Posted on 06/26/2006 6:16:17 PM PDT by Natty Bumppo@frontier.net
To the sophisticated post-modern ear, General William Tecumseh Sherman’s famous formulation sounds cynical, too dry and concise, an ironic understatement. But there is no evidence that Sherman intended to be funny. In fact, it was part of a plea to graduating military cadets in 1880, that they should not hope for war, but only engage in it when absolutely necessary. As he said on that afternoon, “You don’t know the horrible aspects of war. I’ve been through two wars and I know. ... I tell you, war is hell!” Sherman was a man who knew both war and hell.
There is ample evidence of what an educated 19th Century man would envision as hell. The paintings of that era depicting the Final Judgment are pornographically explicit. The famous New England theologian and preacher, Jonathan Edwards said of hell that God “holds you over the pit … much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect… There will be no end to this exquisite horrible misery.”
In that earlier age, heaven and hell were considered by most to be actual places and not mere concepts. Thus, when Sherman proclaimed that war is hell, he was not making a poetic comparison, nor advancing a metaphor. He did not say “war is like hell” or “war is hell on earth.” He said “War is hell.” Real hell.
At that time, many Americans had seen war first-hand, and most had felt its effects. One in every ten American boys and men fought in our Civil War, and one in every four of those soldiers was slain – almost a million of them, a staggering 3% of our total population. Rare was the family that escaped untouched by death, maiming, or destruction. After only three days in Gettysburg the fields were littered with enough torn bodies to fill a modern sports arena.
They knew war, and they knew hell in those years, but how the times have changed …
In Iraq, after almost an equal amount of time as our Civil War, fewer than 3,000 soldiers have died, coming from a military force that represents barely 1% of the our population – a national casualty rate measured in fractions of a percent. Few Americans, therefore, know the face of war, and the minority that does is largely made up of military personnel. Few Americans even know someone who has been to this war or any war.
At the same time, it appears that very few Americans believe in heaven or hell anymore, and in the ranks of the disbelievers, it has become increasingly vogue to assume all the worlds evils are of our own making. We know neither war nor hell, and it explains a lot about why we don’t seem to understand what is happening around the world. It is within this breathtakingly shallow intellectual context that we find ourselves embroiled in a war, and trying to come to terms with the terrible things that happen during wars.
In Iraq, many have died, some have died needlessly, some brutally, and all tragically. But while American Marines await trial for alleged war crimes, our enemies routinely engage in atrocity, dismembering, beheading, and targeting civilians. While we are careful to remove from our ranks those “rough men” who have gone too far while there in hell, we remain confronted by an enemy who recognizes no bounds. In short, we refuse to come to terms with the hellishness of this war.
Instead, supposedly hardened combat veterans like Jack Murtha chant for the U. S. to to fight the insurgency from 6,000 miles away; posturing pretty-boy pols like John Kerry propose we pull-out on some arbitrary schedule; and the media toils away at trying to undermine both our troops and our tactics by routinely declaring everything we do as too extreme, and everything they do as unremarkable. The truth is precisely the opposite: our own transgressions are rare, the transgressions of the insurgency are legion. That is, in part, why it is necessary for us to succeed.
Here is the part that Jack Murtha, John Kerry, Cindy Sheehan, Tim Robbins, the New York Times and others don’t want you to know: war is hell, and hell exists. People die, and bad things happen. But wars are won by nations that do not flinch when the enemy raises the ante, and Americans almost never lose, except for when we lose our nerve. Freedom is, not surprisingly, not free. War is stomach-turning, soul-searing, body-rupturing hell, but our enemies rarely give us any other choice.
The trouble is, our enemies in this war know that war is hell. They’re simply counting on us to have forgotten. From the looks of things, they may be succeeding.
David J. Aland is a retired Naval Officer with a graduate degree in National Security Affairs from the U. S. Naval War College.
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Dead,
I am not the author. I am a classmate of the author from the Naval Academy. I have had the privilege of working with Dave on active duty and after we both retired from the Navy.
It is nice to know that a few people are awake. Thanks.
This is good and it's now on it's way to the sandbox.
Excellent read...excluding Shermy...
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