Support the troops?

It had been probably ten years or more since I had been in Washington DC before this week. I was there on business, visiting federal agencies with my boss, and we had some time between appointments on Thursday. He wanted to go see a couple memorials, so we grabbed a taxi and went on down near the Mall.

We walked along the sidewalk toward the Korean War Veterans Memorial, which I had never seen. All of a sudden I saw these life size figures of soldiers walking across a frozen landscape, themselves frozen in sculptured metal. That day it was about thirty degrees and there was snow on the ponchos worn by the figures, and an inch of snow on the ground. It was very striking to me, since the histories that I have read say a lot about how cold it was that first winter of the war and how ill equipped the soldiers were for the weather. You could almost feel what they felt, walking along next to them.

I have just started reading David Halberstam’s history of the Korean War, “The Coldest Winter”. I am only about a hundred pages into it (six hundred more to go), but already his considerable research allows him to tell stories moment to moment of battles on the level of the individual soldier. For instance, the first Americans to contact Chinese soldiers are overwhelmed by their sheer numbers. A chaplain bravely rescues a wounded soldier by defying a befuddled Chinese fighter who is not sure what to do with these strange people he’s just encountered. Meanwhile, back in Tokyo headquarters, MacArthur refuses to believe that it’s really the Chinese—in fact, the people receiving the information about these early fire fights are afraid to tell MacArthur that their opponents are now the Communist Chinese and not just North Koreans, so they bury the reports. Consequently, a lot more people die before the truth is finally accepted.

Moving in reverse chronological order, we then walked over to the World War II Memorial, which is a big oval shallow concrete pool surrounded by columns with the name of each state on them. It’s kind of like an oval Parthenon without a roof. There are stone wreathes hanging on each column, as woven wreathes worn by the victors in Greek contests. My boss remarked, “This is really big!” and I responded, “Just as the war itself was big.” The columns were in not in any particular order, alphabetical or any other, and he also remarked on that. My thought was, “Just as they were in war, when men from different states were all mixed together in different units”.

There was a low waterfall that was still running, despite the freezing temperatures. It was designed so that it produces a low insistent thunder, almost like the sound of artillery, it seemed to me.

Sometimes advocates of war mock people who say, “Support the troops—bring them home” since their idea of supporting the troops means supporting the goals of the particular war all the way. I don’t have any trouble supporting individuals who are sent somewhere to fight if support means praying and working for their safe return and a cessation of hostilities. I certainly do not support Bush and his war in Iraq or his plans to attack Iran.

There is a birthday card I just bought for my friend that shows a graph depicting an indirect relationship between “the number of ribbon magnets on car” with “grasp of issues”. It’s perfect. To me, “Support the troops” cannot mean blindly following an ill conceived plan and the president that wrote it, but it can mean “bring them home”.