratch, off the shelf doesn’t cut it.
