War Is No Video Game.

[GoldenDragon]

Donnie Johnston writes for The Freelance Star in Virginia.


Age-old lesson to younger generation as America fights overseas: War is no video game.
IF ONE SINGLE piece of prose can personify America's per- ception of war it was a letter to the editor in last Sunday's paper from a lady who described the deplorable conditions her soldier husband faced in Afghanistan.

She complained that the men in uniform are not issued bottled water and that "TVs and play stations don't last two months over there due to all the dust."
TVs and play stations! Bottled water! We're talking about war, not a Sunday school picnic! World War II veterans had to laugh their heads off.

This is precisely the problem with America's under-40 population. These people think war is some kind of video game that pauses when the joystick is put down so everyone can take a sip of bottled water.
God help us! War is not a game. It is blood and guts and gore.
War is talking to the soldier next to you one second and having his brains splattered in your face the next.
It is running for your life across the deck of a burning ship and stepping on heads, arms, legs and internal organs all along the way.

War is having diarrhea so bad you sleep on a toilet at a staging area in England for fear you won't find a seat 10 minutes later when you have to go again.
War is landing on the beaches of Normandy and fighting from hedgerow to hedgerow until you get to Berlin. It is not drinking bottled water but drinking from streams that may very well contain the blood of a young man who was in the bunk next to you at basic training.

War is holding your insides in after your belly has been shot open or watching a 4-foot-long stream of blood spurt out from the neck of a mortally wounded comrade.
War is a screaming baby being burned alive after his home has been bombed, or his mother's bloated body lying in the street with a thousand green flies waiting to feast. It is the stench of his father's rotting flesh on some no-name battlefield.
War is having the son you cherished shipped home in pieces the size of a hamburger, the sum total of which would fit in a gallon jug. It is a mother disillusioning herself that the child she loved died for some holy cause when in reality he perished to satisfy some politician's thirst for power.

War is a child never seeing his father, a widow looking at a Purple Heart and trying to remember the touch of a now-dead husband, or a broken-hearted father crying in the night.
At best, war can be called a necessary evil; at worst, it is a destroyer of men and dreams and entire civilizations.

No, I don't like war, because it is a waste. It is a waste of lives and of resources, a curse upon humanity. The only people who like war are fools and undertakers. And undertakers would just as soon find their business elsewhere.
War is not some Civil War re-enactors playing soldier on Saturday afternoon to the delight of a thousand upper-middle-class yuppies out for a historical high. It is death and destruction.
If the re-enactors want to show us what war really is, let them use real bullets and have their limbs sawed off without the benefit of anesthesia.

War is not a show. If you don't believe me, ask the survivors of Dresden or Hiroshima or London. Ask any World War II combat veteran or any GI who fought in the jungles and rice paddies of Vietnam or the freezing cold of Korea.
Americans were horrified by the terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon. Those who lived in London in 1940 will tell you that they lived Sept. 11 day in and day out for months.
The problem with wars is that the politicians who start them sit back in safety while directing others to die. If those who made the high-minded speeches had to dodge the bullets there would be far fewer international confrontations.

As conflicts go, Afghanistan has not been much of a war--at least for Americans. In reality it has been a punitive action by a far superior and much more technologically advanced invading force.
We have lost more men in accidents in Afghanistan than we have in combat. In fact, we killed more civilians at one Afghan wedding than our forces have lost during the entire conflict.
If the worst deprivations our boys face over there is dust on their play stations and the lack of bottled water they'll be damned lucky! The veterans of World War II, Korea and Vietnam will tell you that.

Those who glorify war and would rush headlong into battle may want to talk to some soldier who has been on the front lines.
Wars may sometimes be necessary, but they should always be a last resort and never a first response.
There are millions of unmarked graves all over this world that will attest to the fact that war is indeed hell.

Donnie Johnston