"WHAT? WAR IS HELL?"

Just last week, the people over at National Review Online were bantering about whether George Orwell said,

"People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."

It’s still up for debate if he said it or not, but the general consensus was that even if he didn’t, it’s still true. CS Lewis was quoted as saying,

“It is a brutal truth about the world that the whole everlasting business of keeping the human race protected and clothed and fed could not go on for twenty-four hours without the vast legion of hard-bitten, technically efficient, not-over-sympathetic men, and without the harsh processes of discipline by which this legion is made.”

Again, completely true and relevant to today’s column by Bob Herbert in the New York Times. In it, he tells the story of Staff Sgt. Camilo Mejia, a member of the Florida National Guard who is refusing to return to Iraq now that his furlough is up. Herbert doesn’t really care about Mejia, he’s using the story to tell how what terrible things we are doing in Iraq.

“He led an infantry squad and saw plenty of action. But the more he thought about the war — including the slaughter of Iraqi civilians, the mistreatment of prisoners (which he personally witnessed), the killing of children, the cruel deaths of American G.I.'s (some of whom are the targets of bounty hunters in search of a reported $2,000 per head), the ineptitude of inexperienced, glory-hunting military officers who at times are needlessly putting U.S. troops in even greater danger, and the growing rage among coalition troops against all Iraqis (known derisively as "hajis," the way the Vietnamese were known as "gooks")…”

“He spoke about a friend of his, a sniper, who he said had shot a child about 10 years old who was carrying an automatic weapon. "He realized it was a kid," said Sergeant Mejia. "The kid tried to get up. He shot him again."

The child died.”

All terrible things, but that’s what war is – terrible. Herbert seems to feel that war should really clean and maybe no killing, like a game of Risk or chess. Does he have no comprehension that war is very messy, that it is a nightmare and that people get killed? Herbert either is a fifty-nine year old ignoramus (a very real possibility) or a liar, who feigns shock, shock! that people get killed in war. I tend to believe the latter because of the wording of the column, (“slaughter of Iraqi civilians”, “glory-hunting officers”, etc), all showing an anti-liberation bias, oh, so common in the liberal press today.