As I type, I am listening to the roll call from the Fort Hood memorial service.  Ironically enough, I was running all over town at the noon hour getting a veterans’ day tribute poster printed for our company lunch room, so I was really late going to lunch; this delay landed me in the lunch room during President Obama’s moving speech honoring the Ft. Hood dead.

I realized as I listened to him name off the victims that I am deeply conflicted in my feelings towards the military.  On the one hand, I had to choke back tears as he listed all the promising young people – many leaving small children behind – who were senselessly killed.  On the other hand, I could not help but think of my cousin, who lost his wife in the Oklahoma post office shooting.  Sure, people were sympathetic, and there was news coverage, but the outpouring of support was nothing like that these service people are getting.  Was my cousin’s wife’s victimization – the same type of death by gunshot at the hands of a mass-killing crazy – any less dreadful?   Why is this so different?   It’s not like it was a military attack on a US installation.

Our military occupies a special place in our society.  Most of us who are not in the military couldn’t begin to fathom how or why they bring themselves to enlist in the first place.  Many of us think that killing, even in the name of peace, is horribly wrong.  Others of us simply couldn’t imagine voluntarily placing oneself in harm’s way for the pittance of a salary that our service members are paid.  Nevertheless, despite whatever personal misgivings we may have about the way our government uses them, or about the personal choices they make when they join, we almost universally respect, honor and love these men and women.

One of my friends is a Marine wife.  Her spouse was injured – not seriously, but seriously enough to keep him from deployment to Iraq – and I was so happy for her.  I expressed my feelings, letting her know how glad I was that her husband wouldn’t be in harm’s way.  Her incredulous response:  “You’re GLAD my husband’s career is destroyed?”  Rather than celebrate his continued safety here on American soil with her and their three daughters, she was mourning his loss in not being able to be in the field doing his job with his comrades in arms.  I could never, ever in a million years be that unselfish. 

I’ve said many times that if our son talks about enlisting, I’ll tie him to a chair until his craziness passes rather than let him go.   I know that’s not what I’d do though.  Rather, like another friend of mine whose nineteen year old son (who had never before left his small West TX town before enlisting) deployed to Afghanistan last month, I would find some way to cope.  She is coping by distributing care packages from members of our community to the service men and women in her son’s unit.  As the President read the listing of shooting victims I said a silent prayer of thanks that this one young man was not on the list.  It will kill his mom if he gets killed.  I know it in my soul.  Watching her live with the torture of his decision to enlist, followed almost immediately by witness of her pained, resigned acceptance of his deployment is almost like watching a plane crash in slow motion.  Even if he comes back unscathed except for painful experience, it will have been agonizing for her and for his father.

One thinks of agony when thinking of military service, sacrifice and tradition, but the words honor and glory always come up too.  It may partly be that mythos of honor through combat, memorialized in our traditions from the earliest Greek, Spartan and Roman mythology, Bible stories of Hebraic kings triumphant and legends of knights’ derring-do that tempts people into service.  When assembling the photo collage for our poster this morning, I couldn’t help but note the shining pride on the then-much-younger faces of my co-workers.  They were living history, not reading it.  They were in the game, and they knew it. 

I know that’s part of what lured my very young uncle to enlist at the beginning of the US involvement in WW II.  He had been raised on stories of war – his great-grandpa in the Civil War as a drummer boy, his crazy Uncle Charlie in WWI.  After WWII, my uncle continued in the military.  He served as a medic in Korea and in Vietnam.   Once of my earliest memories is of my mother watching combat footage of Vietnam on TV, scanning for any sight of her beloved older brother.  He came home from that war, mostly.  My aunt says he was never the same again – the nightmares and the stress after Vietnam were different she said, much worse than that of WWII or Korea. 

This Veterans’ Day is the first time I’ve thought through any of this.  I wish our society was less militaristic.  I think that the military-industrial complex is a real thing, sucking the money and life out of our nation when it’s not necessary.  The wars in Iraq and increasingly in Afghanistan seem to me to be quagmires we should rapidly extricate ourselves from, no matter how you feel about the “rightness” of using war to enforce the nation’s will in international situations. 

I also fear that I wouldn’t be able to be a real pacifist; in the face of terrible tyranny like that displayed by a Hitler, I would likely be as apt to support force as anyone.  That’s my conflict with honoring the military too much, with showing strong nationalism or over-the-top patriotism.  Though I oppose much of what US military forces are sent to do, I recognize that we must have a fighting force for those very rare occasions when even a semi-pacifist like me can see that might is right.  It’s as if, as a nation, we are forcing this group of people to do something that we know is morally wrong – kill others on our behalf - but that we know we need to do if we intend to hold onto power, position and our place in the world.