#477: D-Day Reflections

A tough question for 21^st century Catholics.

On this 75th anniversary of the landings at Normandy, I am reflecting on comments made by a reader following my last CrossCurrents posting, about the fire at the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, which also included my comments about Armistice day as it has been observed in Europe,  and my dissatisfaction with the way the date is observed in the United States.  In response I got this comment:

“Would that WWI had truly been the "war to end all wars." Each year, I, too, recognize the historic moment, 11-11-11, and would much prefer that world peace had prevailed since then.

At the same time, I believe that those brave souls who "visited" France on 6-6-44, via the beaches at Normandy, or who parachuted onto French soil behind enemy lines  deserve our respect for their service, not necessarily "praise as warriors." If not for their selfless courage, might not Hitler and his Nazis have had their way....and what then, of Notre Dame Cathedral?”

For me this comment raises an important question: how should we, as Catholics and Christians, regard those who have served in the military?  The question is important because the answer is complex and reveals a contrast between Christian identity and national identity.

My own reflections are personal because they are rooted in both my faith in my family.  My father and five of his brothers served in WWII.  A sixth brother served in Korea, and a seventh - - the youngest--died during active service in the US marines.  Their only sister was also married to a WWII veteran.

Do I recognize that many serving in WWII sacrificed a great deal, and even life itself, for their country?  Yes, of course!  But then the matter is more complex than that.

In my previous blog I mentioned attending Armistice Day services in Paris when I was a student.  On November 11, 2010 I also attended services in Chartres, as part of a reunion group.  We arrived on the train and immediately, next to the station, we came across found a small ceremony at a WWI memorial.  Some texts were read, a wreath was laid, and then one man - - an elderly war veteran--stepped forward and spoke.  He said this day mattered to remind us that the men who died in WWI could only be honored if we commit to ending war.  He said their sacrifice proved, as he too had learned in combat, that “the barbarism of war is an unacceptable way to resolve conflict.” He implored all of us to take that message with us.

I have not often heard an American veteran deliver this kind of speech on Veterans Day.  And it seemed to me that his point was worth repeating: those who die in any war die in vain unless we overcome war itself.  If not, their sacrifice only brings us brief respite before the next war begins.  I say “brief,” since the U.S. has not had a generation without war in more than 120 years. 

I suspect that French veteran would recognize that sometimes war is a necessary evil. This acknowledges, just like the Catholic “just war theory,” that war is always evil, but sometimes unavoidable. Yet since WWII, our nation has engaged in many “wars of choice”—conflicts engaged, not in self-defense (although that has usually been the pretext) but to serve other men’s goals.

And the just war theory also demands that, even when war is unavoidable, its conduct must also meet certain moral standards.  We often think of World War Two as “the good war,” but of course the reality was more complex than that.

Did the men who landed on Omaha Beach display uncommon courage and sacrifice?  Yes--but we must recall that not all who served in WWII were on the beaches of Normandy. 

In any war, those who serve have missions—and we should never confuse their service or their sacrifice with the mission they perform. The men on the Normandy Beaches were sent to fight a well-armed and fortified occupying army that had invaded France. But not all in WWII had such honorable missions. Some who served were sent to firebomb Dresden, killing tens of thousands of terrified civilians. Some were sent to firebomb Tokyo, killing even more civilians. Some were sent to drop the A-Bomb on Hiroshima, and others were sent to drop it on Nagasaki. More than 100,000 civilians were killed in minutes, and countless more died over the following years. All soldiers serve their country, but not all missions are equal.

During one parish meeting after 9/11 an older man approached me during the break. He had served on an unnamed Pacific island in WWII. When it was time for his company to move out, the commander gathered all the prisoners of war they were holding and ordered this man and his mates to shoot them. And this man and his mates shot them. All of them. All dead. In cold blood. By 2001 this man, now in his 80s, had long realized his guilt would haunt him to his grave.

Yet we like to think of World War Two as the “good war.” If that is our idea of good, then the realities about Korea, and Vietnam, and Iraq, and Afghanistan are even more morally fraught.

Those who serve in the military serve policies made by other men, usually older men (and now sometimes women).  They must obey orders that come from others.  Some soldiers may kill, or be killed, in ways we can justify. Others end up committing crimes against humanity.

