Day 102 / Mar 11

DAY 102 / MAR 11

 

Weapons of peace.  Is there such a thing?  Someone said, "if you want peace, prepare for war," and he was right.   But it is not the peaceful aspect of an Army that provides peace, it is the willingness and ability to do great violence and harm that deters others from doing things to bring it upon themselves.   That is where we have gone wrong.  The United States government has taken an Army (actually, the whole military) and tried to play it on both sides of the fence.   We go kick ass - which we do very well and there is virtually no one who can oppose us in a conventional war; then we try to be all goody-goody nice guy and make things all better.   That's bullshit.  Armies don't keep peace, the whole purpose of an Army is to destroy, not to build.  The government that invokes the power of their military does it for one purpose, to destroy the enemy.  Not help them, not rebuild their cities.  We bomb the hell out of them, kill them – and their families is they happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and we do it without remorse for the "innocent" civilians and soldiers who may not have wanted to fight.   I'm sorry, but that is the purpose of the military.  We are not, contrary to the popular opinion of the government, peacekeepers.   The UN has "Peacekeepers," use them.  We are hurting the military might of our country by using the military as anything but what it is – a deadly fighting force.   You can't build a house with a sword.

 

Am I rambling?  Maybe.  But, I know that somewhere, deep within all of the rantings is a grain of truth.   The bottom line is, we should be using the military to kill people and destroy stuff that needs to be killed and destroyed.  Then, we should take our military and go home until the next guy needs to be killed or destroyed.   We don't go to help people, we go to kill them.  We fought WWII to stop the Germans from taking over the world.   We didn't do it by trying to play nice, we did it by carpet bombing their cities and using the military to kill and destroy them.  Did we stick around for a bit to rebuild?   Sure, we did.  But, we didn't have to.  Our military philosophy should be to go in, eliminate the threat to us, and leave.   If the world, or even the US wants to rebuild the country we just rolled over, then send in the right people to do it.  If that country attacks the people there to help, the UN, the engineers, the volunteers, too bad for them – those do-gooders will leave and the country will either recover on its own under decent leadership or it won't.   Either way, we protected ourselves.  Take it for what its worth.

 

 

On another note, it's a bit odd the things you can get used to and accept if they happen enough and you have absolutely no control over it.  Our office is right next to our helipad where helicopters of all shapes and sizes (Apaches, Blackhawk, Chinooks, Kiowas) land and take off, usually at night.   Here I am, yelling into the phone to be heard by my wife who is back home at a parade where she is also yelling into the phone to be heard.  But, for her its unusual to be yelling into a phone, for me, its commonplace.  We grow to accept the things we deal with day in and day out and eventually even the craziest things become routine.   Take for instance the generator that sits outside my CHU – it provides the whole area (our pad, the offices, etc) with power – so it makes a lot of noise.   Its somewhat like sleeping by a running semi-truck.  The odd thing is that I've gotten used to it, my roommate and I really don't talk much in the room, because we almost have to yell, but we have accepted that and its no big deal.   The other odd thing is that when its NOT going in the middle of the night, I wake up and wonder whats wrong.  Its not that the lights go out, because there are none on.   Its just the sound and vibration that I've become accustomed to.  When they go away, it triggers something inside that says something is not as it usually is.   It must be a instinctive survival reflex that kept our cave dwelling forefathers safe from critters coming into their caves, or bears, waking up from hibernation and coming out.