Nocturne at the Farm

The dialogues always visit me in the night. “Who mourns the dead?” “We do.” “And who are you?” “Those who came before. The ones fortunate enough to survive, or lucky enough never to go to war. Soldiers we were, but now, we have questions.”  I listen. 

Decades ago, I heard them in the barracks, in the motor pool, in the hum of the generators. They followed me from the ideals of West Point straight into the B Company, 2nd Platoon command tent in Germany that smelled of stale coffee, diesel, and wet canvas.

Later, there were other Posts, with other jobs. They sometimes murmured in the background.  

 And now? Now, they have followed me to the farm. At night, I hear them argue over the right course, voices cutting through the dark about what is worth what. Vietnam. Grenada. Panama. The Persian Gulf, Iraq, Afghanistan, and now, Iran.

Tactically, we always win. We have the best-trained, best equipped Armed Forces on earth.

Strategically? Not so much. Clausewitz taught us that war is the continuation of politics by other means. Our politicians forgot the second half of the equation: politics requires an objective.

In war, we know some soldiers die.  Others fight and bleed, and then come home and look around to find we’ve accomplished exactly what?

 Now, we are in Iran. Eighteen dead. Or maybe fourteen in actual “war”. The other four? They died during a negotiated pause, so the ledger treated them like administrative errors. They didn’t quite count, until public outrage grew so loud, the Pentagon added them back into the war dead and we are again at eighteen.

 “Soldiers we were, but now we have questions.”

I call out to them in the dark at the farm, “What do you want of me?”

“Accountability.”

Cathy and our dog Carmen, unaware of their spectral presence, sleep. I toss and turn in our bed, waiting for daylight. 

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Addendum:

• Thanks to West Point Classmate Gus Hellzen and old friend Mark Dunavan for their suggestions and thoughts on this blog. 
• Interestingly, on the day I first drafted this blog, it troubled me that night while sleeping. Phrases, words, and suggestions flowed through my mind  clamoring for attention.  Eventually, I got up around 5AM and after making coffee, worked in three or four ideas from my restless night.
• I created the header drawing working with Google Gemini. I probably made ten or fifteen iterations before refining it to this one. 
• I left out Bosnia and Kosovo from the list of conflicts.  From a mission perspective, they were largely peacekeeping or humanitarian aid efforts, although soldiers both died and suffered there. Those soldiers are just as dead, or wounded, or suffering from PTSD as the soldiers in the other conflicts.