Whatever the case, the soldiers have this in common: they are cogs in the machine of war. They do what others want—and often those others want evil things.  Even many who survive never really recover. My WWII parishioner never did, and two of my family members suffered permanently from Vietnam. Many veterans now with PTSD suffer pain that is mainly, not physical or psychological, but moral.

So while I recognize we can honor the sacrifice of those who served in the military, for me that honoring is always with a remorseful, even mournful spirit.  For me, this is never a matter for marching bands, cheering, applause, and flyovers. “Taps” for the deceased and a silent salute for the survivors seem better to me.

Recognizing the sacrifices of D-Day is perfectly reasonable, especially on the 75^th anniversary of the landings.  But we dishonor the heroes of that day if we pretend that all other soldiers were equally courageous, that all others performed with equal honor, or even that all others were heroes. 

One of the tragedies of our time is that thousands of Americans have died or been maimed or traumatized while serving their country under the pretense that they were protecting our freedom when in fact, in a case like the invasion of Iraq, no threat to our freedom even existed.

Such people served their country, often at great cost, and they deserve our respect. But if we pretend that we benefited from their service, if we pretend they protected us from some phony evil, if we pretend that those who died did not die in vain, then we blind ourselves to the reality that if war is sometimes a necessary evil, more often it is an unnecessary evil.  Victory does not justify such deaths; in the long run, the real enemy is war itself. 

This was the lesson of the original Armistice Day. World War One ended on “The 11^th hour of the 11^th day of the 11^th month” in 1918 because Maréchal Ferdinand Foch, the Supreme Allied Commander, chose the feast of Saint Martin of Tours, a soldier who resigned to become the patron saint of the poor and of peace.  His feast is about repenting wars, not praising its heroics.

It is right and just that we honor the soldiers who fought on D-Day, and especially good if we do it by memorializing their sacrifice with gratitude but also with remorse that their sacrifice was ever necessary. But we also mourn the sacrifice of those many soldiers serving in “wars of choice,” whose sacrifice was never necessary.

We Catholics are taught to hate the sin, but love the sinner. So even as we honor these people, we hate what they were made to do in our name.

© Bernard F. Swain PhD 2019

#362: One Dark Night

The horrific midnight massacre in Aurora, Colorado confronts us first of all with the mystery of human evil. But it also challenges us to reflect on how violence has pervaded our culture--and even our leisure. Amid renewed calls for tighter gun controls come reports of death threats to critics making negative comments about the new Batman movie, even while the alleged killer portrayed himself as the Joker. Are we seeing something new: violence as play?

Actually, I suspect that violence has always overlapped with play, fantasy, and make believe. After all, western culture inherits a classic literature has always been shot through with violence. We cannot say Oedipal, or Achilles tendon, or Trojan horse, or Pyrrhic victory without evoking ancient images of assault, death, and treachery. Do we imagine that children in the ancient world never pretended to be the violent heroes of their epic tales?

I’m assuming, of course, that human nature was more or less unchanged by the time my peers and I donned fake armor and wielded plastic swords, or shot cap guns or air rifles or toy bows while impersonating soldiers, knights, cowboys or Indians. Over the years my own alter egos included Sir Lancelot, GI Joe, Zorro, Hopalong Cassidy - -all were on the side of good, but all were heavily armed, and all imposed their will by violence.

Such violent make-believe was reinforced by toy armies (from lead crusaders to plastic bazookamen), by cartoons and by comic books. Some of these simply portrayed the violence-without-consequences typical of Looney Tunes characters, but others showed real menace and super-heroic violence: Superman, Batman, Green Lantern, and others.

In all such make-believe, my peers and I assumed we were watching or acting out fictional events—yet the context was the real world: medieval Europe, World War II or Korea, the far west, or a modern Metropolis or Gotham. And we knew such recourse to violence was typical of the real world as well.

That’s why my father sometimes drew the line with violent movies and barred me from viewing films like “Sahara” or “Purple Hearts” or even TV shows like “Dick Tracy” on the grounds that they were “too real.”

But the days are long gone when kids can be easily isolated from such violence. Cable TV and DVDs and the Internet combined with computer generated special effects and massive advertising and products spinoffs to ensure that young people’s lives are awash in fictional villains and heroes of every violent stripe.

Nor do kids have a merely passive role. Video games have “matured” dramatically since “Super Mario” days, and now kids (of all ages) can rent or buy or download or stream games that echo their favorite violent movies, or fictional accounts of terror attacks, or even scenes from real-war situations in Iraq or Afghanistan. For some youth, such violence-saturated games are their chief recreation. And they all allow the player to participate in the carnage by killing at will with a click of a button. The active destruction on the screen takes a little effort and entails few if any consequences.

