#111 BLOG

MANAGING THE INEVITABILITY OF WAR

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

I

n the absence of peace, humanity must endure a multitude of sufferings that are put in play each day following the rising sun.

Questions about what the darkness feels like will have to be left for those stuck in the mud, frozen lifeless bodies around, and big rats, having initially grown fat in the farmer’s fields, scrambling over and about everywhere, during days with no ends, weeks, months, and even years.

The soldier watches the sunset and fears the morning stars more than the approaching darkness.

The fields in Flanders, where poppies grow, were just like that over one hundred years ago now, with soldiers, from competing interests in geopolitics, dug into trenches for years with the singular purpose of murdering.

The lingering inevitability of death followed everybody around for every minute of long days.

Broken disfigured bodies, with lost eyes and blank faces, tear away at the mind, almost immediately, if the bullets and the bombs had not made a mess of everything else already.

Why we go to war is often complicated, the reasons for which get defined in overly simplified explanations about leadership and the profits of arms dealers.

The call to duty may seem even simpler, but only after long exhausting hours of preparation. Not everyone makes their way to the war theatre. And not everyone returns.

You have been chosen, to haul a 60-pound pack, shoot a rifle to kill another human being when required to, which is too often a requirement.

The bravery of the soldiers and their sacrifice may even go unnoticed – with only family and a few friends truly experiencing the loss.

And the struggles go on, despite the sacrifice, sometimes completely unchanged after a war ends, despite heavy casualty counts and cities, once with vibrant cultural significance, lost to civilization, having been turned to rubble, with only bricks and bits of concrete remaining after the fire storms during which the wood and everything else held out for much less time.

Why we go to war is often too complicated a reason to unravel, even after the heat of the fires and the percussions of bombs have long since dissipated.

And so, the soldiers march on, again and again, taught the same tune, with the same singular purpose of killing.

Why we go to war is often irrelevant to innocence. And the guilty often escape.

Why we go to war may never really have sufficient reasons, but wars inevitably get started, time and time again, with no definitive end.