Why We Fight

 

Band of Brothers," that Spielberg/Hanks series about Easy Company's World War II experiences was mostly accurate, sometimes just got things plain wrong, but overall, it provided a sense of what it was like for a group of men some of whom survived the war as a true band of brothers, to make their way through that trial by fire.

We can hear that from those who fought in Easy Company after they saw the series on TV. Each found some inaccuracy here and there--especially where Lt. Dike and Pvt. Blithe were concerned, but overall the veterans say the series got it mostly right. 

Mad Dog has never fought in a war.

His brother got shipped off to Vietnam and Mad Dog has heard his stories. One thing Mad Dog thinks is true is that once you are in war, you are in it, and you do what is required or seems like a good idea at the time.  Mad Dog's brother was a doctor on a Coast Guard cutter, bobbing in the waters off the coast of Vietnam, and the doctors on these cutters told each other just what Cook says in "Apocalypse Now," i.e., "NEVER GET OFF THE BOAT!" But Mad Dog's brother got off the boat, and on to a swift boat, so he could go up the river to the villages to bring medicine and the Great American way to the villagers, where American military doctors were busy winning the hearts and minds of the locals. He was rewarded with a rocket attack on his swift boat. Thankfully the rocket missed.

"Why did you do something that foolish?" Mad Dog asked him. "You didn't have to do that."

Mad Dog never got a really cogent answer to that question. People, apparently, do stuff in wartime for reasons which later may not make much sense. The answer to that "why" question is often not very satisfying.

Episode 9 of "Band of Brothers" is called "Why We Fight." It begins with a hard bitten veteran, Perconte,  who has been with the company since its inception, in a sandbag station with a machine gun, guarding the periphery of camp. He is on duty with O'Keffe, a new replacement to the company. O'Keefe is fiddling with the machine gun, saying he hopes he has not missed all the fighting, now that the Germans seem to be in retreat. Perconte explodes, telling O'Keefe he should only be so lucky to have missed all the fighting, that guys like O'Keefe wind up with their guts hanging out of their wounds crying for their mothers, because that's what combat is. As for Perconte, he is happy to have slept in a real bed with sheets and to have used toilet paper--both for the first time in months. That's what Perconte is fighting for, the pleasure of toilet paper.

Of course, it is Perconte who discovers the concentration camp on a patrol outside of the German town, and when he rushes back to tell Captain Winters, Perconte cannot even get the words out, he is so stunned. 

Gas Chamber At Mauthausen 

Walking through the concentration camp, the American soldiers look around, and cover their noses from the unbearable stench, and they discover the magnitude of the evil they have been fighting. 

So, the episode is called, "Why We Fight." But, of course, fighting to liberate that concentration camp was NOT why these soldiers were fighting. It was an unexpected revelation, not a reason for them to fight, a casus belli. They had no idea what evil lurked behind the lines of the Wehrmacht they had been facing. The Wehrmacht was nasty enough to concentrate the attention of these American soldiers. They were fighting for their own lives and that was enough.

Mauthausen Concentration Camp, Austria

But this is often the case in war. Soldiers fight to keep each other alive, without thinking about greater war aims, as Eric Maria Remarque so beautifully depicted in "All Quiet on the Western Front." The funniest scene has Kat, the squad's emotional center, being told that the war resulted from France having insulted Germany, and Kat says, "Oh, well I don't feel offended at all! So I guess I just be packing up and going home!"

Oath to Hitler, Not to Germany

Even the American Civil War, which turned out to be a war to free the slaves, was not fought by warriors determined to end slavery, in large measure. Many, if not most, of the northern troops had no sympathy for the slaves and were not fighting to free them. Even their best generals, like William T. Sherman, had no particular sympathy for the slaves. In fact, the rallying cry was "Union!" (Mad Dog has wondered why keeping South Carolina in the union would have motivated a farm boy in New Hampshire to joint up. And yet, there are cemeteries all over the state, in every little hamlet, with Civil War dead.)  Some of that changed, as the Federal troops marched through the South and slaves appeared with satchels, following the Union army to freedom.  Like Perconte discovering the concentration camp, those northern troops saw for the first time suffering they had not comprehended, nor imagined and the "why we fight" got added on later.

Lincoln tried to give an answer to the "why" question with his Gettysburg address, but he was reviled by even Northern newspapers for suggesting the Civil War was really a second American revolution, a fight to expunge the original sin of slavery. And when he tried again, in his Second Inaugural address to explain how the war came about, he admitted the war seemed propelled by a force of its own, "and so it came."

The Troubles in Ireland have a big "why" which concerns religion. Read "Say Nothing" (Patrick Radden Keefe) and be amazed at the depths and the breadth of hatred between Catholics and Protestants in Belfast. They make the Hatfields and McCoys look like a disrupted tea party. And to Mad Dog's eye, there is so little that actually separates these people. ("Derry Girls," the TV show, does some amazing riffs on this issue. They are forever trying to figure out, from names or appearances, whether someone is Catholic or Protestant, and can't do it.)

It has been said that the most vicious internecine warfare occurs not between people who are very different, different races, from distant lands, but among people who, to outsiders, look very much alike. The Palestinian/Israeli conflict seems to be a case in point. Of course, there is the Muslim/Jewish difference, but watching Israeli TV shows, Mad Dog was struck by scenes where an Israeli store owner sees a customer enter, who to Mad Dog's eye looks like anyone else, but that person entering the store is immediately identified as a Palestinian by the owner, and treated most unfriendly. "Where did all that come from?", Mad Dog asks the screen. 

So, in that case, maybe the "why" is a little more obvious to the combatants. Of course, given the October 7 attack, the viciousness, the rapes, the kidnappings, which indicated how calculated that onslaught was, the casus belli is obvious. But, like many wars, the "why" seems to morph as time goes on.

She Knows Why She Fights

The "why" with respect to the war against Japan seemed pretty clear at the time: Pearl Harbor. 

But why did the Japanese attack Pear Harbor? 

It is only now decades later, with the advent of youtube and histories written at a distance that the Japanese rationale for the attack is now presented. To be sure, the Imperial Japanese, with their bushido culture, driving them to ravage Chinese and Korean populations as subhumans, provides plenty of "why." 

Of course, there are always "innocent" victims of war: the children who were immolated by Curtis LeMay's firebombing of Japanese cities and by the atomic bombs were hardly combatants--although slightly older children were taught with sharpened bamboo to prepare to kill the American invaders.

And, clearly, in Gaza today, innocent children are dying, just as innocent children died on October 7. 

So, in the end, Mad Dog suspects there is really often no single "why" war happens, or violence erupts. There may be a driving force, a climate set by people at the top, but there are as many reasons as there are people involved.