When a war is wrong!

What is the most awful matter about a war that is wrong? It is asking warriors to kill people who do not deserve to be killed! It is those who kill who must live with the action and not the unfeeling government that sent them into war.
by Charlie Leck

“A nation that sends its young into war has an absolute responsibility to care completely for them when they return from such horror – a responsibility to heal up their physical, psychological and spiritual wounds and to never, ever abandon them – no matter the cost!”

I was among the protesters of the war in Vietnam. I took my stand in 1965. I was impressed with the arguments presented by Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr.. I also had hours of discussion with an ethics professor in the graduate school I attended. I did not lightly take to the streets to protest this outrageous war.

The basic and underlying premise that was used to justify the war was wrong. The hawks, who promoted war against North Vietnam, claimed that the Asian nations would fall like dominoes into the hands communism if the war was lost by “democracy.”

History is on the side of the protesters. There are not any of us who do not believe that we were fighting against the war in order to stop the shipment of young lives into battles that severely endangered them. We did not oppose the service men and women. We supported them and protested for them. We were anxious for the day that they could be proudly brought home. We were willing, if necessary, to be criticized, beaten and even arrested. Often called cowards by unthinking people, my fellow protesters were among the bravest young men and women I have ever encountered.

The matter of war is the most serious decision a nation and its government ever makes. It was in the Korean War that administrations began avoiding their constitutional requirement to leave matters of declaring war to the Congress. We began to give our military actions other names – like “police actions!” Nonsense! They were wars!

A nation that sends its young into war has an absolute responsibility to care completely for them when they return from such horror – a responsibility to heal up their physical, psychological and spiritual wounds and to never, ever abandon them no matter the cost!

This morning I read a remarkable short editorial in the Christian Science Monitor (a publication that is regular reading for my wife and she pointed out this piece of wisdom). It concluded in this manner…

“Some happy day, war itself will be a fading memory. Until then, let’s never forget that the decision to go to war is a decision to put men and women into peril. At a minimum, we must keep faith with them afterward. And we can do better than the minimum. We can think long and hard – and longer and harder still – the next time we ask them to fight.”

History has shown that we should not have asked Americans to spill their blood and lose their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan. To say so is not unpatriotic. To recognize the truth and to save the loss of American lives is the height of patriotism.

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