Remembering Those Who Fought And Died – And Pressing For An End, Once and For All, To War

A Brief Note from Doug Draper

“I want to know who the men in the shadows are
I want to hear somebody asking them why
They can be counted on to tell us who our enemies are
But they’re never the ones to fight or to die.”

–         From the Jackson Browne song, Lives In The Balance

This Remembrance Day – Sunday, November 11 – is once again a time to pay homage to those who fought and died in wars which, after all, are so often a failure of the ones at least a percentage of us entrust to resolve conflicts between peoples and nations in more peaceful and constructive ways.

An iconic Veterans Memorial in Chippawa Park, Welland, Ontario.

As for the men in the shadows, and they mostly are men (except for the odd few women like former Bush secretary of state Condoleezza Rice who helped push the lies for justifying an invasion of Iraq that ultimately wiped out more than 100,000 American and Iraqi lives), Remembrance Day should never be a time for celebrating a militaristic agenda or culture.

I’ve always found it interesting that those who talk toughest about going to war are so often those who have never gone to war themselves, and have often gone to some trouble to dodge any duty that might place them in a combat zone. Both George W. Bush and Dick Cheney managed to dodge the draft during the Vietnam War years. And most recently, the U.S. Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who gave the impression in his rhetoric that he might be prepared to engage in a war against Iran, exercised a Mormon missionary duty option to avoid going to Vietnam and none of his five sons, all of eligible age, volunteered to serve in the armed forces in Iraq or Afghanistan.

In Canada, there is tough talking Prime Minister Stephen Harper who, if he had been prime minister with a majority government at the time, would have sent young Canadians off to fight and die in a war in Iraq that most Americans now agree was a tragic mistake. We also endure the hawkish bluster of Harper’s minister of defense, Peter McKay, and minister of foreign affairs, John Baird. None of them have ever served in uniform on some killing floor where the bullets fly.

A memorial to those who died in past wars in Memorial Park, Thorold, Ontario.

 But enough of the chicken hawks.

I’ve also always been struck by the fact that some of the most moving speakers against the War in Vietnam during that period were Second World War veterans, just as some of the most passionate opponents of invading Iraq or the continue war in Afghanistan are Vietnam War veterans – people who know what bloody hell war is for both the soldiers and the civilians who happen to be in the way of the bullets and bombs.

Unlike the men in the shadows and chicken hawks, they have witnessed the blood and the horror, and beg us all to find a way to resolve our differences without war. They know what Jackson Browne sings in that song.

“There are lives in the balance
There are people under fire
There are children at the cannons
And there is blood on the wire.”

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