A New War With Echoes of Old Sorrow – Alan Cowell
My favorite War Poem is Alan Seeger’s Rendezvous With Death, which is kind of like saying your favorite Beatles song is Hey Jude. The first time I ever heard it read gave me chills; reading it myself later did nothing to banish them.
The poets of World War I left for a war planned to be over by Christmas; those who managed to survive in the trenches were quickly disillusioned. It was another war of ‘fight them there so you don’t have to here’ – or at the least protect the free from the Huns. The same motto is repeated today, but its not the same concept. As the America nation-state grows up…there is nobody who is fighting us conventionally in the next 15 years, meaning true nation-state war is not top priority. I just finished an article I had saved from a few years back, Learning About Counterinsurgency by Lt. General Sir John Kiszely, which discussed the relative educational empowerment of those junior officers, to be able to fight an insurgency which decries the warrior ethos because the soldier can’t hate his or her enemy.
It’s almost a full circle. The JOs and civilians bear a lot of the brunt, but they are also learning more through their own experience and through the study of theory and history. Leaves me to wonder about how educated JOs are compared to civil society.
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