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My family and I watched Doctor Zhivago over the past two nights, and for some reason, it troubled me a great deal more than I expected it to. At some point in the movie, after the obsessive but previously amiable Pasha has transformed into the tyrannical Strelnikov, my sister asked for someone to explain the sides.
We couldn't. There were no sides. There are good and evil people in every group that attempts to take power for itself, and when Alexander Gromeko wonders in his gruff way which "gang of hooligans" will end up running the government, it's at once hilarious and heartbreaking, because it rings so true.
I don't think that war is waged over beliefs or land or even money, as is the most commonly attributed cause. War is waged because humans, somewhere deep within them, are unable to let go. I don't know if I can clarify that--I don't know if it even makes sense. All I know is that the people involved in war--the common soldiers, the ones who, according to romantic notions we have of them, march and go hungry and die--these people do not make up a cohesive front.
I cannot believe, for example, that every man who fought for Germany in World War II was an evil goosestepping sadist. The sort of orchestrated cruelty that spread from Nazism outward through Europe was not planned and executed by footsoldiers. It was, instead, the work of a few select people, people so far above the actual battle lines that they were no more than chess players, moving their supply of pieces across their globes.
Only to the brainwashed or the passionate idealists is war anything more than a large-scale, costly game of Risk.
It's a touchy subject, especially since I live in a country currently at war overseas. We've been through this inner struggle before, however, and learned from it. During our protest of Vietnam, we lumped the conflict and the military as one entity, indivisible one from the other. Over the three decades that have passed since then, we have learned to separate the war from the soldier and thus become able to separate the men and women we love and appreciate from the violence we may or may not support.
I'm a military brat. I've worked with members of the military, made friends with them and with their children, shopped at the Commissary, cheered during inter-departmental volleyball games. I've made photocopies of discharge papers and reenlistment contracts, arranged permanent changes of station, handed military members airplane tickets, waved at every weekly plane from Sicily back to the United States. I know men and women who served with dignity and pride in Afghanistan, Iraq, Liberia, Somalia, and countless other centers of conflict. I know men who lived.
I know men who died.
Every few months, the Washington Post publishes photographs and names of those killed fighting on foreign soil. Each time, I spend heart-stopping minutes poring over the lists, letting out little breaths at each unfamiliar name.
War, for me, has been reduced to this: impersonal newspaper columns and tiny sighs of relief.
We couldn't. There were no sides. There are good and evil people in every group that attempts to take power for itself, and when Alexander Gromeko wonders in his gruff way which "gang of hooligans" will end up running the government, it's at once hilarious and heartbreaking, because it rings so true.
I don't think that war is waged over beliefs or land or even money, as is the most commonly attributed cause. War is waged because humans, somewhere deep within them, are unable to let go. I don't know if I can clarify that--I don't know if it even makes sense. All I know is that the people involved in war--the common soldiers, the ones who, according to romantic notions we have of them, march and go hungry and die--these people do not make up a cohesive front.
I cannot believe, for example, that every man who fought for Germany in World War II was an evil goosestepping sadist. The sort of orchestrated cruelty that spread from Nazism outward through Europe was not planned and executed by footsoldiers. It was, instead, the work of a few select people, people so far above the actual battle lines that they were no more than chess players, moving their supply of pieces across their globes.
Only to the brainwashed or the passionate idealists is war anything more than a large-scale, costly game of Risk.
It's a touchy subject, especially since I live in a country currently at war overseas. We've been through this inner struggle before, however, and learned from it. During our protest of Vietnam, we lumped the conflict and the military as one entity, indivisible one from the other. Over the three decades that have passed since then, we have learned to separate the war from the soldier and thus become able to separate the men and women we love and appreciate from the violence we may or may not support.
I'm a military brat. I've worked with members of the military, made friends with them and with their children, shopped at the Commissary, cheered during inter-departmental volleyball games. I've made photocopies of discharge papers and reenlistment contracts, arranged permanent changes of station, handed military members airplane tickets, waved at every weekly plane from Sicily back to the United States. I know men and women who served with dignity and pride in Afghanistan, Iraq, Liberia, Somalia, and countless other centers of conflict. I know men who lived.
I know men who died.
Every few months, the Washington Post publishes photographs and names of those killed fighting on foreign soil. Each time, I spend heart-stopping minutes poring over the lists, letting out little breaths at each unfamiliar name.
War, for me, has been reduced to this: impersonal newspaper columns and tiny sighs of relief.
