The Cost of War
In January, 1960, I watched the San Diego shoreline disappear. It was one of the saddest days of my life. My son, Stephen, was only a week old, and I was leaving him, and my wife, Judy, back in Batavia, New York.
In those days, I wasn’t a preacher. I was an infantry officer on a ship carrying a reinforced Marine Corps battalion to Okinawa for a 13-month tour of duty. Our mission was crystal clear. We were to be a front-line, on-call strike force—a first wave—if or when trouble broke out in Laos or Vietnam.
Since then, I have become a civilian pastor and activist, but my experiences from my time of duty are never far from my mind.
By 1990, I was a pastor in North Carolina and I joined a Fellowship of Reconciliation delegation that went to Iraq just three months before the Gulf War. Saddam Hussein’s desperate attempts to avoid the invasion by U.S. and coalition forces included holding hostages. We brought some of those hostages back, but we failed to keep from going to war in January, 1991.
Four years ago, I opposed the invasion of Iraq and began organizing people across West Virginia who were willing to oppose a preemptive military strike against Iraq. Twelve people gathered in the basement of the Baptist Temple in Charleston for our first meeting. Today, under the name of West Virginia Patriots for Peace, there is a network of about 1,500 people across the state pressing Congress and the President for a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. A military solution will not work in Iraq. A diplomatic and economic plan involving the nations in that region is the only way toward peace in this chaotic situation.
War is a complicated matter not to be entered into ill advisedly or lightly by any person or, for that matter, nation. My work over the years has been predicated on the presupposition that war is the absolute last resort for a nation—when all else has failed—and that preemptive war is no option at all. Diplomacy and conversation, particularly with one’s enemies, lie at the heart of real peace and justice work. Churchill was dead right when he said, “Jaw-jaw is better than war-war.”
At the beginning of the war, West Virginia Patriots for Peace created a Wall of Remembrance. When unfurled, this canvas-like sheeting stretches out for almost 100 yards. It contains, like the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall, the name, age, rank, military service and hometown of each American killed in the war. There are over 3,300 names on the Wall of Remembrance. Nineteen of them are West Virginians.
Every Friday, outside the Town Center Mall in Charleston, volunteers hold the Wall for people to see as they walk or drive by. I take my turn at holding a portion of it. It is, for me, a religious ritual, an hour vigil, a prayer and reflection time.
Sometimes, while standing there, I imagine another wall stretched out along the street. On it, I picture the names of the more than 24,300 wounded Americans— many without legs or arms.1
My imaginary wall grows even longer as I visualize panels of material filled with the names of Iraqis who have been killed in this war, somewhere between 62,000 and 600,000.2
If that weren’t enough, my make-believe wall contains the names of some three million Iraqis who have been displaced or forced to become refugees in neighboring countries such as Syria and Jordan.3
This war is costing an enormous amount of blood, sweat and tears. But this war is costly in other ways as well.
The Financial Cost
On top of the lost lives, the wounded, the homeless and the number of people who have become refugees, this war has cost the American tax-payer an enormous amount of money—money desperately needed back home.
The war has cost U.S. taxpayers almost half a trillion dollars, with no end in sight. West Virginians have kicked in $1.2 billion.4 Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prizewinning economist, estimates that the war in Iraq will eventually cost tax-payers $2.2 trillion.5 The Pentagon is expected to ask Congress for $622.6 billion for the defense budget. Inside that figure is $141.7 billion for the war in Iraq and Afghanistan.6
Most Americans go into a mental seizure when confronted with figures like this. We can’t comprehend what, for example, $1.2 trillion looks like or what it could purchase.
David Leonhardt, in a New York Times article, puts some flesh on $1.2 trillion. “For starters, $1.2 trillion would pay for an unprecedented public health campaign—a doubling of cancer research funding, treatment for every American whose diabetes or heart disease is now going unmanaged and a global immunization campaign to save millions of children’s lives.”7
Speaking of West Virginia, think about how the “rubber” being expended on this war hits our country roads.
In McDowell County, one of our poorest counties, the tax money taken from folks there for war could have paid for four year college scholarships for 483 of their students. They could have hired 170 teachers, paid for health care for 5,892 children and sent 1,303 children to Head Start for a year.8
The tax dollars taken from West Virginians for the war could have funded a full year’s salary for 20,000 teachers and 56,000 four year college scholarships across the state.9 In Lincoln County, 523 students would have been able to receive full four year scholarships from the $10 million taken from that county for the war.10
The Cost To Our Military
As President Bush sends over 20,000 more troops into Iraq as a part of what he calls the “surge,” National Guard units around the country are being sent back to Iraq for a second deployment.
Robert Scales, a retired Army two-star general and former commander of the Army War College, in a recent Christian Science Monitor article declares that the Army is about to be “broken.” There aren’t enough brigades to sustain the mission in Iraq. Alarmingly, the morale of our troops is being compromised as military units and personnel are being called back to three and four duties of service in Iraq. Some 4,500 soldiers are now being deployed to Iraq earlier than expected, denying them by three months the full 12 month rest at home they were promised.
