It's War!
A Veteran's Short Essay
We are at war with Iran. Partnering with Israel, the U.S. conducted missile strikes into Iran’s capitol city of Tehran, as well as other high value and high-payoff targets across the country. War. Another generation thrust into combat by another bureaucrat with zero interest in his own country outside of what it can provide him and his for their own personal gain. Israel’s B.B. Netanyahu finally achieved his lifelong dream to draw the U.S. into fighting a war against Iran for him. For thirty years, the Israel Prime Minister has told the U.S. the same story about Iran being on the precipice of building and employing a nuclear weapon. Now, here we are, in another conflict, in another shithole country, looking for weapons of mass destruction while executing regime change and taking over the country’s oil and energy resources. If President Trump’s gamble is successful, he will make a lot of people in government a lot of money. If this plan falters or fails in the slightest, the U.S. won’t elect a Republican president again for at least two, maybe even three terms. Either way, blood and treasure will always foot the bill.
The inevitability of war within the human race is a certainty. Young men will always be sent off to fight and die for old men with power and money for even more power and money. No matter how intellectually and culturally advanced we fool ourselves into being, we are still animals on this planet, fighting for survival first, then abundance. We are intelligent animals, however, and we have an uncanny ability to convince those outside the familiarity of experience of our superior and altruistic nature of the necessity for the death and destruction of another. Those within the realm of experience either remember the devastation and avoid it or embrace it as they are included in the group benefiting from it. Those outside the realm of experience are usually ignorant and any opinion they have is commonly derived from ego and selfishness. The constant in all of these instances is still death.
I find myself at odds, fighting between two halves of me, each seeking to overtake the other for control of how I will navigate this world thrust back into the colosseum of war. The classification I omitted from my earlier descriptions of those in the realm of experience and those outside that realm, is the warrior class. These days, like so many words with significance and definitions that embody strength, power, and resilience, the word “warrior” is terribly misappropriated. Terms such as “social justice warrior,” and “sober warrior” -- a term I have often used for those in my beloved sober community -- are misusing the word by placing it after an adjective as the user wishes to invoke the feeling that the adjective embodies the very rare characteristics actual warriors possess. My lifelong practice of martial arts brings many encounters of the word’s misappropriation. Almost as an insult, the prize fighters of the ring, the octagon, the cage, or wherever they ply their trade are often labelled with the sacred word. Unfortunately for these charlatans, and for those of us few in the warrior class, the word’s misappropriation strains its true meaning from its essence.
Deriving from the French word, “guerreier,” meaning “to make war,’ it is only appropriate to use the word “warrior” for those of us skilled, trained, and knowledgeable in making war who have also pledged our lives to the country, wore our country’s uniform, and fought for our country in war. The warrior class cares nothing for inclusivity, for, by its very nature, exclusivity is required and paramount. Those lamenting such exclusivity show their ignorance and display the very reason why our exclusivity exists.
Being a member of the warrior class is not glamorous. It is not privileged. Rather, being a member of the warrior class is horrific, brutal, bloody, painful, self-sacrificing, lonely, heartbreaking, exhausting, and utterly terrifying. As a member of the warrior class, we are not our own persons, nor do we care for ourselves more than the men beside us in the fight. Chaos, destruction, and murder are woven into the very fabric of our souls. We look gallant from afar where our symphony of death and destruction is obscured, and we are ghastly terrifying up close, causing even our own loved ones to clutch at their own personal safety. Retiring from service and/or returning home, we do not successfully reintegrate into society. Such things are lies we like to tell ourselves. We exist as a separate entity within society, observing the actual privileged of civilian life with a disgust at its frivolousness and a jealousy that we will never again live in its ignorance and frivolity.
Thus, the battle within me rages on, two sides of my psyche wrestling for control. One side is the warrior, teeth gnarled and claws sharpened, howling to answer the call of war from so far away, the faint smell of bloody copper bringing dripping salivation to my mouth. The other side is the self-created to survive the lie of civilian life, the one who feigns internalizing vapid social buzzwords like “equity,” “empathy,” “fairness,” the one attempting to show his fealty to the subjunctive tense forced upon him by those too ignorant and selfish for acceptance into the warrior class, the one trying to affirm and live the social cognitive distortion surrounding him.
Both sides, unfortunately, are too injured, too broken, too destroyed from a lifetime sacrificing body, mind, and soul living as part of the warrior class to even operate within either side of my psyche, regardless which side wins. It is my personal struggle to exist in this world with a battle raging inside me over the dominance of something functionally inoperable. Despite having medically retired from the warrior class, I know I will still enter Valhalla when my days are finished here because I am fighting an internal war each day I draw breath.
Once again, a generation of young men heed the call to go off to fight and die for their country so old and rich men may fill their personal coffers with even more wealth and to fill their heads with even more power. The absolute glory of the warrior class continues as it as for thousands of years. The privileged civilians outside of the warrior class continue to wear their masks of ignorance as they race to the top of some self-constructed moral high ground. The wounds of last generation’s warrior class continue to afflict their maladies upon us as we bow and shake our heads watching another war unfold, saddened that our war and sacrifices were not enough to keep our sons from suffering our same fate, and quietly wishing for our youth and health back so that we may go and satiate the glorious bloodlust of the warrior inside.
- Jeffery M. Curry