Opinion/Editorial
WHEN JOHNNY COMES MARCHING HOME
The merciless theatres in fields of combat, dangers inherent among teenage warriors carrying loaded automatic weapons, wearing too much gear, alternatingly sweating and freezing, is a place unknowable and indescribable to social beings born and reared in the quiet collective cultures of the United States of America. Conditioned warriors come home, afraid of parked cars, women wearing scarves and black pajamas, and even combat-costumed police face this wall of ignorance inability to comprehend who and what these people were before they went, what happened to them, and what they are having to put up with as they’ve returned to be among us.
And they are not all the same. They served in a million battles of action and mind, and almost none of those battles were the same. They have no ‘Normandy’ compass to guide them among fellow veterans or the public in general. They fought their times of hardship in hot sands, stone caves, and brutal jungles…referred to as the Forever Wars. The wars were forgotten as they continued, once prominent in all newscasts but now only pulled dusty from our collective attic when something huge occurs, like the killing of Osama or the botched debacle of the Afghanistan withdrawal.
These veterans return to us and circulate, unable to join the Veterans of Foreign Wars or the American Legion, where mostly unaccepting and unkind veterans (almost one and all non-combat vets) from the nation’s ‘real’ wars enjoy cheap drinks and tell stories these new warriors can only listen to while quietly and calmly shaking their heads over.
Our Forever War veterans have returned home without stories because a story has to have a beginning, middle, and end…and for these kids, there is almost none of that.
A road was traversed. An I.E.D. was exploded, wounds killing some and injuring others.
And they moved on, to wait for another such event, cooped up inside bunkers made from spent cargo containers waiting to venture forth again among an anti-social citizenry so foreign it gives almost no resemblance to anything of human construct.
So, our warriors come back to attempt to fit in, live, and work among us. To have lives like those they left behind. To be treated like they were. But that is not happening across the length and breadth of this land. These new warriors are feared, as the Vietnam combat vets were feared. Symbolized by David Morrell in his ‘First Blood’ novel, introducing our culture to Rambo. Most non-veterans came to believe Rambo epitomized surviving combatants of that war. Mr. Morrell did not go to Vietnam, and his work reflects his ignorance of the subject. Knowing the kind author named David Morrell, demonstrated, after deep discussion, that he understood nothing about guerrilla conflicts or their effect upon human psychology when he wrote the book. But Rambo stays with us, his nature burned into the national understanding of these returned combat warriors, portraying most of them as being ready to explode like an atom bomb if somehow treated the wrong way. And what the ‘wrong way’ is nobody can describe or predict. That this is a misunderstanding as portrayed by an author, and the as Hollywood team, which had no idea what they were doing has become beside the point.
Our combat veterans of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan have come home in small numbers, one by one, and they are still coming home to every part of the loosely knitted fabric of this culture after the years and wars have passed into history. A debt is owed to them and the repayment must be made with great effort on our part. We must try to understand what has happened to them and then accommodate the deviant changes forced upon them. We cannot do that by portraying them as ‘heroes’ and then consigning them to minimum-wage jobs where their decision-making or emotional state will minimize any damage, we feel they may do. They are not afraid of us. They are afraid of things we cannot comprehend even when accurately described. We must not allow them to come to believe that we are among those things they must fear. They deserved to come home, and we, the citizenry of the USA, are that home.
The reward we give these people who fought and sacrificed bodies and body parts, as well as calm collected sleep at night, is to attend veteran’s parades across the country on one day a year. Some old disabled men march with old rifles, some Harley-Davidsons, and a school band or two. Medals are retired with beautiful uniforms to basements while all earned rank is gone like a flash drive pulled from a computer. There are no great high-paying jobs with the respect the culture holds for having them. We are left with a phrase, so many times repeated, that all of us accept with a small, crooked smile: “Thanks for your service.” It’s a tiny gesture but it has to be enough…because there is to me no more…unless another war comes along in time, and they need experienced veterans to go in once more to bleed and die. And we will go if at all able. It’s what we are, as proven the first time we went.
And now, in this time of need again, these real silent, deadly but truly patriotic warriors must be called into action again, as only they will work night and day to deliver us from ‘our temptations’ of the current U.S. leadership team of assembled men and women who resemble nothing more or less than the fools written about just before WWII in a book called “The Ship of Fools.” These non-veterans of combat, like Vance, Hegseth and more, will take whatever veteran’s benefits they can gather in and then pay that money out to the billionaires whom they carp at the feet of. The combat veterans must target well whom the enemy really is this time out. The enemy at home, rising from the dirt, mud, and dust going all the way back to the Civil War. This was to be a time of peace after wars, but no such peace can be enjoyed unless the lying, cheating, and disgusting charlatans are cleared from the hells like Christ cleared them the Pharisees.
Violence is not coming upon us all, it is already here, hidden now but being called forth by an enemy many saw coming but could not believe what they were seeing. Thank God that Johnny has come marching home and there is hope as the population of the USA passes through a veil of contempt, loss, and shame. Off we go into the wild blue yonder, caissons marching along, toward the shores, of Montezuma…bless them all, bless them all, bless them all…the long, the short, and the tall…