Barry McCaffrey, retired Army four-star general, just back from a fact-finding trip to Iraq, paints a bleak picture. “There is no argument of whether the U.S. Army is rapidly unraveling. This whole Iraq operation is on the edge of unraveling as the poor Iraqis batter each other to death with our forces caught in the middle. Stateside U.S. Army and Marine Corps readiness (is) starting to unravel. Ground combat equipment is shot in both the active and reserve components. Army active and reserve component recruiting has now encountered serious quality and number problems. Promotion rates for officers and NCOs (Non-Commissioned Officers) have skyrocketed to replace departing leaders.”11
Military recruitment is also a matter of concern for our volunteer army. Military recruitment, struggling to meet quotas, now costs $216 million, compared to $140 million in 2001. On top of that, the Army has lowered its standards, taking recruits that would not have passed the grade in the past.12
Captain Josh Gibbs, writing in the Army Times reports that “the services had reached their fiscal 2006 recruiting goals, but compromises had to be made, especially by the Army. Nearly 39 percent of Army recruits scored in the two lowest categories on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, the military’s entrance exam. That’s up from 27 percent in 2003. And only 81 percent of the Army’s recruits in fiscal 2006 were high school graduates, the service’s worst showing in two decades.”
His conclusion is startling. “If soldiers lack basic discipline, the Army cannot successfully meet our nation’s worldwide commitments. By lowering its standards, the Army has essentially told recruiters that it has no faith in their ability to enlist quality applicants.”13
The Cost To Our Children
Andrew Bacevich, a West Point graduate and a Vietnam veteran with 23 years of
U.S. Army service, offers a warning to all of us.
In his book, “The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War,” he writes: “Americans in our own time have fallen prey to militarism, manifesting itself in a romanticized view of soldiers, a tendency to see military power as the truest measure of national greatness, and outsized expectations regarding the efficacy of force. To a degree without precedent in U.S. history, Americans have come to define the nation’s strength and well-being in terms of military preparedness, military action and the fostering of (or nostalgia for) military ideals.”14
When it comes to our children, I am touched deeply by the words uttered by Jesus in the gospel of Luke. “What father among you would hand his son a stone when he asked for bread? Or hand him a snake instead of a fish? Or hand him a scorpion if he asked for an egg?15
Our children are asking to be fed something more than bullets, rifles, violent games and romanticized violence. They need a healthier diet. They hunger deep within their souls for adult mentoring which embodies nonviolence, and a culture that refuses to glorify war.
The Cost To Military Families
I have a real love and concern for military personnel. As the pastor of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Charleston back in the 1970s and 80s, I helped establish a counseling center there for veterans and their families. Pastoral care was provided as was advocacy for medical benefits due returning veterans.
I know firsthand what war does to men and women who serve, and the families they leave behind and then come home to.
We can anticipate enormous problems down the road for survivors who have lost limbs and have serious post-traumatic stress syndrome problems. On top of that, many troops coming back from Iraq are returning with traumatic brain injury (TBI).16 Despite the Pentagon’s reluctance to acknowledge these injuries (much like the denial of Agent Orange disabilities after the Vietnam War),17 all of us must lobby our political leaders to provide the resources to help these TBI victims.
Americans can anticipate an enormous financial cost to taxpayers in order to meet the ongoing needs of these veterans. The recent controversy over inadequate care for veterans at V.A. hospitals could well be a foretaste of things to come. All of us must be vigilant about insisting that these men and women get the care they need and deserve.
For the families of returning veterans, we must see to it that adequate social services are provided to deal with the family problems that arise when family members come home traumatized from the experiences they have suffered in the war.
Getting In The Game
Lee Iacocca, retired chairman of the Chrysler Corporation and founder of The Iacocca Foundation, is angry about the leadership that has led us to this war. In his new book, “Where Have All the Leaders Gone?” Iacocca expresses enormous passion about our country, and the leadership, or, I should say, the lack of leadership, that has taken us to war in Iraq.
He writes: “Am I the only guy in this country who’s fed up with what’s happening? We should be screaming bloody murder. We’ve got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff…But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, ‘Stay the course’…You can’t call yourself a patriot if you’re not outraged.”
Outrage, mixed with a large dose of perseverance, fuels my protest of the war. It is directed toward our elected leadership, which has led us into this senseless and unnecessary war, and the press which, as Iacocca puts it, “is waving pompoms instead of asking hard questions.”
Iacocca points the way for all of us. “You don’t get anywhere standing on the sidelines waiting for somebody else to take action…we all have a role to play.”18
Martin Luther King, Jr., said, “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”
We must break whatever silence we have kept over a war that matters and for the sake of all those whose lives have ended in this war.
We must insist that our elected members of Congress provide the care and nurture that veterans from this war, and their families, will need when Iraq is behind them. They must not be shortchanged, as so many veterans and their families were short-changed after past wars.
All of us must wake up to the fact that the war in Iraq was a mistake and that our homeland security protection against terrorism has been weakened by sending our men and women to fight in Iraq, and by channeling our military personnel, money and resources in the wrong direction.
The recent tornados in Kansas offer a prime example of how the war in Iraq is crippling local communities when trouble strikes. Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius stated that National Guard equipment usually available around the state to respond to emergencies is in Iraq. About 40 percent of the equipment necessary to meet the emergency has been sent to Iraq.
Since war is connected with politics, there is no time left for political apathy. All of us, our children included, because of the cost of war, must speak up, organize and demand political leadership that represents our expectation for nonviolent, diplomatic solutions to world problems.
Violence judges us. Overcoming violence rewards us with peace. Time left to discover that truth may be short, so neither we nor our children can wait much longer.
How To Get Involved
Getting off the sidelines can be as simple as connecting with a computer.
-- In West Virginia, folks can find West Virginia Patriots for Peace
- United for Peace and Justice
- Americans Against Escalation in Iraq
- Veterans for Peace
