Here are my parents in 1943, just before my dad headed back to sea. He came home with a Purple Heart, after mortar fire killed men standing on either side of him. My dad never, never talked about the war.
I honor people who risk their lives in war–and I grieve for the people who lose their lives in war. But I don’t like the way war’s risk has been changed for our leaders by high-tech weapons and our “volunteer” army of working-class kids whose only hope for a decent job or college tuition was military service.
The day after Pearl Harbor, my father dropped out of law school and joined the Navy. He wanted to defend his country–that goal was worth risking his life for. That’s still my idea of what a “just war” means–a war where you try to kill somebody else in defense of a cause that you would willingly die for. A harder test of justice is whether you would send your children to fight for the cause.
Can you picture Bush sending his twins to risk their lives because Iraq might have weapons of mass destruction? Would you send your kids to battle in Iraq because Saddam Hussein was an evil guy whose minions tortured people? If so, your opportunity may still come–many other nations around the globe meet both criteria.