Wednesday November 10, 2004
War and peace
A few years ago, I shared a hospital ward with a man who had helped to liberate Antwerp during the closing campaigns of World War II.
This man had spent 40 years as an executive with a national transportation company. But his voice got excited only when he talked about his war experiences, 55 years before.
I have never served in war. I have never been in the military forces. So I admit that I don\’t fully understand the closeness that veterans feel for each other.
I\’ve watched military men meet each other. “Where did you serve?” they ask. And then the stories start. And people who had been total strangers are suddenly buddies.
I\’m almost envious.
Because without the bonding of surviving battles together, it takes years to generate the same kind of camaraderie. And even then, it\’s never the same. You can lose a friend through a quarrel, you can grow apart, you can simply lose touch — but those who have tasted life and death together seem bound together forever.
Resolving conflicts
I can\’t help wondering if there\’s something in that experience that makes it harder for us to imagine a world without war. Something that makes us unable even to conceive other ways of resolving national conflicts.
Canada is not at war with anyone, at the moment. But we spend millions on leaky submarines and helicopters that need 26 hours of servicing for every hour they spend in the air, so that we can proudly take our place among other military nations.
“But we have to defend ourselves,” some will surely say. Against what? Only against those who share our reliance on armed intervention. In such a situation, which is the cause, and which the effect?
The United States spends more on armaments than all the rest of the world put together. Do they expect to have to defend themselves against everyone?
It\’s as if we cannot picture any other ways of settling differences.
Yet in sports, we have referees. In cities, police. In labor management conflicts, arbitrators.
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I mean no disrespect to those who gave their lives in war. Nor to those who have served, and continue to serve, in the military forces. Beyond building lifelong friendships, military discipline has made “men” out of boys — maybe even out of some women.
But might the aura of heroism that clings to battlefield memories cloud our ability to visualize alternatives?
I remember my hospital roommate. Nothing else compared with his war experiences.
I remember a chaplain who served in the Suez. Conversations always came back to those desert days.
I remember my uncle, the last Canadian doctor out of Burma as Japanese forces closed in. He never talked much about that traumatic retreat — but he never talked at all about his later life as a chief surgeon in Regina.
In our imaginations, we associate glory with strife, battle, conquest. By comparison, peace seems dull.
War is active; peace is passive.
Is that why we pursue peace less vigorously?
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Copyright © 2002 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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