For Veterans Day

For as long as I can remember, my recently deceased friend and mother-in-law kept this snippet of an antiwar poem posted on her refrigerator.

The next and final stanza of the Graves poem reads:

But the boys who were killed in the trenches,
Who fought with no rage and no rant,
We left them stretched out on their pallets of mud
Low down with the worm and the ant.

Like so many of the survivors of what we call the First World War, Robert Graves was not a chest beater. Do read all this short, searing poem. Graves went on to write one of the most devastating accounts anywhere of how what we now label PTSD broke down men dumped into trench warfare.

According to a Pew Center survey, majorities of U.S. veterans who have served in the post 9/11 Forever Wars think those conflicts have not been worth fighting. As the young officer John Kerry asked near the end of his war, the war in Vietnam:

How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?

There's got to be a better way than harnessing the best impulses of young people, their fearlessness and desire to excel, to fruitless causes.