A World Aflame
“Two days past 18, he was waiting for the bus in his army green,
Sat down in a booth in a cafe fair. Gave his order to a girl with a bow in her hair.
He’s a little shy so she gives him a smile and he says ‘would mind sitting’ down for a while and talking to me, I’m feeling a little low.’
Said ‘I’m off in an hour and I know where we can go.’
So they went right down and sat on the pier.
He said I bet you got a boyfriend but I don’t care,
I got no one to send a letter to.
Would you mind if I sent one back here to you.
So the letters came from an army camp,
In California then Vietnam.
And he told her of his heart,
It might be love and all of things he was so scared of.
Said when it’s gettin’ kind of rough over here,
I think of that day sittin’ down at the pier and I close my eyes,
And see your pretty smile.
Don’t worry but I won’t be able to write for a while.
One Friday night at the football game,
The Lord’s Prayer said and the anthem sang,
And the man said folks, would you bow your head,
For the list of the local Vietnam dead.
Cryin’ all alone under the stand,
Was the piccolo player in the marching band,
And one name read and nobody really cared,
But a pretty little girl, with a bow in her hair.
I cried,
Never gonna hold the hand of another guy.
Too young for him they told her,
Waiting for the love of a traveling soldier.
Our love will never end,
Waitin’ for the soldier to come back again.
Never more to be alone, when the letter says, the soldier’s coming home.”
I turn 70 years old in a couple of months. I have been very blessed with much bounty by the good Lord. Amongst my blessings has been the era in which I have lived. I missed two World Wars, the Spanish Flu and a great depression. I was even a year too young to be drafted to go to Vietnam. I missed centuries before that where life expectancies were half what they are today and people had six children hoping that three would survive to adulthood.
Oh sure, I’ve seen some bad things—9/11, wars in the Middle East, the 2008 Great Recession, etc. But I’ve also witnessed the fall of the Soviet Union without the need for nuclear war, fifty years of economic prosperity interrupted only by brief periods of decline, and medical advancements that have enabled me to enter my eighth decade with relative health and mobility.
Blessed indeed.
Many things change in the world over time. Human nature is not one of them.
There will be bad guys who attack others and do bad things. There will be countries who have ambitions to take over other countries. There are long simmering disputes that may flare up. There will be differences about trade or religion or environmental policy or any number of other opinions that can lead to conflict.
As much as I would love for John Lennon’s vision where everybody loves each other to be real, it is not. So, there will be war.
We know about the fights in the Middle East and Ukraine. We also know all the saber rattling that the Chinese Communist Party does with Taiwan and the Philippines and Japan and Korea. North Korea still would like to “take back” the south. We recently saw two nuclear powers, Pakistan and India, engage in military conflict which was fortunately short because of the efforts of the Trump administration, according to the combatants. There are always several wars in Africa. Venezuela is always a threat to its neighbors.
You get the point. There are “fires” all over the world.
So, why have the wars since Korea been so limited, at least in a historical sense? Take the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West. The threat of “nuclear assured destruction” kept either side from directly attacking the other’s sovereign territory. But I would argue that what “nuclear assured destruction” really meant is that neither side could win. At least not win in the sense that the allies won World War II. Nobody wants to start a war unless they believe they can win it. Today, it is very uncertain that any of today’s potential wars would result in total victory for either side or even achieving an objective. Arguably, the only war the U.S. won since WW2 is the Gulf war in 1990. The objective was achieved although the enemy (Iraq) was not totally vanquished. The Russians have not won in Ukraine. None of the attacks on Israel since 1948 have succeeded in defeating the country. Iran and Iraq engaged in an 8 year war in the 1980s that may have had as many as 2 million casualties, and nobody won.
The Cold War was won by the west. The military of the west kept the Soviets from attacking, but the Soviets were defeated economically, not on the battlefield.
You need to have a strong military to ensure that your enemies cannot see a path to how they could defeat you. Without that deterrent, they will attack and there will be war. Some enemies may be suicidal and attack anyway, so even this does not guarantee no conflict. My point is that a peaceful world does not result from everybody taking a happy pill and putting “war is not healthy for children and other living things” stickers on their windows. It comes when victory is not achievable by those who would start a war.
President Trump clearly wants to be a president who ends the wars started under Biden and doesn’t start any new ones. We could see last week that his strategy in the Middle East is to isolate Iran so they they have no friends in the region at all and therefore must capitulate to eliminating their nuclear program. Trump is trying hard not to have to take it out by force.
He has gotten Zelinski to want to make a deal but Putin is proving difficult. Can he bankrupt Russia if they don’t go along? We will see. Trump clearly does not want to escalate militarily there.
I bring all this up because you will be reading this just before or during Memorial Day weekend in the United States. Memorial Day is the day during which we commemorate not those who served (that’s Veteran’s Day) but those who gave their lives in service of their country. We thank God that there are millions today willing to make that sacrifice as their forefathers did so we can be the inheritors of this great country.
But we really don’t want them to have to make that sacrifice. That’s why I think the Trump administration is trying so hard to avoid having to send the missiles flying, all the while trying to let the bad guys know he’ll send them if he is left no other option.
There is also an understanding in those countries that have recently policed the world (the U.S. and the U.K.) that we just can’t do that anymore. So, we try to be instruments of peace around the world, and we vigorously protect our direct territory and interests particularly in our hemisphere. But we’re not going to engage in every conflict that’s out there anymore.
The song I picked this week was originally recorded by the Dixie Chicks, but the Countdown Singers cover is the one I first heard and have on my playlist. I must confess, it brings a tear to my eye every time I hear it. And I cannot hold myself together to sing all the words. I included all the lyrics, although the chorus repeats, because you can’t understand the story without all of it.
It is one, albeit amongst many, of the poignant reminders of what those who died, and those close to them, gave up for us. It is our obligation to never forget them. It is also our obligation to do all we can to make sure the list of soldiers like the one in this song, gets shorter and shorter under our watch.
God Bless them. God Bless America.
I remain respectfully,
Congressman John Campbell
Drive Fast & Live Free
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