No Matter How Waged, War Is Hell

Hayden Hollingsworth
Hayden Hollingsworth

General Sherman got that right in his description of war. While the strategy and tactics have changed radically, even in the last few years, the horror of combat and its results have only intensified.

In Sherman’s march to the Savannah after the burning of Atlanta, the devastation of property and the loss of combatant’s lives were horrendous but the carnage was largely limited to the troops. My grandfather, born just outside Atlanta in 1856, told me of the terrible struggle for survival after the war and the hiding from the union forces. His father had gone off to war in 1862 and died in the Battle of the Wilderness. Some years ago, I accidentally discovered his grave in the Confederate Cemetery in Lynchburg. In visiting any military cemetery one cannot help but reflect on the families altered forever by those silent graves.

Wars have been waged since the beginning of time and there will always be conflict. It most commonly revolves about resources, geography, and religion. The latter reason has not figured prominently in our history until the last decades. Never has religion been so polarizing as it is today with the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.

We’re not even sure what to call it: ISIS IS, or ISIL, standing for Levant, which includes all the Middle Eastern countries east of Greece. One thing we do know: they are violent and radical beyond any reasoning but there is precedent in history.

Twelve hundred years ago Christendom was caught up in a similar tide of blood that lasted through The Crusades, six of them. The avowed purpose was to wipe out Muslims and Jews; the Christians nearly succeeded in a period of four centuries about which we don’t hear much said in churches today.

During all of our international wars up to Viet Nam we had a clearly defined enemy. There were nations with borders, troops easily identified as adversaries. Now things are quite murky; who we were fighting and how did we find them in the jungles of Southeast Asia radically altered warfare. Even the major architect, Robert McNamara, admitted that we were wrong on many of our goals and assumptions.

The last war fought with traditional strategy and tactics was Desert Storm. Since then we have fought the Iraqis, the Afghans, al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and ill-defined terrorists over the atrocities of 9/11. We live in fear that we will be revisited by such horror again. Now we have a group of radical terrorists who every sane nation agrees cannot be allowed to succeed.

To even identify the true enemy is very difficult; they blend in with a peaceful population who then become the casualties. To find and destroy the ISIS will be even harder. Saddest of all are the millions of innocent civilians caught in the midst of the terror. In previous wars, noncombatants were killed, but usually not indiscriminately; Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki were horrible exceptions to that. In today’s conflict women and children are daily victims, often at the hands of their own neighbors.

We have drones to do the killing. From the reaches deep in the western United States, these weapons are dispatched on the other side of the world. Who can predict who, other than the terrorists, will die without warning when the missile strikes?

The President has been criticized for lack of a strategy and perhaps with good reason. It would behoove us, however, to remember that haste in rising to the rhetoric of Vietnam, of the understandable hysteria over nonexistent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq have set the stage for a war without a front, a war of religion led by radicals as misguided as the Christians of the Crusades, with little hope for reasonable resolution, and that millions will enter a period of suffering that certainly may not spare the United States.

Now there is much media blather about whether this is a war or not. Certainly, for those caught in the military maelstrom the quibbling over definitions is beyond ridiculous. The Crusades lasted 300 hundred years. To expect a quick resolution to the current horrors certainly will not happen.

– Hayden Hollingsworth

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