Historically, by contrast, real violence generally required physical effort (often grueling and painful) and entailed genuine risk (while killing, one might be killed). So real violence occupied a different plane of reality from play violence. In young people’s minds, the two were easily distinguished.

But not anymore.

Because while play combat has been getting more and more like a real combat, real combat has also been getting more like play. The science fiction notion of conducting war by remote control--by robots--has arrived in the form of drone aircraft.

Most people will be surprised that the first drones - -unmanned planes for military use--flew in World War I. But of course Hitler’s V-1 was a drone-like bomber: it flew like a plane with wings but lacked any remote control, and simply crashed and exploded when it ran out of fuel.

By the Vietnam War, drones were still crude and more vulnerable than piloted planes to being shot down, but they offered a decisive advantage: they did not risk American lives. By war’s end drones flew more than 3000 missions!

Since 9/11 drones have made dramatic advances, and if the Bush administration made drones a key player in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Obama Administration has made them the dominant weapon in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere.

The temptation to rely on drones is obvious. Militarily, they’re now capable of pinpointing targets small as a truck or even an individual. And drones cancel out the major downside of manned aircraft: what was once the highest-risk of all military tasks was now a “no-risk” proposition: whenever drones fly, US servicemen remain safely back on base.

But those drones are not flying blind. They are guided by military technicians. They guide the drone on its assigned route, spot the intended target, launch their attack, and bring the drone home--all while sitting at digital screens before images not unlike consumer video games. In this sense, conducting war now comes to resemble child’s play.

So if drones preserve the benefits of war while driving down its costs, where is the problem? The problem is not military or economic; it is moral, for two reasons.

First, by making war so easy, so painless, so risk-free, drones are making the moral costs of war invisible. People may argue, for example, whether the use of drones against targets in Pakistan and Yemen is justified. We may argue if the civilian deaths in those attacks should be labeled “collateral damage” or if, instead, they earn Barack Obama (who authorizes each attack) the label “child killer.”

But what is beyond debate is this: the US killing of civilians by drones has been consistently ignored by the general public. Such killing is an indisputable violation of Catholic Just War Theory, yet I am willing to wager all I own that it will never become a major campaign issue in 2012.

Second, as drones threaten to become the future of war, war itself becomes less “real.” For drone warfare is warfare waged by computer, and it makes the violence of war an increasingly “virtual” experience, and thus less “real.” In so doing, it threatens to merge the practice of war with the rest of our “virtual” lives--not only our fictions and fantasies, but the virtual worlds we all now inhabit through smart phones, social networks, streaming videos, and digital games.

Indeed, Boston Globe film critic Ty Burr brilliantly suggested that, whatever the Aurora killer’s motive, his murderous behavior not only carries terrifying echoes of the virtual violence all around us--but also reminds us that we all now hide behind the “mask” of our digital screens, just as the super heroes and villains that have become such a staple of our culture’s contemporary folklore:

It is possible for any of us, of any age or gender, to avoid reality all day in America by keeping our eyes fixed on our screens. They’re on our walls at home and in restaurants, in our living rooms and bedrooms, toted around in our knapsacks, fitting neatly into our hands. The screens sell us many things: video games both benign and ultra-violent, empty “news” about celebrities, Facebook posts from our most intimate 2,864 friends, trailers for the latest Hollywood blockbuster in which men fly through the air and blow up everything bad in their lives. The screens tell us that we matter, each and every one of us. To look away from the screens is to confront a world that says, in most cases, no, you really don’t.…The superhero movies that dominate our box offices are all about mild-mannered secret identities and the power that comes with donning a facial covering. We live each day through digital masks: screen names, online personas, Twitter feeds, Facebook posts, and on and on, each an attempt to show the world the face we want to be, rather than the face we fear we have.

As a kid, I generally could recognize the bad guys in westerns: they wore masks. Today our country kills behind the mask of computerized remote control, and most of us join in protecting our identities online while maintaining “virtual” contact with the world around us.

Then, one dark night, into this world steps a masked man with a gun who reminds us that virtual reality--especially virtual violence--is not real violence at all. And that real violence--like killing by drones--is no less real for happening beyond our digital screens.

©Bernard F. Swain PhD 2012