OPINION: Fight Small Wars To Avoid Fighting Bigger Ones

By Roger Madon

We send our soldiers off to war with glory.  They return, some of them dead, only to be forgotten.

This is Roger Madon and this is what I think.

This week Frank Buckles, the last surviving U.S. veteran of WWI, the war to end all wars, died at 110.  53,000 soldiers died in that war within a period of 2 years while nearly 5 million joined the armed forces to fight.  And today, for us, it is as if it never happened. 

A little more than a third of the population supported the American Rebellion and General George Washington didn’t have much of choice at Valley Forge but to attack the Prussians in Trenton since within a very short period of time he was about to lose nearly his entire army through disease, starvation and legal furlough.  How many of us today remember the Battle of Trenton and how it changed the course of the Rebellion and for that matter, the world?

James Webb, U.S. Senator from the Virginia wrote despairingly in “Born Fighting,”  which explores how the Scots Irish shaped America, that we sacrifice our soldiers’ lives for wars more often than not are unimportant to our national security and when they return home they are abandoned  and even worse, unremembered.

If all this is true what is it that drives our young men and women to join the Army, the Navy, the Marines, the Air Force, placing themselves in harm’s way, pulling themselves away from those they dearly love?  Not a generation goes by when the U.S. finds itself on some far flung battlefield fighting some ambiguous war that our politicians swear to us must be won.  But Americans are not fools.  They know the politicians are lying.  And they know more about the chance for victory then all the pundits on Fox, CNN and MSNBC.  But they also know what those who fought in WWI and the Vietnam War and have fought and are still fighting in Afghanistan know that if we don’t fight the small stupid wars which we may lose from time to time we’ll be fighting the big important ones which we can’t.

This is Roger Madon and that’s what I think.