Children: The New "Fog of War"

"What “the fog of war” means is: war is so complex it’s beyond the ability of the human mind to comprehend all the variables. Our judgment, our understanding, are not adequate. And we kill people unnecessarily. Wilson said: “We won the war to end all wars.” I’m not so naive or simplistic to believe we can eliminate war. We’re not going to change human nature anytime soon. It isn’t that we aren't rational. We are rational. But reason has limits."

-- Robert McNamara (1916-2009), former U.S. Secretary of Defense

I read several articles preparing for this post, confirming much of what I already knew, prior to putting pen to paper.  One of the most important points that still is relevant today:  The media wasn't reporting everything to the American people during the Vietnam conflict, either.  There are so many current articles still out there denying the "baby killer" mantra that met most returning service men.  They play up the fact that being spit on by protesters was infrequent and the death of innocents was collateral damage; little, if any of it, was ever reported in the news, therefore it must be urban legend.  Bullshit.  

Back in the late 1960s, prior to joining the Air Force in order to avoid the draft, I participated in several marches with the Vietnam Veterans Against the War.  For me this was my first encounter with what would become known as PTSD, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.  Vietnam was a horrific war but, then, aren't they all?  Unlike Korea and the wars that went before, Vietnam was the first of the "undeclared" wars for America.  It was never declared a war by Congress, nor was it sanctioned by the United Nations, and was also in violation of Geneva agreements and UN charters.  I marched because I felt America was better than this, not because I was a coward any more than the men I marched with were.  They had been there.  They had seen the new face of "war."

This was a war of suicide bombers and innocent children carrying grenades, of backwater village women armed to the teeth and smiling sweetly to the American soldier before machine gunning them to death.  This was jungle guerilla warfare against an ideologically driven, well-trained fourth world country being well-armed and supplied by their neighbor to the north, China, and by extension, the Soviet Union.  This was a war soldiers of the day were ill-prepared to fight, but they did, as big business and politics dragged it on for years.  Like the Soviets found out in Afghanistan, years later, as we were supplying their opposition, some battles should either be won by overwhelming force or just left alone.  We used this overwhelming force to great advantage by securing a victory in less than a week in Iraq, before the politicians got involved, and then we had to go back and do it again... and again?

Since the end of Vietnam, this new world we live in is a world of criminally driven rebels, drugs, piracy, jihad, and dictators.  Where war was once a battle of military men with some sense of morality and ethics fighting each other over territory and a concrete cause the rest of the world could understand.  The only time this morality was muddy was when politicians became involved; the military always tried to do the right thing against overwhelming odds, and win.  Now the enemy force is even more corrupt and immoral than their insane leadership.  Africa has been embroiled in conflict after conflict for years as tyrant after tyrant try to oust the current tyrannical regime.  African village children become the cheap, moldable, renewable, weapon of choice for their immorality and criminally sick desires.  

Back are the suicide bombers, smiling women armed to the teeth, and babies carrying weapons of destruction.  In Vietnam young people carrying a weapon were either too young to understand the consequences, or were part of a larger force.  Today, as was seen in Cambodia in the 1970s, children are being indoctrinated at a young age to preach the heretical party line and die for Allah in an interpretation of Islam that approves of killing women and children for the greater glory of some insane, sociopathic lunacy preached by self-proclaimed leaders of a faith gone so very wrong.  We see the film footage and photos of uniformed children standing in formation or learning how to shoot and kill.  We see Iran convince an entire country it is better to press the nuclear envelope and go up in a radioactive cloud, than to try and live peacefully with the rest of the world, and they use Allah to justify it.

"I must study politics and war, that my sons may have the liberty to study mathematics and philosophy, natural history and naval architecture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, architecture, and porcelain."

-- John Adams (1735-1826), 2nd President of the United States

Once again we find ourselves on the verge of becoming baby killers.  Once again we find ourselves at odds with our morality, our security, and our survival.  When our young men come home with broken souls, will the press report about the people that call them baby killers, oh will they continue to support bad behavior?  Will they report of the armed children in the opposing force, or will they simply show the broken bodies and continue to let the reader draw the wrong conclusions?  Will they report the people spitting on the military members returning home, or will they cheer on the lack of respect shown by those that have not earned the right by sacrificing their very soul?  It is hard to believe that the media of today could actually be worse at reporting facts that it used to be, that the National Inquirer could possibly get more right than a nationally recognized "news" paper.  But, this is the world we have been indoctrinated for years to buy into.  This is the kind of Kool Aid drinking, unquestioning robots they want us all to be.

In this new "war" against terrorism, like all other recent conflicts, patriotic people of faith and morality will find themselves up against innocence twisted to the will of immoral monsters and armed with weapons of death and destruction.  We will, once again, find ourselves killing babies for the sake of survival, and then killing ourselves for the "crimes against humanity" that we found ourselves forced into.  It won't matter that the innocence we were forced to destroy was corrupted by others, our society demands morality.  Our society expects the protection of the innocent and we, for the most part, are taught to do just that.  When you throw a perfectly good transmission into reverse while a car is moving full speed ahead, the transmission is damaged, at times beyond repair - PTSD.

In this new "fog of war" we, as a nation, also find ourselves with new challenges.  We are beset by the enemies at our gate, and the traitors within.  How will the peaceful world, the moral, righteous, and the faithful world, deal with this threat and emerge unscathed?  God help us.

“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear.”

-- Marcus Tullius Cicero (107-44 BC), Roman philosopher, politician, lawyer

Editor's Note:  

Before you go getting your panties in a bunch, it is essential to understand that this is just an opinion site and, as such, can be subjected to scrutiny by anyone with a differing opinion.  It doesn't make either opinion any more right or wrong than the other.  An opinion, presented in this context, is a way of inciting others to think and, hopefully, to form opinions of their own, if they haven't already done so.

It is my fervent hope that we keep open and active minds when reading opinions and then engaging in peaceful, constructive, discussion and debate in an arena of mutual respect concerning the opinions put forth.  After over twenty years as a military intelligence analyst, planner, and briefer, I have come to believe engaging each other in this manner and in this arena is the way we will learn tolerance and respect for differing beliefs, cultures, and viewpoints.

We all fall from grace, some more often than others; it is part of being human.  God's test for us is what we do afterward, and what we learn from the experience.
  

Pastor Frank Anthony Villari

Pastor Tony is founder of the Congregation for Religious Tolerance and author/editor of the Congregation's official blog site, "The Path."